Connecting Washington and China
The Story of The Washington State China Relations Council
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Author's Note:
I am putting together this unique story because I am a U.S.-China relationship buff, and I never came across any story that I wanted to write about so much and could until this one, which, although regional in nature, has all the drama of the U.S.-China relations at the national level.
My enthusiasm for U.S.-China relations—the most unlikely and intriguing of all relations—started with Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. But I was not involved until 1979.That year, when the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China normalized diplomatic relations, I was a young staffer at the foreign affairs office of the Shaanxi provincial government in China. That summer, I had the opportunity, honor and excitement of working for the delegation of Walter Mondale, then vice president of the United States, who was visiting Xi’an—the provincial capital and my hometown—to see the terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.
That was in fact the reciprocal visit of an earlier visit to the United States that year by Deng Xiaoping, then vice premier of China, on his first official tour after normalization. After meeting with President Jimmy Carter in Washington D.C. and touring Atlanta and Houston, Deng and his delegation came to Seattle—the last stop of that historic trip.At about the time I was working for the Mondale group in Xi’an, a new organization came into being in Seattle, the first of its kind in the U.S. But I wasn’t around to know it until a decade later, in 1989, when I arrived in Seattle and visited it. It was the Washington State China Relations Council, a private non-profit organization with the primary purpose of promoting trade and ties between people of Washington state and people of China.
I was awed and fascinated by the mere existence of such an organization, not to say the people and the devotion behind it. For up till then, in my Chinese life, all organizations focused on foreign relations were governmental. However, with the Tiananmen bloodshed casting a shadow over U.S.-China relations, one wondered if this private council on China could survive.It did, miraculously. In June 2004, I was privileged to attend the gala of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Washington State China Relations Council. Seeing and listening to the movers and shakers of the Council as well as distinguished guests from both American and Chinese sides, the old feelings of awe and fascination came back.
The outlet of those feelings is this book. The story of the Washington State China Relations Council is really a collection of stories about its people—those who had the vision to start it in 1979 and those who have had the dedication to continue it since.It is my hope that this story will fill you, Washingtonian or non-Washingtonian, American or Chinese, with the same awe and fascination I felt.
Wendy LiuOctober 2005
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About the Book
Foreword
Joseph J. Borich President, Washington State China Relations Council As a relatively junior Foreign Service Officer working on the State Department’s China Desk in 1978, I found myself in an ideal “fly-on-the- wall” situation from which to observe and peripherally contribute to the chain of events that would lead to the full normalization of relations between the U.S. and China on January 1, 1979. By January 1980, I was in China helping to reopen the U.S. consulate general there after a 30-year hiatus. Although I did not imagine it at the time, I would spend much of the final 17 years of my Foreign Service career involved with China. During that time I encountered the Washington State China Relations Council – its executive directors, board members, member company representatives and delegates of various WSCRC-led missions – on a number of occasions. In the process my knowledge of and respect for the WSCRC and its mission grew with each passing year. Perhaps it was destiny that the WSCRC’s executive director position should become vacant in 1997 at the same time that I retired from the Foreign Service. Whether by fate or coincidence I was ineluctably drawn to accept the Council’s offer of employment, an acceptance that years later I have found no reason to regret. Washington is one of only a handful of states that have found compelling reasons to establish and support a China-centric nonprofit business association like the WSCRC, and the WSCRC remains the oldest and arguably best known of these. The foresight of the WSCRC’s founders tying together Washington state’s historical links to China with the suddenly unleashed but still not well understood new opportunities for business with China on a massive scale has been fully justified by history. Today Washington leads all states on a per capita basis in trade with China and is the only state to maintain a trade surplus with China. This is very important because no other state is nearly as dependent on foreign trade as Washington – nearly one job in three here is directly tied to international trade. The vision of the WSCRC’s founders in 1979 has withstood the test of time. I congratulate Wendy Liu for writing Connecting Washington and China, published originally in 2005, and for updating it with new content. The Washington State China Relations Council has in more than a quarter century become an institution in the state of Washington and in the realm of post-normalization U.S.-China relations. As such, its story is certainly worth telling. But, this work also reflects an intensely personal voyage of discovery for Ms. Liu, with her own metamorphosis on her journey from China to the United States and from normalization through Tiananmen and beyond. That, too, is a story worth telling. Seattle, November 2009About the Author
Originally from Xian, China, Wendy Liu is an enthusiast of U.S.-China relations. With a B.A. in English from Xian Foreign Languages Institute, and a M.S. in Technology and Science Policy from Georgia Institute of Technology, she is an independent China business consultant, translator and writer, living in Seattle, Washington.
She is also the author of "Everything I Understand about America I Learned in Chinese Proverbs." Her writings have also appeared in The Seattle Times and other news publications.