USC to Focus on U.S.-China Ties

USC plans to open in September the first research institute dedicated to the study of United States and China relations, college officials announced during a trip to Beijing on Tuesday.

University officials, who are on a weeklong tour of China, said USC is an ideal location for such an institute, with California boasting some of the largest populations of Chinese Americans in the nation.

“We have a lot of students in and from China. We have leadership relations in China,” Associate Vice Provost Howard Gillman said Tuesday in Los Angeles. “The institute just seemed like a natural extension.”

Although numerous institutions focus broadly on Asian studies, Gillman said USC’s institute, with about 30 scholars, will be the first one dedicated to studying the relationship between the United States and China.

The institute, expected to cost several million dollars, would reach beyond run-of-the-mill topics, he said.

“We don’t want to be a talking-head institute that simply comments on the day-to-day Washington debate about China,” he said. “We want it to be a broadly defined institute that looks at all different variables like economics, natural resources, aging populations, cultural change.”

The institute is the brainchild of USC Provost C.L. Max Nikias, who commissioned a team of department heads to establish it shortly after he took office last June.

“The feeling here is that the U.S.-China relationship is the defining relationship of the world,” said Vice Provost Elizabeth Garrett in a telephone interview from China, where the USC team is promoting the institute.

Garrett said the institute could prompt a variety of new college majors, including one focused on China trade policies.

Zhong Jianhua, consul general in Los Angeles of the People’s Republic of China, said the institute will “serve as a platform for Chinese and American scholars to conduct academic exchanges in a broader and deeper level.”

“We sincerely hope that the institute will play an important role in enhancing China and U.S. cooperation,” he said.

Gloria Tai, executive director of the Chinese Culture Center in San Francisco, said she hopes the new institute will expose both the successes and shortcomings of U.S.-China relations. Tai said it could also play a major role in studying how the U.S. has influenced China’s newer generations.

“China has been closed for so long that any new thing American has a great influence on young people in China -- to the point where I worry they’re going to lose their own identity,” Tai said. “I mean, they like McDonald’s more than wontons.”