Florence Fang
Florence Fang is a member of the Board of Directors of the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations.
Born in China, educated in Taiwan and adopted by the United States, Ms. Fang is also the chairwoman of the Florence Fang Family Foundation.
She currently serves as an honorary trustee at Peking University and an honorary professor at Wuhan University. She also serves as the honorable chairwoman of the Flying Tiger Historical Organization.
Ms. Fang was the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, the first mainstream U.S. newspaper company owned by an Asian immigrant family, as well as the chairwoman of the Independent Newspaper Group. She was also at the helm of Asian Week and served as president of the Chinese version of The Young China Daily.
She was a big supporter of the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and East Asian Library. Peking University also honored Ms. Fang by naming a building the Florence Lee Fang building to promote understanding between the United States and China.
She has twice been honored as “Woman of the Year” by the California State Legislature.
In 2014, then U.S. House of Representative Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi broke ground for the Florence Fang Asian Community Garden in the San Francisco Bayview Point neighborhood, the only community garden in San Francisco named after an Asian community leader. It now serves as the grassroots community’s gathering place as well as a regular San Francisco-Marin Food Bank distribution site.
On April 2, 2014, the U.S. Congress honored Ms. Fang for her lifelong efforts in promoting and advancing the bilateral relationship between the United States and China. This was recorded in the Congressional Record of the 113th Congress, second session (Congressional Record volume 160, number 53, page E497).
Ms. Fang also founded the first overseas China World War II Pacific War Memorial Hall in San Francisco’s Chinatown, which opened its doors to the public in 2015.
On February 13, 2019, Ms. Fang was honored as the first recipient of the “Global Leadership Award” by the Bay Area Council in San Francisco for her leadership in promoting the bilateral relationship between the United States and China.