Last week I attended the 60th annual Public Affairs Conference at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. The them of this year's gathering was "China Rising." The three-day conference was packed full of an all-star team of china scholars including David Lampton, Daniel Wright, Minxin Pei, Melvyn Golstein and Jonathan Spence. The issues at the conference ranged from the chinese economy, political future, human rights and security perspectives.
Lectures were given in all of the issues while on the last day we broke up into policy groups to further discuss our areas of interest. The hosts of the conference was Principia College, a small 500-student christian science college. The conference was entirely student run and the organizers run an extremely professional, well-run conference. The Principia campus was amazing as well, located right on the Mississippi River in the forests of Illinois.
During my short time on campus, I also ran into the local goats on campus, that are used on campus as lawn-mowers. The Principia campus takes sustainability much more seriously than we do, purchasing enough carbon offsets to make the conference a carbon-neutral event. A big thank you to the PG and Asian Studies Department for sponsoring my trip. Next year's topic is "The End of Oil."
I encourage everyone to take advantage of this amazing conference and if your interested in the future in attending PG conferences, just ask Professor O'Neil.
