2008 Annual Dinner

On April 30, the Club held its 2008 Annual Dinner at The Briar Club. The happy hour reception provided a good opportunity to meet new members and for current members to get reacquainted.

At 7pm, the Club's outgoing President Nisha Desai brought the meeting to order. Nisha introduced the Club's new officers and Board members. She also gave her appreciation for the retiring Board members.

Leah Barton and Chinhui Juhn presented an overview of past and upcoming Club events, including a wine tasting that will be incorporated into a new book.

Barry Zhang gave a brief overview of the Club's new websites. The Club has launched a Blog (which you're reading now) to allow members to comment on postings and provide feedback on events and Club operations - so members: TELL US HOW YOU WANT YOUR CLUB TO BE RUN. There will also be a Facebook profile where members are invited to create their own Facebook accounts if they don't have one already, and link to the Club's Facebook (add "Eli Houston" as your friend). Both sites are designed to enhance the existing club homepage with more tools to foster a vibrant online community for Houston-area members.

The feature speaker was Prof Minh Luong, Assistant Director of International Security Studies at Yale. Prof Luong teaches courses for Yale College and the School of Management in areas including international negotiations and industrial espionage. Incidentally, Prof Luong started the debate team many years ago at Bellaire High.

Also, Prof Luong leads a program to bring talented high school students to Yale for summer courses and activities.

Prof Luong's feature speech was on the topic of China's ascendancy onto the world stage. Specifically, his thesis challenged the general notions that this ascendancy will be all but a sure thing.

During the first half of the presentation, the professor cited some common and not-so-common wisdom about China's meteoric rise, including an avg 9% GDP growth over the past 10 years and an ever growing budget to build up their military.

Then he raised a number of reasons why there may be significant obstacles to China's path to world leadership. China has the fastest aging population in the world. The implications on workforce productivity and lack of a health care system will create strains on China's society. Pollution, socioeconomic disparity between coastal citizens and the rural poor, food and energy consumption, increasing instances of civil unrest - these will all impede China's growth if not carefully managed. The time frame for seeing the negative impacts will be over the next 20 to 30years.

There was a lengthy Q&A where Prof Luong fielded questions from the Club's members. Risher Randall, the Club's new President, presented Prof Luong with a gift showing our appreciation of his speech.

The enlightening and spirited lecture ended at approximately 9:30pm. The Club's outgoing President Nisha dismissed the meeting. We hope you will join us at the 2009 Annual Dinner!

-Barry