Speakers at Chinese Australian Roundtable 2022

Kingsley Liu is known as a public figure in the area of diversity. He advocates Chinese Australian issues and contributes across a number of publications.

He is Principal of The Peoples Solicitors, a law firm with full and part-time lawyers and specializes in all kinds of litigation including human rights. He established it during 2006 in partnership with the late QC Jeff Shaw who was an Attorney General and Supreme Court judge from 1995 to 2004.

He served as the National President of the Asian Australian Lawyers Association serving 2018 to 2021 that promotes cultural diversity in the legal industry. It doubled over the period, and branched into every capital .

He serves as the President of Chinese Community Council of NSW, a peak community body since 2018. He is noted for organizing and chairing significant conferences for Chinese Australians since 2016.

In his early career he was a mechanical engineer on power station projects in Victoria and Canada and held senior positions in investment banking in Asia and London. He was the second ethnic Chinese Member of ASX and managed the first Asian stock-broking firm in Sydney during the late 80’s.

He has B Eng (UniMelb) and LLB Hons (UNE) and was born in Melbourne.

Frank H. Wu serves as the eleventh President of Queens College. Prior to joining the City University of New York (CUNY) system, Frank served as Chancellor & Dean, and then William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, a unique standalone institution, the original law school of the UC system. Before joining UC Hastings, he was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university (HBCU), for a decade. He was appointed by the federal Department of Education during the Obama administration to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), and by the Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission. He was a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons, from 2000 to 2010, and Vice-Chair for the final four years of his tenure. In April 2016, he was elected by the members of Committee of 100 as their Chair, and he held that office for two years; then in February 2017, the Board named him as the group’s first-ever President, a role he held for two and a half years. He served on the Board of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund from 2004 to 2010. For his advocacy work, he received the John Hope Franklin Award in 2020.

Frank is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in its hardcover edition. Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients. He received a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. with honors from the University of Michigan.

Erin Chew is a social entrepreneur, freelance writer and social activist focusing on issues impacting on the Asian diaspora. Erin founded the Asian Australian Alliance back in 2013 as a way to include the Asian Australian voice in the mainstream and create a platform for change. In 2021, her organisation is running an Australian wide COVID-19 Racism Incident survey, which has garnered close to 500 responses thus far in Australia. More recently, the Asian Australian Alliance are the architects for the #stopasianhate Australian campaign.

Erin has written for both Australia and American publications with a focus on entertainment and social issues. Her work can be found in Junkee, HuffPost Australia, SBS, YOMYOMF and Asian American News (AsAmNews). She is also a public commentator.

In 2019, Erin founded the media site “Being Asian Australian” and co-founded of new media site FlixAsia – which focuses on Asian trends, entertainment and public events.
Erin has a Bachelor’s degree in Business, specialising in economics and a Masters degree in Human Rights. She worked in the Australian trade union movement, as a political advisor and as an election campaign manager.

Erin will tell her story and address the experiences of Chinese Australians in today’s world.

Marcus Reubenstein is graduate in politics and economics from New South Wales University, for more than two decades Marcus has had a keen interest in international and Asian affairs. With more than two decades of media experience, he is the founder and editor of, independent website, APAC News. He has held senior news production roles at Australia’s Seven Television Network and as a senior correspondent with SBS World News Australia. Additionally, he has contributed to all of Australia’s major print and online media titles. He has worked extensively as a photojournalist and has held major exhibitions of his works.

Marcus settled a high-profile defamation case six months ago in which he sued federal government employee Geoff Wade. The Sydney Morning Herald described as the Canberra-based parliamentary library researcher a “relentless” Chinese Communist Party watcher whose 42,000 Twitter publications cast suspicion over many of their targets in the Chinese community who “have only the vaguest, if any, links to the CCP.” Whilst Reubenstein believes defamation should be the action of last resort in any case where reputations have been slandered, he argues there is a strong case for a permanent Anti-Asian defamation league along the lines of the highly successful Anti Defamation League of the United States which was established to combat anti-Semitism in that country.

Dr Fuxin Li is a holder of a PhD in Education sponsored with Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) from Monash University since 2002.

He is the Founder and Principal of the Australian School of Contemporary Chinese established in ACT since 2003. He is also the Managing Director of Trilong International Trade and Technology Pty Ltd – the first organisation of its kind in promoting and importing Chinese teaching materials since 1996.

Dr Fuxin Li is the President of the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association of ACT since 2010, and the National President of the Chinese Language Teachers’ Federation of Australia (Inc) since 2015. He ran as an Independent in Yerrabi electorate, ACT in 2020 under adverse social media.

Haiqing Yu is Professor of Media and Communication and Australia Research Council Future Fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne. She has a PhD in media and cultural studies from the University of Melbourne. She was a TV journalist and university tutor in China prior to coming to Australian in 2000 to pursue her PhD research in Chinese media and internet studies. She worked at University of Tasmania and the University of New South Wales prior to joining RMIT in 2018.

Haiqing is an internationally esteemed scholar at the forefront of critical media studies and Chinese studies, and is among the first academics in Australia to conduct critical social research on communication technologies and digital media in the Chinese context. Her current research concerns the socio-political and economic impact of China’s digital media, communication and culture on China, Australia and the Asia Pacific. She is Chief Investigator of the China’s social credit system and everyday life project and founder of the Platforming China Research Network.

Haiqing will address
• the distrust of and bias against Chinese internet and social media platforms (esp. WeChat): in Australian media and academia
• the role of non-Western knowledge production: what we can do from own profession and platform

Han Hee is an Australian Legal Practitioner focusing on Web3 and Blockchain related legal and regulatory matters. Han started his career as a systems engineer after he graduated from UWA Engineering Faculty. He was a Management Consultant with Arthur Andersen in the late 90s, and co-founded an Internet, Media and Entertainment company in the early 2000s. Han returned to UWA Law School after spending about 10 years in Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing, and he has found his new passions in law, politics and Web3 economy in recent years. Han is the founder of

Han’s Like-minded Cafe, a Wechat socio-political chat group with about 500 Chinese Australians established in 2016.

Han talks about Chinese Culture and Australian Values – Alignment or Dissociation?
• Are Chinese migrants from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore sharing common Chinese culture? What are those?
• Is there a need to align Chinese culture with Australian Values? Is there any practical incompatibility between the two?

John Lander worked in the China section of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the lead-up to the recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1972 and several other occasions in the 1970s and 1980s. He was deputy ambassador in Beijing 1974-76 (including a couple of stints as Chargé d’Affaires). He was heavily involved in negotiation of many aspects in the early development of Australia-China relations, especially student/teacher exchange, air traffic agreement and consular relations. He has made numerous visits to China in the years 2000-2019. He contributes to Pearls & Irritations.

John will address
• how the US is trying to manoeuvre Taiwan (and Australia if we are foolish enough to join the battle) into the position of proxy in America’s war with China.
• how military engagement with China would impact Chinese people in Australia – visa holders and citizens alike.