Edith Terry 86 connections

Edith Terry is managing director of Cotton Tree Productions, a Hong Kong-based consultancy on East Asian business and public affairs, which she founded in 2004.

Ms. Terry’s career has spanned journalism, strategic work on East Asia for major multinationals, and policy research based in think tanks in the United States, Japan and Singapore. In the early 1980s, she was among the first American business people to be based in Beijing, and she has maintained an interest in China through her books, publications, and consulting. Ms. Terry has been a visiting fellow at research institutes and universities including the East-West Center (Honolulu), Japan Institute for International Affairs (Tokyo), Keio University (Tokyo), Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore), Economic Strategy Institute (Washington, DC) and the Gaston Sigur Center for Asian Studies (Washington, DC).

In the 1980s and 1990s, Ms. Terry was a foreign correspondent for Business Week and the Toronto Globe and Mail Newspaper, serving as Tokyo bureau chief and East Asian economics correspondent for the latter from 1988 to 1992. More recently, from 2002 to 2004, Ms. Terry was the opinion page editor of the South China Morning Post, during the period of SARS and large-scale democracy marches in Hong Kong. She is the author of three books on China and Japan, including an edited volume on the Pearl River Delta and How Asia Got Rich: Japan, China and the Asian Miracle (Armonk, NY, ME Sharpe, 2003). She is fluent in Chinese and Japanese, and has lived in Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, China, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong as well as Canada and the US. As managing director of Cotton Tree Productions and in previous capacities, she has worked closely with senior executives and public officials in a variety of client relationships advising on East Asia. She has lectured and written extensively on subjects ranging from East Asian energy and the environment to Sino-Japanese relations and the politics of democratization. Her degrees are from Yale University and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Affairs, and she has also studied Chinese and Japanese language at Stanford University, Middlebury College, and the University of Hawaii.

She has been chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong Environment Committee and a member of the strategic subcommittee of the Hong Kong Council for Sustainable Development. Currently she is a member of the Hong Kong Forum, an affiliate of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a visiting fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Center on China’s Transnational Relations.