clair065

The first time I studied abroad in mainland China was in 2013 when I moved to from New York City to Xi’an. One of the things that I noticed from the very beginning of my study abroad experience in Xi’an was that every time a person asked me where I was from, he or she would find it hard to believe that a person with brown skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes could possibly be from America. I could not fully comprehend why this belief was common in China until I was exposed to mainstream media which depicts almost all Americans as white. The more time I spent in China, the more encounters I had with people who held this idea. For someone who, for almost all his life, grew up in one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse cities in the world, I felt as if the movies, T.V. shows, and social media in China were not doing justice to the America I have experienced. It was not until I arrived at the HNC that I had the chance to meet other American students of color who shared a similar...

Matt Ferchen, HNC Certificate 2001, reflects back on his time at the HNC and his experience working as a Professor of International Relations at Tsinghua University.   Tell us about your current role. I was the first foreign professor to join the International Relations faculty at Tsinghua and am still the only foreign professor there. I am also a resident scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, where I run the China and the Developing World Program. My own research focuses on governance of China's urban informal economy, debates about the "China model" of development, and relations between China and Latin America. How did your experience at the HNC prepare you for this work? Something that I think a lot about in my own teaching and research is that, when I was at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, there was an emphasis on US-China relations and that's still important. But in the past 15 years, China's role in the world has expanded dramatically. I th...