Wednesday, October 8, 2025 | 4:00 PM EDT - 5:30 PM EDT
Chinese Encounters with America tells the stories of twelve Chinese whose American experiences transformed their lives and influenced China’s trajectory. Each chapter recounts how these individuals understood the United States and adapted their interpretations to bolster China’s quest for modernization. Their varied professions range from diplomacy, business, and science to sports, education, and the arts, but several shared questions tie their stories together: Why did they go to the United States, and why did they decide to return to China? What difference did their encounters with America make in their lives and careers? What do their experiences tell us about the complexities of Sino-American interactions?
Join the National Committee on Wednesday, October 8 from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. as Yale University professor emerita of sociology Deborah Davis, Yale University Jackson School of Global Affairs senior fellow Elizabeth Knup, and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies fellow Terry Lautz, in conversation with Syracuse University Professor Yingyi Ma, discuss the importance of personal encounters in the context of Sino-U.S. relations.
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Speakers
Deborah Davis
Deborah Davis is professor emerita of sociology at Yale University where she previously chaired the Department of Sociology, the Council on East Asia, and the Women Faculty Forum. Currently she is a visiting faculty member at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua and an honorary professor at Fudan. She previously served six terms as a trustee of the Yale-China Association and chaired the advisory board of the Universities’ Service Center Library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the H [Humanities] panel for the Hong Kong University Grants Council. She has served on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, The China Review, and the Chinese Sociological Review. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, Harvard, and Boston University.
Elizabeth Knup
Elizabeth Knup is a senior fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University where she teaches about how international organizations work both in and with China in the current era. Prior to joining the Jackson School, she served as the regional director for China at the Ford Foundation from 2013 to 2023, overseeing Ford’s operations in China and its programmatic strategies.
Ms. Knup moved to China in 1998 to be the American co-director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies after serving ten years at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. She then spent 11 years in the private sector as president, Pearson Education China; chief representative, Pearson Group; and managing director, Kamsky Associates.
Ms. Knup is a member of several not-for-profit boards, including the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the American Mandarin Society, the US-China Education Trust and the Yale-China Association.
Terry Lautz
Terry Lautz is the author of Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic and John Birch: A Life. He is former vice president and secretary of the Henry Luce Foundation, and has served as board chair of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Lingnan Foundation, and Yale-China Association. After retiring from the Luce Foundation, he was a visiting professor and director of Syracuse University’s East Asia Program. He is a past director of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and an advisor to its Public Intellectuals Program. Dr. Lautz is currently a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He graduated from Harvard College and holds MA and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, where he was a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities.
Moderator
Yingya Ma
Yingyi Ma is a professor of sociology at Syracuse University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Foreign Policy Program. She is the outgoing chair of the Asian/Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Ma’s research addresses education and migration in the United States and China; she has published one monograph, two co-edited volumes, and more than 30 journal articles and book chapters. Her book, Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education, published in 2020, won the best book award, Higher Education Special Interest Group, Comparative and International Education Association in 2021, and the Bourdieu Book Award Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association the same year. She is a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program fellow, and a frequent commentator for national and international media outlets. She received her doctoral degree in sociology from Johns Hopkins University.