From Beijing to Tokyo, from Seoul to New Delhi and beyond, LinkAsia takes viewers into media about Asia -- from Asia -- offering unfiltered insights into one of the most diverse, fast-paced regions of the globe. Each week, LinkAsia brings you a unique half-hour program that combines everything from the official state news from Asia's top television networks to the trends and conversations rising through Asia's blogs and social media.
LinkAsia's host, entrepreneur Yul Kwon, serves as your trusted guide to the vast world of Asian media -- spanning culture, business, technology, politics, and more. Meet LinkAsia on TV, online, and in social media.
LinkAsia is supported by grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Freeman Foundation, the Fund for Commonweal, and viewers like you.
Yul Kwon Explains LinkAsia
Paul S. Mason, President & Chief Executive Officer, is an award-winning broadcast journalist and documentarian. A 28-year veteran of ABC News, Mason served as senior vice president and the executive-in-charge of several ABC News shows, including Nightline, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and ABC News Radio. He also directed all political coverage at ABC News and served as executive producer for the weekend edition of World News Tonight. Through the course of his career, Mason's work earned an Emmy (plus 14 Emmy nominations), four Cine Golden Eagles, and the New York Film Festival Grand Prize for his one-hour news documentary, Judgment at Midnight. He was a member of the ABC News team that won the DuPont Silver Baton and the Peabody Award for coverage of the events of September 11, 2001. For more information, please see Paul's full bio.
Kim Spencer, Link TV Founder and Chief Content Officer, has managed non-profit media companies for 30 years and produced more than 80 hours of innovative current affairs TV productions and documentaries. As co-founder of Internews, and as Managing Director until 1998, he oversaw a staff of 240 in 19 countries working to promote independent media. He was also coordinating producer of ABC News Prime Time Live, producing reports from Cambodia, Africa, and Russia. Spencer and Patrice Barrat developed the innovative Vis à Vis series: transcontinental video dialogues linking people "face to face" from their homes and workplaces. In 1999 he co-founded Link TV, based in San Francisco and New York, where he oversees all broadcast and web content, and is Executive Producer of the Peabody Award-winning daily news program Mosaic: World News from the Middle East. He has filmed documentaries or coordinated productions in China, Tibet, India, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Wendy Hanamura, Link TV VP and General Manager, & LinkAsia Executive Producer has been an award-winning television journalist for more than 25 years. Beginning her career at Time magazine, Hanamura moved into television production in 1985, reporting and producing news and documentaries around the world. As a Tokyo-based correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor's nightly news, World Monitor, which aired on The Discovery Channel, Hanamura covered stories in China, Korea, Singapore and throughout Japan, focusing on topics as diverse as the fallout from Tiananmen Square to abortion in Japan. Hanamura served as a substitute anchor and consultant for NHK's "Japan Today," a reporter for CBS's San Francisco station KPIX-TV, and series producer for the PBS station KQED-TV. Her favorite project remains Honor Bound: A Personal Journey, a documentary about her father and his WWII march with the all Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Her documentaries have been awarded an Emmy, Gold Medal-Chicago Film Festival, Cine Golden Eagle, and Chris Award for the best Social Issues Documentary. Hanamura began her studies of the world at Harvard University where she was a phi beta kappa, summa cum laude graduate majoring in East Asian Studies and architecture, and went on to study architecture at the University of Tokyo. She was a Rotary International Travelling Fellow in Japan in 1984-85, and her senior thesis focused on the long-term effects of the bombing of Hiroshima on the hibakusha or survivors.
Yul Kwon, LinkAsia Host, has had a diverse career spanning law, business, technology and media. Although his multifaceted professional experience spans almost two decades, his rise to international acclaim began in 2006, when he became the first Asian American to win the CBS reality show, Survivor. Prior to his Survivor victory, Yul held positions at both Google and McKinsey & Company. As an attorney, he clerked on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, practiced law at Venture Law Group and Wiltshire & Grannis, worked as a legislative aide in the US Senate, and most recently served as Deputy Chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. In addition to hosting LinkAsia, Yul has worked as a special correspondent for CNN and as a co-host on the Discovery Channel, and he is also the host of a new PBS series, America Revealed, which will premiere in the winter of 2012. Yul is active in a wide range of charitable causes and has been profiled in VIBE magazine's annual "Juice" issue spotlighting "power players," as well as People's "Sexiest Man Alive" issue. He received his JD from Yale Law School and his BS degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.
George Lewinski, Series Producer, has 44 years of experience in international journalism and broadcasting. He began in his native Montreal as a researcher for a local radio program and went on to be London bureau chief for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a field producer, and foreign editor for the CBC's major national newscast. When he moved to the United States in 1988, he was hired to be the founding foreign editor of a new business and economics program, "Marketplace," which was about to premiere on US public radio. After eight years of covering Asian economic and business news, Lewinski was asked to conceive of and produce a program on the Asia Pacific region and its links with the United States for KQED Radio in San Francisco. After six successful years at "Pacific Time," he became planning editor for public radio's "The World," a daily foreign news program co-produced by BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. Lewinski is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal and he has three grown sons.
Maureen Fan, Editorial Consultant, received her bachelor's degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She began her journalism career at the English-language South China Morning Post in Hong Kong in 1986. She has worked for the Los Angeles Times, the Long Island Newsday and the New York Daily News. In 1999, she covered race and demographics stories for the San Jose Mercury News and then became the paper's New York bureau chief in 2000, reporting on Northeast business and technology stories, 9/11, and postwar Iraq for Knight Ridder Newspapers. She joined the Washington Post in 2004, where she worked on a multimedia series called Redlining China's Family. In 2005, Fan became the Post's Beijing correspondent, then bureau chief, writing about China's social change, tensions with Tibet, the Sichuan earthquake, and the 2008 Olympics. Fan has won awards from the Associated Press and the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) for her work, and was an AAJA board member from 1992 to 1996.
Elizabeth Cabrera, Associate Producer. As a media professional she has worked for several organizations including the Independent Television Service (ITVS), Scribe Video Center, and National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC). She currently works at Link TV as an associate producer on news productions. In addition to managing the production of the news analysis program Global Pulse, she directed a team of interns who created videos for Link TV's "Real Conversations" website and coordinated a mini-documentary about Soliya's Connect Program, a facilitated online dialogue between college students around the world. Outside of her work with Link TV, she is a filmmaker who is working on a documentary exploring the Japanese Migration to Mexico through the story of her great-grandfather. Cabrera served on the 2010 advisory committee for the Cinema Department at the City College of San Francisco, and is currently a Short Film Screening Committee member for the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. She has been a Bioneer's Reel Change Agents Media fellow and in 2008 was selected as a semi-finalist in the Free Your Story Contest sponsored by the Center for Asian American Media.
Annie Fu, Associate Producer. Prior to Link, Annie worked as an anchor in Beijing at the English language channel of China Central Television (previously known as CCTV-9), the state-owned national broadcast network. At CCTV, Annie started in the general newsroom and eventually moved to BizChina, CCTV's live daily business news program, doing reporting and anchoring. Before making the move to China, Annie was a marketing professional at Capital One in the Washington DC area, working on the development and launch of an innovative telecom services product. Annie earned a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from INSEAD.
Hailey Yang, Video Editor. Prior to joining the LinkAsia team, Hailey worked as a producer and an editor in South Korea at OCN, a movie channel. At OCN, she produced, shot and edited a half-hour weekly movie program, Zoom-in. In addition, Hailey produced several documentaries for Kia Motors and directed promotional videos and music videos. She earned a BA in Advertising and Public Relations from Hong-ik University in Seoul and an MA in Multimedia Communications from Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Youngbin Kwon, Production Assistant. Youngbin rejoined Link TV after previously working for Global Pulse. Born and raised in South Korea, Youngbin served in the military service as an honor guard at the United Nations Command in Seoul. He moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2007 to work at a non-profit organization for Korean expatriates. While attending several schools in San Francisco, he also worked at the Center for Asian American Media and Educational Access Television. Youngbin has a dual BA in Journalism and Cinema from Handong University, in South Korea.
Erica Marcus, Media Consultant. With a degree in Chinese Studies, Marcus was one of the first Americans to study in China after normalization of relations in 1979. Since 1981, she has worked in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, the US, and the Middle East in film, television, and journalism. Films she produced and/or directed received awards at Sundance, Berlin, and other festivals. She was Associate Producer on a series about the American experience in China and interviewed Beth Luce Moore in 1985. She has worked with numerous award-winning Chinese directors. A prime-time television series on international film that she directed in China in the mid-1990s was among China's top rated shows at the time. Marcus worked in the development department of Link Media from 2008 to 2010.
Michael Dalby is a general management consultant, active in the fields of enterprise strategy, growth and organizational effectiveness, in both for-profit and non-profit environments. In 2000, he founded a management consulting firm to advise CEOs, board members, and senior managers in the higher education, healthcare, family business, arts, and financial services sectors. From 1983 to 1994 he was a partner at McKinsey & Company, the preeminent global management-consulting firm. He helped lead the Hong Kong office from 1988 through 1990, and in 1991 opened the McKinsey office in Seoul. A graduate of Yale, Dalby later received his PhD from Harvard University in Chinese History and East Asian Languages. He was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, as well as an affiliate of the Institute for Humanistic Sciences at Kyoto University. From 1975 to 1983 he was a professor of Chinese history and of Far Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago.
Clayton Dube has led the USC US-China Institute since its founding in 2006. He was previously the Assistant Director of UCLA's Asia Institute. During his tenure there, he headed the Asian studies teacher training program and oversaw a variety of instructional, research, and outreach initiatives, including two student-driven web publications, AsiaMedia and Asia Pacific Arts, each of which had more than one million readers annually. His research has focused on how economic and political change in China since 1900 affected the lives of people in small towns. Dube writes the weekly Talking Points column on US-China relations and trends in China. He has taught Asian and world history at several colleges and has written teaching guides on Chinese history. He serves on the board of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, the editorial board of Education about Asia, and on the advisory boards for the USC Center for International Studies, the Center for International Business Education and Research, and the UCLA Confucius Institute.
Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University, where he is also affiliated with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. In 2010 he was honored by the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodow Wilson International Center for Scholars with a two-year Research Associateship awarded to "top scholars from across the United States" who "have successfully bridged the gap between the academy and policy."
Emmerson serves on the editorial boards of the Contemporary Southeast Asia, Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. Other organizations to whose advisory bodies he belongs include the Asia Society of Northern California, the CIMB ASEAN Research Institute, the International Forum for Democratic Studies, and the Japan Policy Research Institute. In 2010 he advised Appleseed Entertainment on the Southeast Asian filming of a documentary on democracy in developing countries. He is also a member of the US Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. Emmerson has a PhD in political science from Yale and a BA in international affairs from Princeton.
Robert A. Kapp is president of Robert A. Kapp & Associates, Inc. The firm provides consulting services to companies and non-profit organizations seeking to develop successful activities with China or to engage with policy makers in US-China relations. Kapp is Senior China Advisor to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP, a global law firm with more than 20 offices in Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East, including strong facilities in Greater China, London, California, and Washington, DC. He chairs the China Committee of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Committee on US-China Relations, and the World Affairs Council. From 1994 to 2004, Kapp served as president of The US-China Business Council, the principal organization of major American companies engaged in trade and investment with China. Kapp was also the initiator of The US-China Legal Cooperation Fund, a corporate-supported program assisting joint US-China projects for the development of China's legal and judicial systems. From 1979 to 1987, Kapp was the founding executive director of the Washington State China Relations Council, and from 1987 to 1994, he served as president of the Washington Council on International Trade. He received a doctorate in modern Chinese history from Yale University, and from 1970 to 1980 taught Chinese history at Rice University and the University of Washington.
Daniel I. Okimoto is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, at Stanford University. In 1978, Professor Okimoto co-founded the Shorenstein Asia/Pacific Research Center, a leading center for scholarly research, public policy analysis, and policy outreach, where he served as the Director for more than ten years. He has been Vice-Chairman of the Japan Committee of the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences, the Research Institute on the Economy, Trade, and Industry, and a member of the Advisory Council of the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He has served on the Board of Directors of several Silicon Valley start-ups, including SOMA Networks and Zeptor. He is currently a Senior International Advisor to the Development Bank of Japan, a Senior Advisor to the LS Corporation in South Korea, and Advisor to Harbor Pacific Capital, a venture capital fund based in Silicon Valley. Since 1995, he has also been a member on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Padres, and an advisor to the Boston Red Sox.
Since August 2009, Dr. Okimoto has been a Special Policy Advisor for US Ambassador to Japan, John V. Roos, particularly on policy issues related to clean technology. He serves on the Board of Councillors of the US-Japan Council. In 2004, Professor Okimoto received the Japanese Foreign Minister's Commendation in recognition of his contributions to US-Japan relations during the 150th year celebration of bilateral relations. In 2007, he was awarded the "Order of the Rising Sun with Goldray Neck Ribbon" by the Japanese government, the highest honor that can be conferred on a non-Japanese. In 2009, Professor Okimoto was awarded "The Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Keizai Society, US-Japan Business Council of Silicon Valley. Professor Okimoto earned a BA from Princeton University, received an MA from Harvard University, and earned a PhD (Political Science) from the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including Between MITI and the Market: Japanese Industrial Policy for High Technology, and co-editor The Political Economy of Japan and Competitive Edge: The Semiconductor Industry in the US and Japan and "The Financial Crisis and America's Capital Dependence on Japan and China," in Asia-Pacific Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, May 2009.
Merry White is a Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research examines urban social spaces and social change in Japan, focusing primarily on the history of the cafe. Her teaching includes courses on Japanese society, women in Asia, food and culture, and the anthropology of travel and tourism. She is also on the Board of BU's Center for the Study of Asia and in charge of outreach initiatives. In 2002 she was a visiting professor at the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies. While a resident in Kyoto, she learned of a project to build schools in devastated areas of Cambodia. When she also learned that coffee was the main crop of the area, and that it cannot be exported due to overplanting in Vietnam, she networked marketing experts with the farmers in Cambodia, and helped to start the export of Cambodian coffee to Japan. She received her BA in Anthropology and Japanese Studies, her MA in Comparative Literature, and her PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.
R. Bin Wong is Director of the UCLA Asia Institute and Professor of History. Before coming to UCLA in 2004, Bin Wong served as Director of the Center for Asian Studies at UC Irvine where he was also Chancellor's Professor of History and Economics. At UCLA he is responsible for overseeing and coordinating activities in five research centers and developing new initiatives in Asian Studies fields. Wong's research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change, especially since the 18th century, both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns. Wong received his BA in Economics from the University of Michigan. He received his MA in East Asian Regional Studies and his PhD in History from Harvard University.
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