History

FACULTY CONTRIBUTIONS

In thinking about why UW-Madison proved attractive to so many students from China in the early 1900s, the Department of Political Science points to one of its own, Prof. Paul Reinsch. President Woodrow Wilson named Prof. Reinsch the first American minister to post-imperial China in 1913.  Political Science department historian Crawford Young writes that Reinsch sparked “a striking flow of  doctoral students to the department in the interwar years.  Between 1929 and 1936, 7 of the 28 doctorates awarded went to Chinese scholars.”

Franklin Hiram King, for whom King Hall (housing the Soil Science Department at 1475 Observatory Dr.) is named, was a Wisconsin native and professor at the University of Wisconsin from 1888-1902.  His best-known book, Farmers of Forty Centuries (King, 1911) discusses agricultural practices he observed during a nine-month trip to China, Japan and Korea in 1909.

Professor of plant pathology Arthur Kellman was among the first UW-Madison faculty members to visit China in the post-Mao era. Dr. Kellman traveled with a group of scientists to study China’s agriculture systems.  Horticulturalist Warren Gabelman and political scientist Edward Friedman also conducted research in 1970s China.

Mechanical engineer Shien-Ming Wu was internationally known for his work to modernize automobile factories, but he also served as the main faculty mentor to a group known as “Shain Scholars.” These 461 scholars from the PRC were the first to return to UW-Madison after China reopened in the late 1970s. While almost 200 UW faculty members helped mentor Shain Scholars, most faculty worked with one or two. Professor Wu mentored 33. He is also a Badger alum, having earned his PhD from UW-Madison in 1962.

Kuo-P’ing Chou, linguistics professor at UW-Madison, 1952-1980.  She helped establish the Department of Chinese in 1960 and served as its first chair.  Renowned for her teaching skills and innovations in language instruction, she was among the first women on campus awarded Emeritus status. She also hired a graduate student in agricultural engineering, Gwang-tsai Arthur Chen, as a teaching assistant. He liked the work so much that he earned his PhD in Chinese Linguistics in 1971 and went on to a career of over 30 years teaching Chinese at his alma mater and offering numerous innovations in language learning.

Chow Tse-Tsung 周策縱, acclaimed historian of the May Fourth Movement,left Harvard in 1963 to join the faculty of the fledgling Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at UW-Madison.  He directed the program through most of the 1960s and 70s, directed over 20 dissertations, and drew large enrollments for his classes on calligraphy, history and literature.

Growing up in the Chinese port city of Tianjin informed the later scholarship of renowned geographer Yi-Fu Tuan 段義孚, considered the father of humanistic geography. Professor Tuan taught at UW-Madison from 1983-1998, and continued to be active on campus until his death in 2022. The Yi-Fu Tuan Lecture Series is still held on Friday afternoons in the Department of Geography.

1907: First students from China enroll at the University of Wisconsin. The very first appears to have been a young man from Anhui, Louis Yu-fong Sun 孙裕方, who arrived in Madison on a summer tour of the U.S. and decided to stay. He summoned his cousin, Roy  Jee-fong Sun 孙季方, and then convinced a friend in Chicago, Juedan Tung-Shou Chen 陈同寿, to join them. All three studied engineering at UW and then transferred elsewhere.

1909: First woman from China to enroll. Wisconsin newspapers noted that Yun Yiu Wong 黄琴英 enrolled in the summer session, and then transferred to a school in Indiana. Her father was then a member of the Chinese Educational Mission to the U.S.

1910: First degrees offered to students from China were offered to seven men, three bachelor degrees (Guok-Tsai Chai 赵国材, Yet C. Owyang 欧阳月, and Chu-tung Tsai 蔡序东, all in the College of Letters and Science) and four master’s degrees (Lau-Chi Chang 张德熙,字柳池 and Kungchao Chu 朱公釗 in political science, Ye-Tsung Tsur 周诒春 in education, and Nae-Tsung Woo 吴乃琛 in political economy.

1913: UW Political Science Professor Paul Samuel Reinsch named by President Woodrow Wilson to become the first American minister to post-imperial China. He served in that capacity through 1919.

1917: The first degree awarded to a female student from China – Helen Chai, who attended UW along with her brother. She went on to become a member of the first Control Yuan of the Republic of China. Also in 1917, the UW library began its collection of Chinese materials by accepting a donation of books and journals from Chinese alumnus Yang Guangbi (杨光弼, who went on to become the first dean of the chemistry department at Tsinghua University).

1929: First wedding at Memorial Union was for two students from China, Tsao Shih Wang 王造时 and Tou Fang Chu 朱透芳. The ceremony was presided over by State Supreme Court Chief Justice Marvin B. Rosenberry, covered by the Wisconsin State Journal, and drew an audience of more than 200.

1950: Chinese language instruction is formally included in the university curriculum.

1962: A Department of Chinese created in the fall.  This later became part of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, which is now part of Asian Languages and Cultures.  The Center for East Asian Studies opened in the same year, one of eight federally-funded National Resource Centers on campus.

1965: The University hires its first Chinese Studies librarian, Chester Wang.

1979: Chancellor Irving Shain led one of the first university delegations to China of the post-Mao era, in the process launching a visiting scholar program that attracted hundreds of Chinese academics (now known as “Shain Scholars”) to Madison.  In 1980, UW-Madison had the largest PRC group on any American campus. Many of these scholars returned to China to become leading scientists and engineers.

1980: UW-Madison hosted 88 scholars  for a summer conference on “Dream of the Red Chamber,” the great 18th century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin. The international conference, which featured 42 papers presented over five days, was organized by UW-Madison Professor Chow Tse-tsung 周策縱 and was hailed as milestone in “redology” or Red Chamber research and believed to be the first post-Cultural Revolution international conference that Chinese scholars were allowed to attend.

1990: East Asian Legal Studies Center forms in the UW-Madison Law School.

2007: Wisconsin China Initiative (today’s Wisconsin China Resource) forms in the Division of International Studies to bring together faculty, alumni and leaders in business and government.

2008: Two-day conference on Intellectual Property (IP) Management, “From the Lab to the Market,” held at Nanjing University, organized by the UW Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies Center, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and Nanjing University.

2013: Partnership with the School of Human Ecology and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies to host talks on conservation and sustainability projects in China and a photography exhibit on Sichuan, “Evolving Landscapes.”

2014: The Wisconsin China Initiative launches the Red Cap Lecture Series, funded by Wade and Bev Fetzer. This series featured talks on China’s economy by: Stephen Roach (alum and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia), Nicholas Lardy (alum and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics), Yao Yang (alum and dean of the National School of Development at Peking University) and William Overholt (Harvard). These events were the largest East Asia events on campus from 2014-18, drawing about 200 per event.

2017: Screening of the PBS documentary “The Chinese Exclusion Act” along with a panel discussion with the filmmakers, Li-Shin Yu and Ric Burns.

2019: A UW-Madison official delegation to China results in the signing of a strategic partnership with Nanjing University.

May 22-26, Memorial Union: 2023 Summer Institute: Chinese Literature and the Global South: Writing, Translating, Reading, and Looking. Writers, poets and artists from India, the U.S. and China gathered along Lake Mendota for a week of conversations about literature, along with public events including a film screen, artists’ conversation, and public readings by the participants.