Mr Ong Ye Kung is Singapore’s minister for education. He is concurrently a board member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and chairman of the Chinese Development Assistance Council.

He was elected a member of parliament for Sembawang Group Representation Constituency in September 2015, and appointed to the Cabinet of Singapore on 1 October 2015. Before his current appointment, he served as minister for education (higher education and skills) and second minister for defence.

Prior to his Cabinet appointment, he was director of group strategy at Keppel Corporation, where he oversaw long term strategic planning of the group’s activities.

Between 2003 and 2005, he was principal private secretary to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and from 1997 to 2003, he was Mr Lee’s press secretary. Mr Ong was also the deputy chief negotiator for the US–Singapore Free Trade Agreement.

Mr Ong graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) with a first class honours in economics, and holds an MBA from the Institute of Management Development, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Professor Ezra F Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the United States Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, receiving his PhD in 1958.

He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. In 1960 to 1961, he was an assistant professor at Yale University, and from 1961 to 1964, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard University, becoming a lecturer in 1964 and, in 1967, a full professor. He retired from teaching on 30 June 2000.

In 1987, he spent eight months in China at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the economic and social progress of the province since it took the lead in pioneering economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published in The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (1991). His most recent publication is Is Japan Still Number One? (2000). He has visited East Asia every summer since 1958 and has spent a total of over six years in Asia.

Professor Vogel has received honorary degrees from Kwansei Gakuin (Japan), the Monterrey Institute, the Universities of Maryland, Massachusetts (Lowell), Wittenberg, Bowling Green, Albion, Ohio Wesleyan, Chinese University (Hong Kong) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received The Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998. He has lectured frequently in Asia, in both Chinese and Japanese.