Panel Discussion: 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Slide lecture and book signing with Jack Birns: 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm.

Moderator: Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, is the author of many books and articles about China and Asia, most recently Virtual Tibet (2001).

Panelists:

Seymour Topping, who covered Chinas civil war from 1946-9, is San Paolo Professor Emeritus of International Journalism at Columbia University and author of Journey Between Two Chinas (1972) and The Peking Letter, a novel of the Chinese civil war (1999).

Joan Chen, a prominent film actress in Shanghai before she left China in 1981 at the age of 20, appeared in The Last Emperor (1987) and is the director of Autumn in New York (2000) and Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998) among other celebrated films.

Thomas B. Gold, Associate Professor of Sociology at U.C. Berkeley and author of many studies of social change, civil society, and private business in China, travels frequently to Shanghai where he spent 1979-80 as an exchange student at Fudan University.

Pamela Yatsko, who covered China as the Shanghai bureau chief for the Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1990s, is the author of New Shanghai (2000) and a freelance journalist.

This event is held in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs from the recently published Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (UC Press, 2003). The book features photographs by Jack Birns, a staff photographer for Life magazine covering China’s civil war. Assignment Shanghai, edited by Carolyn Wakeman and Ken Light, collects Birns’ startling images to offer a graphic vision of a great city, Shanghai, poised on the precipice of political revolution.

Exhibit on display from January 20 to March 19, 2004.