The Camden Conference presents Matt Ward at the Freeport Public Library on Wednesday, January 9 at 6:30pm. Join us for a crash course in U.S. and Chinese relations. This talk will cover all of the salient issues, similarities, differences, myths, facts and fallacies in the relationship between the two countries. This talk is free and open to the public.

Matt Ward is a retired Foreign Service Officer.  He is the former President of the World Affairs Council of Maine and has been an Adjunct Professor at the USM School of Social Work where he taught multicultural social work, and in the Political Science Department where he taught modern Chinese politics.  He currently lectures on international issues and consults on cross-cultural matters. Ward served the United States as a career Foreign Service Officer from 1967 to 1996.  Specializing in economic, developmental and humanitarian issues, Matt served in Vietnam (CORDS), Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar, Iran, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Luxembourg, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) and the Sudan.  He was a pioneer in developing refugee processing systems for “boat people” arriving on the shores of Indonesia and Singapore, and was the director, in Taiwan, of the school that trained U.S. diplomats in Chinese language, culture, economics, history and politics in preparation for service in China and Hong Kong. In both the Bush and Clinton White Houses, Matt was Director for European Economies in Transition, the office that oversaw trade, developmental and humanitarian policies for the several nation-states that came into being with the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.