Terry Weidner will be the keynote speaker at the 2008 UCA China Symposium on Fri., Mar. 7, from 12 noon to 4 p.m. at the McCastlain Ballroom on the UCA campus.
This year’s symposium, titled ?The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: China in 2008,? is sponsored by a Title VI Federal Grant and the UCA Confucius Institute for Arkansas, in conjunction with UCA’s Instructional Development Center and UCA’s Humanities and World Cultures Institute.
The symposium is free of charge and includes lunch. A panel discussion will follow Weidner?s speech. There will be limited seating, and participants must register by Feb. 15. For registration information, contact Adam Frank at (501) 450-3486 or afrank@uca.edu.
Weidner is the Director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, an Asia Center at the University of Montana. A Ph.D. in Chinese history (U.C. Davis), he began his career in academics before working six years as a Chinese political and economic analyst for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service in Washington, D.C., a job that entailed analyzing Chinese economic reform and U.S.-China relations using Chinese media. He also served as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he was one of two people responsible for reporting on the Chinese pro-democracy movement (Tiananmen).
After leaving government, Weidner served for seven years as the associate director of International Programs and professor of Chinese history at the University of Kansas, and then moved to the University of Missouri, where he was Director of the Asian Affairs Center and the Missouri International Training Institute from 1998-2003. Weidner?s current research and teaching interests include Chinese political economy, and U.S.-China political and economic relations.
