James Townsend, 71; China Scholar, University Professor

James R. Townsend, 71, a leading China scholar at UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, died Jan. 17 in Seattle of prostate and bladder cancer.

Born in Hastings, Neb., Townsend earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Omaha and his master’s and doctorate at UC Berkeley, where he began his teaching career.

He moved to the University of Washington in 1968 where he held a joint appointment in the political science department and Jackson School of International Studies. He retired in 1991, when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Townsend, a pioneer of post-world War II China studies, was credited with tutoring a generation of Sinologists in the U.S. and Asia. He taught at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies, jointly administered by Nanjing University and Johns Hopkins University, and was active in groups like the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China.

His publications include “Political Participation in Communist China,” a landmark study of mass mobilization in support of government programs, published by UC Press in 1969, and “Politics in China” published by Little, Brown in 1980. Townsend was a corporal in the Army stationed in Korea in the mid-1950s.