Memoir Series

The China Research Center Memoir Series

Our goal for the China memoirs series is to provide a stable and enduring platform for various types of China experts to present and disseminate their memoirs and autobiographies. With our inaugural volumes, Crossing Borders: The Making of an American Asian Specialist, by John W. Garver, and China On My Mind, by Mary Brown Bullock, the China memoirs series is off to a strong start. The series promises to be a valuable home for those who wish to share with readers their lifetime experiences and knowledge about a country that is, depending on one’s perspective, so far yet so near to us.

Preface to the China Memoirs Series

How to Apply

Memoirs in the Series

China on My Mind

The United States and China are today at a crossroads. Will there great countries be enemies, or will they be engaged with each other? Mary Brown Bullock explores this question through the highs and lows of her yfearly China travel for nearly five decades. Using vivid diary and letter records, her memoir describes being a missionary kid in Asia, studying China from afar, leading the first exchanges of students, being a college president, and establishing an American university in China. Bullock, an optimist and long-term participant, concludes with today’s uncertainty as Duke University, Ford Foundation, China Medical Board, United Board and National Committee on US-China Relations, and others face a new era of relations with China.

Crossing Borders

John Garver’s memoir traces his evolution from a 1960s Student for a Democratic Society radical committed to socialist revolution to an American patriot trying to understand and explain China’s quest for wealth and power. Several years early encounter with variants of dictatorship in the UssR and Eastern Europe, in China including both Taiwan and mainland China, and Burma, shaped his rethinking of United States global containment. Over a career of thirty years at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Garver evolved from a revolutionary activist surveilled by the FBI to a leading academic authority on China’s foreign relations, including Sino-Soviet/Russian, Sino-India, and Sino-Iranian relations.