Ying Ma (馬穎) is a senior vice president of SDB Partners, a team of senior professionals and leaders providing strategic advice for clients focused on homeland security, law enforcement and defense. She is also a policy advisor at the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market think tank, and the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, a memoir about getting to know freedom from post-Mao China to inner-city Oakland, California.
She writes regularly about China, international affairs, the free market and conservatism, and much of her research explores the nexus between political and economic freedom with respect to China’s rising influence on the global stage. Her articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Weekly Standard, National Review Online, Foxnews.com, PJ Media and other publications. She has appeared on Fox & Friends, Fox News Live, C-SPAN, Fox News Radio, CBS Radio, The Laura Ingraham Show, The John Batchelor Show and other programs.
Ms. Ma has previously served as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, a premier conservative think tank; practiced law at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, a leading global law firm headquartered in New York; managed corporate communications at Sina.com, the first Mainland China-based Internet company to list on the Nasdaq Stock Market; and served on the first professional staff of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional commission established to examine the security implications of America’s economic relationship with China.
From 2007 to 2012, Ms. Ma was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1998, Ms. Ma served on the staff of an American delegation whose leaders were appointed by former President Bill Clinton and invited by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit China and discuss religious freedom. She traveled with the delegation throughout China and co-drafted the report that the delegation subsequently presented to the U.S. Congress and President Clinton.
In 1996, Ms. Ma was the Bay Area Outreach Coordinator for Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that ended public racial and gender preferences in California.
Ms. Ma received a B.A. in Government, magna cum laude, from Cornell University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. In college, she served as President of The Cornell Review, a bi-weekly conservative newspaper. In law school, she was President of the Stanford Chapter of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, an organization dedicated to conservative and libertarian legal principles.
Ms. Ma is fluent in Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese. She immigrated legally to inner-city Oakland, California, from Communist China at age ten.
