Berkeley’s Ties to China:

A Relationship Spanning over 140 Years

1868 Founding of the first of the University of California nine campuses at Berkeley.  The new Town and the permanent site of the University campus named in honor of Irish philosopher George Berkeley

1872 Regent Edward Tompkins, one of Berkeley’s founding fathers, endows the first “chair of learning” at the fledgling University of California, the Agassiz Professorship in Asian languages and cultures

1896 Department of East Asian Languages founded

1898 College of Commerce founded, in part to serve as a “portal” for the exchange of “products and thoughts” between East and West

Professor John Fryer, a legendary promoter of Chinese modernization who lived and worked in China  for 33 years as a government translator before accepting the first Agassiz Professorship at Berkeley, offers a course on the “commerce of China and Japan with Europe and America” to meet the needs of students of the newly organized College of Commerce

1899 Benjamin Ide Wheeler becomes President of the University of California and pledges his support for the expansion of Asian studies at Berkeley: “Here can be collected to best advantage data concerning the conditions of the markets in the Asiatic world, and here can be taught to best advantage the manners, customs, social conditions, civilization, and languages of that world”

1919 Berkeley Political Science Professor N. Wing Mah is the first, or among the first, US scholars to present courses in the United States on the political institutions of China and Japan

1921 The Berkeley Bureau of International Relations is founded, in part to provide opportunities to research international law and relations on Asiatic affairs

1928 Phi Theta, the Berkeley honor society for Asian languages, is founded

1930 International House Berkeley, the gift of US industrialist John D. Rockefeller, is established.  Rockefeller recognized that the Bay Area, and Berkeley, are the American point of entry from Asia … “through which pours so much of the world’s commerce and travel.”  Since its founding, the International House has been home to thousands of international students from the Pacific Rim, many of whom have achieved prominent positions in areas of intellectual, political, and social life

1942 University of California hosts the California College in China to promote opportunities for intensive language study of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Malay

1946 Professor Claude Hutchison, Dean of the College of Agriculture, leads mission of 13 Chinese agriculturalists to study Chinese agricultural practice and make recommendations for improvement in yield

1947 Professor Yuen Ren Chao, developer of the National Romanization, a phonetic alphabet for the Chinese language often bearing his name and officially adopted by the Chinese government in 1927, accepts the Agassiz Professorship at Berkeley

Berkeley endows the East Asian library, one of the most comprehensive collections of materials in East Asian languages in the United States.  The Center for Chinese Studies Library, of which it is a part, is the world’s largest repository of materials on contemporary China outside the People’s Republic

1957 Center for Chinese Studies is inaugurated

1977 Walter and Elise Haas Chair in Asian Studies is endowed

1978 Institute of East Asian Studies is inaugurated

1979 Berkeley becomes the first US institution to sign bilateral agreements on faculty exchange with Beijing, Tsinghua, Fudan, and Jiao Tong Universities following President Nixon’s trip to China.  The agreements were widely publicized in China as an important and valued first step toward normalizing ties between the US and China

1981 UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University agree to microfilm project to film and exchange rare books in the library holdings of both institutions

1985 University of California hosts 40 state leaders from across the United States to attend the first national Pacific Rim Conference

1986 University of California President David Gardner founds the Pacific Rim Research Program, a competitive grants program to support collaborative research on the Pacific Rim by UC faculty, acknowledging that “California’s location and immigrant heritage [enable it] to play a pivotal role in what will surely be one of the greatest centers of trade, commerce, and cultural exchange the world has ever known”

1988 Berkeley is awarded grants under Title VI of the Higher Education Act to fund the Berkeley East Asia National Resource Center to support teaching, lectures and conferences, outreach programs, and the East Asian Studies library

1989 Tung-Yen Lin, Class of 1933 and member of the civil engineering faculty at Berkeley for 30 years, creates the T.Y. and Margaret Lin Chair in Engineering

Berkeley signs exchange program with Tsinghua University

1990 Chang-lin Tien becomes Berkeley’s seventh Chancellor

Yu-Il Han Chair in Asian Studies is endowed

1992 Law students at Boalt Hall create the first Asian Law Journal in US, concentrating on immigration law, trade policy towards Asian nations, and the biographies of prominent Asian Americans

1994 T.Y. Lin named Berkeley Alumnus of the Year

Haas Professor John Harsanyi, 1920-2000, wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science  for his work in game theory, a mathematical theory of human behavior in competitive situations that has become a dominant tool for analyzing real-life conflicts in business, management, and international relations

1996 Berkeley Chancellor Chang-lin Tien collaborates with counterparts at UCLA, Cal Tech, and USC to found the Association of Pacific Rim Universities to facilitate strategic partnerships for teaching and research

1997 University of California/Tsinghua University Conference on Internet Communication Technology, with UC President Atkinson, Chancellor Chang-lin Tien, an honorary member of the Tsinghua faculty, and Tsinghua University President Wang Dazhong, to promote academic partnerships between UC and leading research universities in China

1999 Liu Visiting Scholars Program is established to provide senior-level public administrators from China who are responsible for directing regional growth with an opportunity to study at Berkeley

2000 Haas one of eight departments campuswide to receive a Liu Visiting Scholar, Xu Wei, CFO of Shanghai Electric Group Corporation

2001 Inaugural Berkeley MBA student-run Asia Business Conference started. Speakers included the School’s Professor Janet Yellen, currently President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; Dr. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, former Dean of the Haas School and former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to the President in the Clinton Administration.

Building on these roots, the Berkeley MBA Asia Business Conference strives to gather industry leaders to create a collective dialogue about the hottest topics in Asian business and continues to this day.

2008 The School launches its Asia Business Center, and holds a successful first conference in Singapore in December 2008.  Professor Teck-hua Ho is the faculty advisor for this area.  Dean Richard K. Lyons makes a strategic commitment to increase the school’s global footprint, most immediately with Asia due to Berkeley’s historic connections to the area.

Here is that part of Liz’s speech:

>> Second half of O-Week welcome speech — intentions & conversations

Take this week to make notes to yourself of what’s important to you, what you want to focus on this year. Watch for your own stress points – what is likely to cause you to lose that composure, that effortlessness?

With that in mind, whatever you know now about what you want to focus on and what your likely stress points are, you want to take this week to set your intentions. As you are at the threshold, what do YOU need to get out of this year, what will you gain from this experience? And I don’t mean that you need to know exactly what career or job or whatever you want – plenty of us come here with the intention to figure out what lights us on fire. That’s an intention. Figure out if you’d like consulting. That’s an intention. Figure out what it takes to serve on a board, and if you could try that out. That’s an intention. Figure out if you can show a side of yourself that you’ve never been able to showcase before.

Each of us walks in with a set of intentions, but if we don’t set them down before we get into the smorgasbord of Haas, we risk deciding to take the approach of “try one of everything,” or worse the “I feel like I have to do it” mentality that causes you to do things you don’t want to / can’t / don’t have time to do. By setting your intentions early, even if they change mid-course, you avoid some of the perils of business school – the perils that can cause you to lose your intensity.

Without your intentions…well, the best thing I can think to compare it to, is that it’s like walking in to a grocery store with no list – something I personally do all the time. You walk in, you’re on the phone, you circle the aisles, you inevitably spend 3 hours on a task that could’ve taken 30 minutes, and you invariably walk out with a lot of stuff – a lot of tasty stuff even – but without the ingredients to make a single meal.

Haas is a grocery store – there’s a lot to offer.

To navigate it well, as you push your cart around, you want to know what you are trying to create – you need your list.
- To build a career you need a lot of ingredients – and you have a finite time to shop. Walk in with a grocery list, plan, and you’re more likely to walk out with what you want
- You’ll still want to have your eyes open for other ingredients, other things you wouldn’t have thought to try, or always wanted to try and see available for the taking…

But there’s one other thing that’s really important as you’re getting ready to shop the aisles of Haas, even if you do have your grocery list and you’re ready to keep your eyes peeled for fun new ingredients

There are other people shopping alongside of you. Your classmates, with their own plans and lists, may have something to share that will shape your own plans for something you could never have even thought to prepare on your own.

I was reminded of this recently at an event for our alumni leaders, who spent the day debating how we can help Dean Lyons push Haas to the next level. I was chatting at the end of the day with one of the recent alums who’s taken a leadership role in our alumni community. He was asking if I could get all of us, the current students, to start pushing out information on what’s being talked about on campus. And when I asked him what he meant, what information, he said – “it’s those conversations in between – the conversations between a few people after class or in the courtyard or over a beer. If you could package up those courtyard conversations and broadcast them out, that would be like being back on this campus. Those conversations define the cutting edge of thinking in such a range of industries. That is what I miss. That’s what I can’t get anywhere else.”

In this store, you are surrounded by people who are constructing their own fabulous plans for incredible lives, careers, heck even incredible weekend plans. The conversations that happen in between the meat and potatoes of classes and recruiting nights and consumption functions and everything else – those conversations can flavor what you are creating. The ingredients that others are adding to their own basket can make the meal that you are preparing even more exceptional. Use them, make time for those conversations, but to have them you HAVE to pick your head up you have to engage the people around you and not just be going for the ingredients that you think you need – they will be perhaps the most invaluable part of this balance that you’re trying to strike.

So now, before I close, if you haven’t written anything down yet – write this down.

Set your intention.

Make time for conversations that will flavor your own experience You are about to open that gift that all of you have given yourselves – this week, you go BACK TO SCHOOL. Your time is yours – life is good.

Welcome to Haas. Welcome home. I’m so glad you’re here.

Thank you.

Liz, thank you very much for the speech.

Paul’s speech is simply great.

Great.

What a day!  Stay tuned.  This is just the first day of Orientation week.  :-)

(Daniel, my deal Haas classmate, thank you for the photo.)

Travis is the most social guy that I have ever met.

I just met Travis in June 11 evening at Shanghai, in the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business party featuring Dean Lyons.  Then I got known Travis is a very active Berkeley alumnus based in Hong Kong.  It was truly enjoyable talking with Travis in the event.

Then the next day I found Travis’ entry on LinkedIn and Facebook.  This guy has 500+  connections on LinkedIn, and 1500+ friends on Facebook.  Oh my god. 

Then I read recommendation words like this:

As the #1 volunteer for UC Berkeley in Hong Kong, Travis is at the hub of so much activity. Travis knows everyone; he is responsive and creative; Travis never hesitates to help fellow alumni.

Travis has been an enthusiastic and professional member of the steering committee of the Berkeley Club of Hong Kong since 2001. Thanks to Travis’ continual and inspiring efforts, loyalty and dedication, the Berkeley Club membership and event participation has grown enormously, which has resulted in countless benefits for the campus.

Oh, then I realized that Mr. Travis must be the “social connector“:

Connectors are people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. Connectors usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles.

Although connectors are rare — only one in several thousand people might be thought of as a true connector — they are, like mavens and salesmen, very important in the healthy function of civil society and business. Connectors are also important in trendsetting.

Author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term connector in his 2000 book The Tipping Point.

I followed the Wikipedia link to the book The Tipping Point , and found below interesting description:

• “The Law of the Few“, or, as Gladwell states, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”^[4] According to Gladwell, economists call this the “80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the ‘work’ will be done by 20 percent of the participants.”^[5] These people are described in the following ways:

• Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”^[6] They are “a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack [... for] making friends and acquaintances”. ^[7] He characterizes these individuals as having social networks of over one hundred people. To illustrate, Gladwell cites the following examples: the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Milgram’s experiments in the small world problem, the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” trivia game, Dallas businessman Roger Horchow, and Chicagoan Lois Weisberg, a person who understands the concept of the weak tie. Gladwell attributes the social success of Connectors to “their ability to span many different worlds [... as] a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.”^[8]

• Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”^[9] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others. Gladwell cites Mark Alpert as a prototypical Maven who is “almost pathologically helpful”, further adding, “he can’t help himself”.^[10] In this vein, Alpert himself concedes, “A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own”.^[11] According to Gladwell, Mavens start “word-of-mouth epidemics”^[12] due to their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate. As Gladwell states, “Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”.^[13]

• Salesmen are “persuaders”, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them. Gladwell’s examples include California businessman Tom Gau and news anchor Peter Jennings, and he cites several studies about the persuasive implications of non-verbal cues, including a headphone nod study (conducted by Gary Wells of the University of Alberta and Richard Petty of the University of Missouri) and William Condon’s cultural microrhythms study.

I have not read the book The Tipping Point yet, but I like these kind of discussion on different people roles in a society.  I guess Travis is really the “connector”.

Anyway, it is so good to have Travis as my future Berkeley alumnus at Hong Kong.  It is no wonder that the Berkeley Club of Hong Kong is very strong and active.  Not only does the Hong Kong club have over 1,000 Cal/Berkeley alumni it also contributes the most to the University in donations in Asia (even before the $40 million from Li Ka-Shing).

For myself, I guess I am (or inclined to be) the Maven.  I am always thrilled to explore new information and knowledge, and like to share with other people.  “Information broker…”, sounds like a good job. 

Anyway, it is truly my pleasure meeting and talking with Mr. Travis Darrow, a truly very resourceful and responsive man, and “#1 volunteer for UC Berkeley in Hong Kong”. His LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/travisdarrow , and Berkeley Club of Hong Kong .

By the way, I have to say the Haas Alumni Network Shanghai Chapter is also pretty active and very supportive.  We have regular gathering events H-BOM, which stands for Haas Bar-Of-the-Month every month: every 3rd Thursday of the month at Racks Pool Bar in Shanghai Xin Tiandi, and it rotates co-host with other business school alumni orgs or other Berkeley alumni orgs.  For me as a new admit, it was definitely very excited to be involved with the Haas and UC Berkeley community.  Ann, Justin, Rong, Louisa, Haibin, Sharon, Zhaohui, thank you so much for organizing so many great events.

Go bears!