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Sticking With China
Yale’s links to China go back nearly 150 years and have weathered war, ideological conflict, and physical isolation. But few could have predicted that the university would now be engaging the Asian giant in almost every area of academic and professional activity.
Summer 2001
by Melinda Tuhus

Melinda Tuhus, a freelance writer living in Hamden, writes regularly for the Connecticut section of the New York Times.

When President Richard Levin began planning for his trip to China this past May, he knew he was breaking new ground (see “China on my Mind”). Although Yale’s links to the country go back more than a century through missionaries and scholars, no sitting President of the University had ever visited the Chinese mainland. But Levin also appreciated the role Yale had played in maintaining contacts with China despite decades of warfare, political upheavals, and “incidents” like the one in April involving a U.S. spy plane and the recent detention of Chinese-born American scholars. As he sees it, nothing symbolizes the long interrelationship better than the fact that a book that was banned by the rulers of China in 1730 and had apparently been lost to scholars since then was found in 1997 in the Sterling Memorial Library stacks by Jonathan Spence, one of America’s leading authorities on Chinese affairs and now a Sterling Professor in Yale’s history department.

But the relationship between Yale and China extends well beyond the history department. Indeed, China is now the subject of programs in the College, the Graduate School, and most of Yale’s professional schools. Yale University Press is collaborating with a Chinese publisher on a 75-volume project about Chinese culture and civilization. Nearly 500 students and researchers from the People’s Republic are pursuing their work on the Yale campus, representing what is the largest single contingent from any foreign country. And the Yale-China Association—founded exactly a century ago by Protestant missionaries—now has links throughout the University. During his May trip, Levin extended those ties with the announcement of a joint center at Peking University for the study of plant genetics and agro-biotechnology. None of which surprises Jeffrey Garten, dean of the School of Management. China is, he argues, “the second most important country in the world.”

That conclusion has been a long time coming to New Haven. In 1854, when a young Chinese student named Yung Wing became the first of his countrymen to graduate from any American college or university, China was almost as irrelevant to Yale as it was exotic. Not until 1901, after decades of occasional contacts, did Yale make a significant commitment to China. In that year, a group of Yale graduates established a mission in Changsha, the captal of Hunan Province, in south-central China. The project was called Yale-in-China (renamed the Yale-China Association in 1975). The program expanded steadily and its mission quickly became more educational and medical than spiritual. But the Changsha complex was heavily damaged during the Second World War and was transferred to Chinese control after the Communist revolution of 1949.

For the next 30 years, Yale-China continued its mission in semi-exile in Hong Kong, and only in 1980 were Americans allowed to return to the mainland to resume educational work. Yale-China now links Yale students and faculty with their counterparts thoughout China in the fields of American studies, legal education, nursing, public service, and English language instruction.

Nancy Chapman '78, the organization’s executive director, was a member of the first group of teaching fellows to return to Changsha. “It was unbelievable,” she says of that experience. “There were very few foreigners at the time, but there were lots of people who had been taught by Yale-China teachers decades earlier, so we were welcomed with open arms.”

Chapman, who accompanied Levin on the May trip, says the biggest change she’s noticed is “the huge expansion in personal space.” In 1980, she recalls, “China was just emerging from the Cultural Revolution, when there was extreme isolation and very tight internal control. The state still had the power to determine where people lived, studied, worked, if and when they got married, and when they bore the one child they were allowed to have. The freedom to make these personal decisions has been the most striking development.”

The history department’s Jonathan Spence has seen similar changes. Spence, who did his dissertation at Yale on 17th- century China and covers the four most recent centuries in one of the College’s most popular courses, was part of a University delegation that went to the People’s Republic in 1974, after President Richard Nixon’s historic visit there. Spence recalls that a political science professor in the original delegation was denied a visa because Chinese leaders apparently considered him too critical of their government. The same thing could happen today, Spence adds. “The Chinese do keep watch over people who are very critical of their regime. Some Americans still are not allowed in.” Nevertheless, Spence describes the differences between the 1970s and the present as “immense,” with “remarkable, amazing opportunities for scholarship” now possible. He says academics have much freer access to archives, foreign students can move more freely around the country, and Chinese scholars can travel to and from the West and speak more frankly.

Such expanded access is especially encouraging to Paul Gewirtz, the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at the Law School. Last year, after returning from a stint in the Clinton administration working on issues of Chinese law, Gewirtz made what he calls “a fascinating and extremely challenging” career shift to become founding director of Yale’s China Law Center. The Center has two goals: to enhance Americans’ understanding of the Chinese legal system and legal reform, and to actually help move that reform along through collaboration with Chinese legal scholars and government officials. For example, the Center is working with the Chinese legislature on reform of criminal procedure and China’s first criminal evidence law; with the executive arm of China’s government on regulatory reform; and with the judiciary on increasing its independence. Other issues being addressed are legal education and legal aid for the poor. Several of these arenas overlap with human rights, but Gewirtz says the focus is on institutions, not individuals. “Courts, law schools, the legal profession—the premise is if you can improve these institutions and make bureaucracies more lawful and open, it will be better for businesses and individuals.”

The work obviously has the blessing of the Chinese government, but it is not easy. As Gewirtz notes, “While there are many reformers in China, there are also many who are opposed to certain reforms and are very cautious.” He adds that despite notable progress, freedom of speech in China presents “a very mixed picture. Informally, in social situations, people say pretty much anything. If it’s an academic publication, a very broad range of things is allowed. In print or in a more public setting, people are constrained.”

The Center is striving quietly to broaden the range even further. Throughout the year, visiting scholars from China come to Yale under the Center’s auspices. Last fall Chen Zexian, who works with a law institute affiliated with the People’s Congress, was on campus during the drawn-out U.S. national election of George W. Bush as president. He is researching judicial reform in China and the U.S., and commented on the “critical impact” of the courts on the election. The visitor’s conclusion: “The most valuable thing [about the election process] is the rule of law in the U.S.—that Al Gore respected that.”

Attempts to reform the legal system in China address the underlying structure of the nation’s society, and are likely to take place only gradually. Far speedier progress is being made in the world of business and finance. Not surprisingly, the School of Management is concentrating on that aspect of the growing Yale-China relationship. For instance, Zhiwu Chen, a professor of finance at the School, is helping to strengthen the fledgling Chinese stock market. Chen will soon become an adviser and commentator on a 30-part Chinese television series about stock market and investment issues.

When Garten arrived at Yale in 1995, he brought substantial expertise of his own on China. As undersecretary of commerce for international trade in the first Clinton administration, he helped American firms break into the China market. Since then, Garten has published an influential book, The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives. China heads the list. Regarding the country’s transformation to a market economy, Garten says, “China has a long way to go, but it has already made dramatic strides.” The difficulty in doing so is perhaps best illustrated by the current attempts to describe the results. “Officially, of course, China’s not a capitalist economy,” Chen says. “There is an ongoing debate over what to call it, because politically it’s still communist. The government uses a name that translates into English as ‘socialist private ownership.’”

One of the most pressing issues in China’s progress at the economic level has been the impact of that progress on the environment. The country’s industry still relies heavily on outdated technology, and the government has been reluctant to adopt the spirit of environmental restrictions common in the West lest they slow the current momentum at home. Although not officially coordinated with activities in the Schools of Law and Management, initiatives undertaken by the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES) have brought Yale into the China relationship through another channel. “The Chinese people and government recognize that there are huge costs to environmental degradation and pollution,” says Alan Brewster, associate dean of the School. “For example, the immense loss of life and destruction due to flooding on the Yangtze River a few years ago was caused, in part, by deforestation of the headwaters of the river. They have made a conscious decision that they must reforest.”

Spurred by such concerns, FES is now involved in several public and private partnerships to promote sustainable development in China. These efforts have blossomed in the past decade, but they have their roots in the early part of the 20th century, when the School’s first Chinese student, who graduated in 1911, returned home to become China’s forestry chief. After the restoration of relations with China in1979, former FES dean John Gordon was tapped to join the first official U.S. Forest Service delegation to China. The School’s current dean, James Speth, is currently a board member of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development.

This expanded contact with China reflects the School’s aspiration to be the first truly global school of the environment. In support of that mission, FES this year received a $1.2 million grant from the Luce Foundation to work on industrial ecology in Asia, primarily China. (The foundation’s namesake, Henry Luce '20, the founder of Time, Inc., was the son of missionaries, and maintained a lifelong interest in all things Chinese.) Marian Chertow, the director of the School’s Industrial Environmental Management Program, has just begun work on the project. “Eighty percent of the infrastructure in China that will exist in 2020 hasn’t been built yet,” she says. “If we can act now there is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the new infrastructure in terms of materials and energy use and build an economy that is based on sustainability.”

A related FES project is the Sustainable Leadership Development Program, funded by a grant from a Canadian company that owns and manages a large forest in China. With faculty provided by Yale, Nanjing Forestry University hosted the first courses last October in sustainable development for leaders in business, government, and the nonprofit sector. Yajie Song, who coordinates the program, says that while human rights issues can be divisive, environmental ones tend to produce more agreement. “Environmental issues are not particularly sensitive ones between U.S. and Chinese officials,” he says. “Pollution control and natural resource management are easy subjects between the two nations.”

Inseparable from any discussion that involves pollution, of course, is the impact on health. And there, too, links are emerging with Yale, specifically with the department of epidemiology and public health (EPH) and the School of Nursing.

EPH associate professor Tongzhang Zheng has been working for years on China-related projects, including studies on breast, stomach, and esophageal cancers, and childhood asthma. (Zheng was co-author of a recent study of Chinese women that showed that extending the period of breast- feeding reduces the risk of breast cancer.) He serves as deputy director of a collaborative project between Yale and the Union School of Public Health in Beijing, to which Yale provides faculty training and curriculum development. “The Chinese are very knowledgeable and very hard-working,” Zheng says. “The biggest problem in working collaboratively is finding enough resources and putting all the projects together.”

Ann Williams, a professor in the School of Nursing and a board member of Yale-China, has discovered another problem: denial. Williams made her first trip to China ten years ago, and along with several other instructors, she developed a training program for nurses in China focusing on HIV and AIDS. The program is now in its fourth year; 100 Chinese nurses have participated and have gone on to train thousands of others. But the early stages were difficult. “When we came to Changsha, the Chinese nurses were convinced there were no people with AIDS there,” Williams says. “But when one was identified, two of the nurses we had trained went to the director of the hospital and asked to be assigned to him. It took courage to be so outspoken. But their request was denied, and the patient was released, went home, and killed himself.”

In China, Williams explains, “you are faced with all the problems of the developing world, but the country is also beginning to manifest the diseases of the developed world. The challenge is to respond to the old problems but also apply some of what we’ve learned in the developed world to help forestall some of the new ones.”

A similar impulse motivates Alan Plattus, whose advanced studio course in the School of Architecture is intended to address some of the overwhelming physical planning issues confronting the Chinese. The challenge for his class last semester was to develop a new role for Suzhou Creek in Shanghai. A victim of the industrial age, the waterway is lined with factories and wharves and contained by culverts. The Chinese government is engaged in a massive clean-up effort of the river, and the task of the students—working with their counterparts at Hong Kong University and Tongji University in Shanghai—was to propose strategies for urban redevelopment and revitalization, while maintaining the creek’s role as a working river. Plattus says the studio provides “a way for our students to have a sense of the global phenomenon of urbanization and how it’s the same and different in different parts of the world.”

Those differences lie beneath virtually every initiative now linking Yale and China. “It’s easy to underestimate the continuing importance of the cultural differences between Chinese and American society,” says Chapman. “We Americans are perhaps more inclined to overlook them since our Chinese colleagues usually meet us more than halfway. Most have studied English and even spent time in the U.S., and they are adept at accommodating American ways. Just about every project runs into snags, however, and more often than not, they are rooted in diverging expectations and cultural responses.”

In February, President Levin, who is also the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics, spoke in Battell Chapel on “Democracy and the Market” as part of Yale’s Tercentennial DeVane lecture series. While not referring directly to China, Levin argued that, “As a logical proposition, markets do not require democratic governments, only a stable and predictable rule of law, which, in theory, can exist in an authoritarian regime.” He went on to say, however, that “the relationship between the market economy and political freedom is entirely symbiotic; the health of one promotes the health of the other.”

Levin did not touch on those themes while in China, concentrating instead on the potential of educational institutions to contribute to the same goal. But he did not entirely avoid the delicate issues involved in such exchanges. In a speech at Peking University, Levin noted that the sort of academic collaborations on which Yale and China have already embarked “exemplify the future of scholarship and service in the global university.” But, he added, “They will flourish best if scholars are free to ask questions, collect information, and conduct research.”  

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