Who We Are

The original concept for the Committee for a SANE U.S.-China Policy was developed in the fall of 2020 by two long-time peace organizer/educator/advocates, Joseph Gerson and Michael Klare, who felt an urgent need to resist the growing trend towards a new Cold War between the United States and China.

Our Founders:

Joseph Gerson has been a peace organizer since the Vietnam War era and helped launch the nuclear weapons Freeze movement of the 1980s. Long associated with the American Friends Service Committee, he has worked closely with Asian, Pacific Islands, and European peace movements and is now President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau. Joseph has taught at Tufts University, The College of the Holy Cross, and Regis College, and is the author of several books, including The Deadly Connection: Military Intervention and Nuclear War, With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination, The Sun Never Sets, and Empire and the Bomb.

Michael Klare has been a peace educator and researcher since the Vietnam War era and served from 1985 to 2018 as the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, a joint appointment at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He now serves as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Arms Control Association, where he studies the weaponization of emerging technologies. Michael is the author of several books, including Resource Wars (2001), Blood and Oil (2004), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (2008), and The Race for What’s Left (2012).

Our Steering Committee [In Formation]:

As the challenges of launching the Committee have grown, Gerson and Klare have invited several highly respected colleagues to form the nucleus of a Steering Committee to help guide the organization’s evolution. Its initial members include:

Helena Cobban, non-resident Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy

Avi Chomsky, Professor of History, Salem State University

Tobita Chow, Director of Justice Is Global, a project of People's Action / People's Action Institute

Carolyn Eisenberg, Professor of U.S. History and American Foreign Policy, Hofstra University

Paul Joseph, Professor and Chair, Dept. of Sociology, Tufts University

Mark Selden, Senior Research Associate, East Asia Program, Cornell University

Jake Werner, Co-Founder, Critical China Scholars; Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Global Development Center, Boston University

Larry Wittner, Professor of History Emeritus, SUNY/Albany

Zhiqun Zhu, Professor and Chair, Department of International Relations, Bucknell University