Co-hosted by Royal Asiatic Society, Beijing (RASBJ), Yale Club of Beijing, and Yale Center Beijing

Event Time

Monday, April 27, 2026

Registration

18:30-19:00

Dialogue and Q&A

19:00-20:00

Location

Yale Center Beijing 
36th Floor Tower B of IFC Building 8 Jianguomenwai Avenue Chaoyang District, Beijing (Yong'anli Subway Station, Exit C) 

Registration and Fees

Please click “HERE” to register. Please send an email to yalecenterbeijing@yale.edu if there are any problems. 

Ticket : RMB 100 for students; RMB 200 for RASBJ members and members of Yale community; RMB 300 for regular admission.

*The registration fee is non-refundable. Unless due to a force majeure reason, Yale Center Beijing will not refund any part of the registration fee if a participant fails to attend the event.

Walk-ins will not be accepted.

The event will be in English

Note: Seats are available on a first-come-first-served basis.

The Event

Chinese Encounters in America: Journeys That Shaped the Future of China (Columbia University Press, 2025) tells the stories of twelve remarkable Chinese individuals whose professional lives capture the evolving meanings of “America” as well as China’s broader quests for economic prosperity and global engagement. The book's personal narratives speak directly about the complexity of cross-cultural understanding across different generations.

On April 27, Deborah Davis, who is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Yale University and who edited the book with Terry Lautz, will discuss how the project evolved from Dr. Lautz’s earlier book, Americans in China (Oxford University Press, 2020), and introduce the twelve individuals selected as featured subjects. Her presentation will be followed by a Q&A between one of the book's subjects, Chinese-American media figure Hung Huang, and Melinda Liu, Newsweek Beijing Bureau Chief, who wrote the chapter on Hung Huang.

Speakers

Deborah Davis
Professor Emerita of Sociology at Yale University

Deborah Davis is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at Yale University, where she previously chaired the Department of Sociology, the Council on East Asian Studies and the Women Faculty Forum. Currently she is a visiting faculty member at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and an honorary professor at Fudan University. She previously served six terms as a Trustee of the Yale-China Association and chaired the Advisory Board of the Universities’ Service Center Library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has served on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, The China Review, and the Chinese Sociological Review. Her most recent book, coedited with Terry Lautz is Chinese Encounters with America, a Tucker-Cohen book with Columbia University Press.

Hung Huang
Writer & Media Expert

Hung Huang from childhood has been steeped in East-meets-West interaction. Her mother Hanzhi Zhang was a Chinese diplomat; her stepfather was the late Foreign Minister Guanhua Qiao. At age 12, Huang was tapped by Chinese leaders to travel to the US, where she lived with an American family to learn English and embed in American culture. She attended Vassar College and later began a career in business. She became the publisher of a glossy Chinese fashion publication, and then began to blog. Her independent voice made her an influencer before the word even came into popular usage. Today her candid comments attract many followers on various social media platforms.

Melinda Liu
Chief, Newsweek Beijing Bureau

Melinda Liu opened Newsweek’s first Beijing bureau in 1980, and has lived and worked in the China mainland for nearly three decades as a U.S. foreign correspondent. In addition to reporting on multiple aspects of China’s modernization as Newsweek Beijing Bureau Chief, she has covered conflicts and military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia and Haiti. She contributed a chapter profiling media personality Hung Huang in the book Chinese Encounters with America: Journeys that Shaped the Future of China, edited by Deborah Davis and Terry Lautz.