One China, Two Freemans
Remarks at the Center for China - US Cooperation,
University of Denver
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs
4 May 2016, Denver, Colorado
I am delighted
to join Professor Carla Freeman here this evening. I admire her as a scholar even as I remember
her as a remarkably muscular and willful infant, gifted student and ballerina,
and the beautiful young woman whom I gave away in marriage when she was
twenty-three. Carla is my eldest child
and my only daughter. I am proud of her
achievements, not just as an academic and university administrator but as the mother
of two of my eight grandchildren. I
cannot match her knowledge of international relations theory, her expertise on
China’s northeastern region and its neighbors, or her ability as a teacher. I’d like to think I had something to do with
her decision to study China and to explain it to her students.
But it may be
genetic. Neither Carla nor I was aware
when we got interested in China that we were not the first in our family to do
so. Three of Carla’s
great-great-grandfathers (my great-grandfathers) worked in China. Around 1900, Chas Wellman, after whom I am
named, was hired by Zhang Zhidong [张之洞]
to help upgrade the Chinese steel industry.
John Ripley Freeman taught briefly at Tsinghua University around
1915. He was lured back to China in 1920
by Sun Yat-sen (孙中山), for
whom he designed what ultimately became the Three Gorges Dam [ 三峡水坝]. And the classes that my maternal
great-grandfather, Robert Ezra Park, a pioneer American sociologist, taught at
what is now Beijing University were the subject of enthusiastic commentaries by
Fei Xiaotong (费孝通) and C.
K. Yang [杨庆堃].
Unlike my
daughter, I am not a China specialist or scholar. I am a retired diplomat. Diplomacy involves critical thinking that
resembles scholarship. But diplomacy is
different. It rests on empathy more than
received knowledge, texts, or quantitative analysis. It demands insight beyond the purely
intellectual into what makes foreigners do foreign things. Diplomacy is grounded in personal
experience, apprenticeship, and area knowledge.
It is culture-specific, reliant on intuition, attuned to emotion as well
as reason as a behavioral determinant, and tested in daily professional
interactions with counterparts. http://chasfreeman.net/one-china-two-freemans/
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