Helping Americans understand China is so important to Virginia Kamsky that she even rescheduled her father's 92nd birthday party just so she could attend the China Institute Executive Summit's opening dinner on Thursday October 28 in New York..
This year, the seventh summit's dinner clashed with her father's birthday on Oct 28, so Kamsky and her family decided to hold the celebration a day earlier. It was a tough decision, but her mother was supportive, just as she was supportive of the young Kamsky learning the Chinese language.
Kamsky started learning Chinese when she was 10, and it was her mother's foresight that she would be thankful for later in life. She was the first American child to learn Chinese at the China Institute in New York City in the 1960s, and is now its chairman. The institute is the oldest not-for-profit US organization focused on US-China relationship.
In 1980, she established Kamsky Associates, one of the earliest American investment organizations to be set up in China. She was selected by Crain's New York Business in 1990 as one of their "Forty under Forty to Succeed" and by Newsweek as one of "America's 25 Top Asia Hands".
When Kamsky became chairman of the board of trustees of China Institute in 2003, she saw the need for an annual business dialogue focused on understanding the economic relationship between the two countries. She wanted to "broaden the scope of cultural understanding to include economic dialogue". Thus, the first China Institute Executive Summit was held in New York City in 2004.
The summit's opening dinner this year, held at Four Times Square, featured a discussion between Chen Zhiwei, professor of finance at Yale University School of Management, and Stephen S. Roach, non-executive chairman at Morgan Stanley Asia and senior fellow at Yale University. On Friday, there are three panel discussions at the Princeton Club of New York on currency, trade and capital markets. (Source: Ariel Tung, China Daily, Oct 29, 2010).