Vol. 32, Issue 2 - Spring 2009
Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program
Two Universities, A Common Focus
by Jeanne Jackson-DeVoe
Scholars in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program are part of a small, tightly knit group that manages to gracefully straddle two preeminent universities that just happen to be about 260 miles apart.
The program offers a small group of scholars who specialize in Chinese foreign relations and international relations a golden opportunity to spend a year pursuing their research and possibly molding their thesis into a book before entering academia. During their year at Princeton or Harvard, they present their research, interact with top scholars in the field, and take advantage of all the two universities have to offer.
Tom Christensen is the Princeton director of the China and the World Program.
What makes the Princeton-Harvard China and the World program special is the two directors: Tom Christensen, a professor of politics and international affairs at WWS, and his friend and colleague, Alastair Iain Johnston, the Laine professor of China in World Affairs in the Government Department at Harvard University.
“The program is already the best program in Chinese international studies in the country without any doubt,” says Lynn White, professor of politics and international affairs at WWS, who was the interim director of the program for two years.
The co-directors are friends and former classmates who wanted to “create a program to combine their study of China with the field of international relations and security studies in an integrated way, “ Christensen explains.
While having a program divided between two universities is unusual, both directors give personal attention to the fellows and the fellows themselves get to interact with top scholars at both locations, with fellows at Harvard trekking out to Princeton to deliver talks about their research and all of the fellows coming together for a panel discussion at Harvard in the spring.
“Fellows can go back and forth,” says Christensen. “They get the fertilization from us, so there’s cross-fertilization. They get exposure to more people.”
Having two universities share the program makes it challenging for the fellows to “develop a sense of community,” Johnston acknowledges but “the upside is that two scholarly communities instead of one benefit from their presence.”
Christensen also credits Krista A. Forsgren, the assistant director of the program who just started her job last fall, with the program’s success. Forsgren has lived and worked in China and Japan off and on for 15 years and did graduate work in Chinese history at Yale. She has her own nonprofit, Windows on Asia, aimed at educating youngsters about Chinese language and culture. “She’s highly skilled and she has a great background in China,” Christensen says.
The Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program is different from other programs because it allows scholars to pursue international relations and specialize in China, Christensen explains. “The international studies people don’t speak the language of the generalists, the generalists lose track of the realities of China and China is an important player, so we continue to do both and walk on two legs.”
Christensen and Johnston developed the program when Christensen was still a professor at MIT and just a stone’s throw from Johnson. When Christensen came to Princeton in 2005 he brought the program with him.
The following year Christensen took a leave to join the State Department where he was a Deputy Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs with responsibility for relations with China, Mongolia, and Taiwan. He returned to Princeton last fall.
The 2008-09 China and the World Fellows are Chong Ja Ian, Todd Hall, Andrew Kennedy, and Jessica C. Weiss. Photo by Larry Levanti.
Johnston says he and Christensen plan to review the program soon to see whether they should consider broadening the approach of the program. One possibility is changing the emphasis to an “Asia and the World program.” They might consider opening the program to scholar/practitioners or offering pre-doctoral fellowships.
The Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program has co-sponsored several high-profile talks, including a talk last spring by Christensen and Ambassador Christopher Hill and a talk by Chinese scholar Qin Yaqing, executive director of the Chinese Foreign Affairs University and a member of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
The talks are crucial for fellows like Jessica Weiss, who got valuable feedback on her research after presenting her work at a seminar last November from Gilbert Roman, the Musgrave Professor of Sociology, who specializes in China, Russia and Japan.
Weiss, who has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at San Diego, says the program has given her a brief respite for research on nationalist protests in the post-Mao era before she embarks on her academic career at Yale University next fall. “I took this postdoc to have that freedom before the tenure clock starts.”
The fellows’ relationships with each other are also very important, says Chong Ja Ian, who came to the program after getting a Ph.D. in politics at Princeton. Chong is working to turn his dissertation, on state formation from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century in the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, Siam and China, into the book before taking an academic position next year.
Chong is working with another fellow, Todd Hall, who is at Harvard, on a project that examines the premise that wars occur because of information problems. The two researchers are proposing that on the contrary, some wars occur because there’s an incentive to enter the conflict. They cite the Russo-Japanese War as an example of a case in which the two nations battled over China despite information that a bargain was possible. The project goes right up to the Iraq War and Hall has interviewed people involved in the decision-making process for the Iraq War to try to determine how that war occurred.
Hall, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, calls the program “a wonderful opportunity. I’m located here at the Fairbanks Center among some of the most eminent scholars of China in the United States.
Hall gave a talk at Princeton in February on the Chinese response to the U.S. issuing a visa to the president of Taiwan in 1995. Hall’s dissertation focuses on the role of emotional behavior in international relations, looking specifically at the response of China and other countries to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Andy Kennedy, the other scholar at Harvard, says the distance isn’t “much of a challenge” and fellows communicate easily by cell phone.
Kennedy, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2007, has written a book based on his doctoral research tentatively titled, The Origins of Audacity: National Efficacy Beliefs and the International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru. He is currently working on another project on the ways China and India approach energy security and climate change. Kennedy has accepted a position at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at The Australian National University in Canberra.
Kennedy says the program has been “really useful in a lot of ways,” by introducing young scholars like him to other scholars and providing valuable feedback. But above all, he says, “They can just sort of share their collective wisdom. A lot of wisdom is necessary when you’re studying China.”