Welcome to the 2025 newsletter of the China Studies Program of the University of Washington. Before I go any further, let me, on behalf of the entire program, express our heartfelt thanks to Prof. Madeleine Yue Dong for leading the program for more than 15 years—a time of extraordinary achievement. Without her willingness to manage and direct the program, we would not be in the good shape that we are today. Thank you so much!
Professor William Lavely, long-time head of our East Asia Center, which is a U.S. Department of Education Title VI Resource Center, retired at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year. Bill has been a tireless worker for the greater good of China and East Asian Studies, while at the same time, a leading scholar of Chinese demography. Bill led the effort to replace the separate China, Japan and Korea M.A. programs with an overall East Asia M.A. degree which includes tracks of study in China, Japan, Korea, and also Taiwan. This fall is our inaugural year for this new degree. Bill’s work for the common good, his dry sense of humor, and his scholarship and teaching will be greatly missed but his legacy lives in his body of work, field of research, the students whom he taught.
Bill’s retirement is coinciding with the possible ending this coming year of our East Asia Center. Federal budget cuts are very much in the news, and one of many outcomes is that our National Resource Centers (Title VI Center) may be ending after decades as a funding and scholarly resource for faculty and students across the UW and beyond.
But we have a new beginning also: the new East Asia M.A. degree which replaces the separate M.A. programs for the major East Asian regions. We did this to make more comparative work possible and also create a path to a one-year degree option for students as is the case nominally at other major East Asia/China programs across the country. For details of the new degree, please see the program website.
I first became chair of China Studies in 1992 and served until 2003. That was a time of recovery from the aftermath of June 4th, and a period of deepening engagement between the U.S. and China. In addition to already significant graduate students from China, the University of Washington began to admit its first undergraduates from China then. More and more of our students spent time in China, learning Chinese, doing research, experiencing a culture and system significantly different than the U.S.
Today, we face a starkly different reality. To many, China is a competitor, a rival, a challenge, and even an enemy. China is discouraging students from studying in the U.S. and since COVID, many fewer of our students are going to China. Academic dialogue and engagement are much more constrained than in the past. U.S.-China relations are increasingly adversarial. Yet, trade continues, if at a somewhat reduced level. Our students and faculty continue to conduct research in China—Professors Susan Whiting and Madeleine Yue Dong did so last academic year.
The U.S. and China have gone through repeated cycles of attraction and repulsion—as one leading scholar noted many years ago, we are in a fragile relationship. Yet, I would argue that it is the connections made by scholars, students, business representatives, and many others at the individual and personal level that has helped keep the relationship from being worse than it is. For our part, we hope to continue to nurture those personal connections.
Despite the deteriorating U.S.-China environment, the China Studies Program has much to be thankful for. The program has received an extraordinary donation of $3 million from the estate of David Hsiao, son of former Jackson School Professor and eminent China scholar Kung-Chuan Hsiao [K.C. Hsiao, Xiao Gongchuan]. This money will be added to the existing Hsiao endowment (established by David Hsiao in honor of his father) to support graduate student scholarships. Many, many thanks to all who made this possible, especially Madeleine Yue Dong and the Jackson School’s Advancement team. Most especially of course thanks go to the late David Hsiao and his family.
We have greatly added to our strength in early China research and teaching, with new faculty hires in Asian Languages and Literature, Assistant Professor Gian Rominger and acting Assistant Professor Yunxiao Xiao, and in History, Assistant Professor Yifan Zheng. Together with Mary and Cheney Cowles Endowed Professor of Art History Haicheng Wang, they make the University of Washington one of the leading centers for early China in North America.
Our faculty continue to be productive scholars. Professor Zev Handel published Chinese Characters across Asia, a study of how Chinese characters became the means by which intellectuals in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam communicated with each other. Associate Professor James Lin’s In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan, which starts with the development of agricultural science and technology on the China mainland, also appeared this year. Professors emeriti Stevan Harrell, Kent Guy, and Patricia Ebrey also kept busy in retirement with publications. Harrell’s “An Ecological History of Modern China” (2023), and Guy’s “Three Impeachments: Guo Xiu and the Kangxi Court” (2024) are recent monographs. Professor emerita Patricia Ebrey edited “Chinese Autobiographical Writing: An Anthology of Personal Accounts” which was published in 2023. Handel’s, Harrell’s, Guy’s, and Ebrey’s books were all published by the University of Washington Press, as part of China Studies collaboration with the Press. Other faculty have work in progress and nearing publication.
This is a time of great uncertainty—in U.S.-China relations, in higher education, and at the University of Washington. Old patterns of interactions and expectations are being jettisoned, and the shape of the new is hard to discern. We greatly appreciate your interest and support and hope to see you at one of our events and perhaps in our classes. Please keep in touch (chinast@uw.edu).
Sincerely,
Chair, UW China Studies Program