Event Date: November 18, 2020 - 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Location: online

Christopher Bishop is the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the University of Ottawa Centre for International Policy Studies. He also serves as a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.  A career U.S. Foreign Service Officer, he is currently on leave from the U.S. Department of State. He served most recently as First Secretary for Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he was the Embassy’s primary analyst of Chinese internal politics and the Communist Party leadership. He has also served overseas in Taiwan, Japan, and Sudan, and in Washington at the Department of State, where he was Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and later to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and pursued advanced studies in history at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He also holds a master’s degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and masters degrees in history from Yale University. He speaks Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

Introduction by:

Scott Simon specializes in political anthropology. He works exclusively in East Asian Studies, and is trained in both Japanese and Chinese. He did his Ph.D. in Anthropology, and his postdoctoral work in sociology at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. From 2004 to 2017, he did research in Seediq and Truku indigenous communities in Taiwan. From 2017 to 2018, he did field research in Japan as an invited researcher at the National Museum of Ethnology (Osaka). In 2020, he did field work with the CHamoru of Guåhan (Guam) and was visiting professeur at the University of Guam. He is a frequent commentator on Taiwan, on Taiwan-Canada relations, and on Japan-Canada relations.

Moderated by: 

Susan Gregson served in the Canadian public service with distinction for 35 years, occupying several senior executive positions. Between 2013 and 2016, she was Assistant Deputy Minister for Asia Pacific at Global Affairs Canada. Prior to her last assignment, she served as Assistant Deputy Minister for Human Resources, Director General of Assignments and Executive Management, Director General, Regional Strategies, World Markets Branch, and Director, Human Rights, Humanitarian Affairs and International Women’s Equality Division, all in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Susan has also represented Canada abroad. Her most noteworthy assignments were as Deputy High Commissioner in London, Consul General of Canada in Shanghai and Minister-Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. She holds a B.A. in anthropology from the University of British Columbia and was Canada-China Scholar at Nankai University and at Fudan University.