Susan A. Thornton is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center. She is also the director of the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Governor Bob Holden is the current Chairman & President of the U.S. Heartland China Association. He served as Missouri’s 53rd Governor, 2001-2005. Prior to being elected Governor, Holden served two terms as Missouri State Treasurer and three terms as a Missouri State Representative.

Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn is a Strategic Advisor for USHCA. He is President Emeritus for the World Food Prize Foundation. Amb. Quinn assumed the leadership of the World Food Prize Foundation on January 1, 2000, following his retirement from the State Department after a 32 year career in the Foreign Service. Amb. Quinn retired on January 3, 2020 from the Foundation.  He now serves as a special consultant.

 

Three members of the USHCA's leadership had the honor to be invited to a small "old friends" reception to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco on November 18, 2023, the same day that President Biden and President Xi met on the sidelines of the APEC meetings. Following that small gathering, the USHCA representatives then joined close to 200 guests from around the U.S. to attend an exclusive dinner at which President Xi delivered a significant speech in which he shared China's openness to cooperation and posed a crucial question: "Are we partners or are we adversaries?"

The Biden-Xi meeting and the special reception and dinner on that day have led to many recent positive developments in US-China relations. In this webinar, Susan Thornton, USHCA Vice-Chair, and one of the leading American experts on China, will lead a discussion about the 2024 prospects for U.S.-China ties based on their take-aways from the San Francisco meetings and their other interactions with U.S. and Chinese counterparts.