William N Brown

Bill Brown served in the US Air Force in Taiwan from 1976 to 1978. Since 1988 he has been professor of leadership and strategy at the MBA Center of Xiamen University, where he is also OneMBA academic director.

In 1992, Bill became Fujian Province's first permanent resident (PR) foreigner, and in 1994, Bill drove with his wife and small sons more than 40,000 km around China, including through Inner Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Tibet. He repeated the drive in 2019 to see the changes in the previous twenty-five years.

While serving as Fujian governor in 2001, Xi Jinping named Bill as an Honorary Citizen of Fujian and encouraged him to write more books. In total, Bill has written twenty books, including two textbooks, hundreds of articles, and has written and co-hosted over 400 TV episodes about Chinese history and culture. He has also consulted with cities on urban and rural development, received China's Friendship Award, and was listed by China's Foreign Experts Bureau as a Top Ten Educator, 1954-2014.

In 2019, he received CCTV's Top 10 Moving China award, and President Xi sent Bill New Year congratulations on his book Off the Wall: How I Fell for China. President Xi shared his confidence that Bill would share even better stories in coming years. In Bill's view, one of the best stories is the Sino-US relationship represented in this book.