Hopkins-Nanjing Center Certificate + Johns Hopkins SAIS MA ‘21
Duke University-University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC) China Leadership Summit Co-Director and Senior Advisor
Born into a tightly-knit extended family in the Chinese island province of Hainan, Bochen has always felt connected to China’s culture and people even after immigrating to Canada at age six. But what drew her academically to China was the concept of “soft power” that she discovered during her freshman year of college: a framework that seemingly explained China’s obstacles to global influence, and that appeared to offer a form of influence that was more benign, persuasive, and longer-lasting than hard power could secure.
As a sophomore at Duke University, she led a team of 20 students across two universities to organize the American South’s largest student-run conference on U.S.-China relations, the Duke-UNC China leadership Summit. The conference brought together over 100 students from 24 universities, 13 experts, and over $26,000 in fundraising. The following year, she mentored the conference’s new leadership while simultaneously serving as the president of the Duke East Asia Nexus, a student-led academic organization focused on exploring the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of East Asia. As president, she led the publication of an online blog, a bi-annual journal, and the execution of topical on-campus events. She explored her interest in China in various other ways throughout her college career, with consultancies and internships at The Diplomat Magazine, Freedom House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and memorably, a summer teaching English to migrant children in Beijing’s outskirts. But perhaps most formative for her was a cross-country trip through China. Wanting to see more of the country that she had committed to studying and understanding, she travelled through ten provinces, meeting people from all walks of life who challenged her most fundamental assumptions about China. It was this experience that cemented her commitment to furthering her understanding of how people relate to one another, with the goal of bridging the misunderstandings that hinder progress on controversial yet consequential issues.
Increasingly fascinated by the political dynamics of the Southeast Asian nations caught in the pull of China’s rising influence, and eager to explore the role of civil society in enacting change, she took a gap year from Duke University, splitting her time between the UN Human Rights Southeast Asia Regional Office in Bangkok, Thailand and a grassroots Myanmar human rights organization in a small migrant town on the Thailand-Myanmar border. While abroad, she realized that Myanmar’s transitional democracy provided opportunities for high-impact change that were less possible in other countries in the region. Hopping between different sectors—from the glossy halls of the United Nations to the humble offices of a grassroots organization—she also saw the value in understanding how different sectors approached the same problems. After graduation, driven to better understand the various actors in play and to figure out where she could make the most impact, she moved to Yangon, Myanmar. There, she studied Burmese, delved into the politics surrounding the country’s constitutional reform, observed its first-ever municipal elections with universal suffrage, and worked at a tech social enterprise tackling some of Myanmar’s most pressing issues in law, governance, and health. Yet the more she saw of Myanmar and experienced the limitations that came with being unable to access the culture through language, the more she realized that her deep grounding in the language and culture of China gave her unique opportunities to effect change. And so, her path led her to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center where she looks forward to building her bilingual skills, distilling how the interdisciplinary approaches in international relations can inform her future work, and discovering where her journey with China will take her next.
Lucas WilleMaster of Arts in International Studies ‘20
Former President of Chinese Studies Club at Wake Forest University
Lucas Wille began his study of Chinese in kindergarten at Breck School in Minneapolis. Following his first trip to China led by his high school teacher, Margaret Wong, Lucas decided to dive into his Chinese language studies. While studying business enterprise management with a concentration in consulting and Chinese language and culture at Wake Forest University, Lucas took opportunities in the summers to return to China to study and intern in Shanghai. In the summer of 2017, Lucas met with a Hopkins-Nanjing Center alumnus, who praised the program for its unique strengths in target-language multidisciplinary coursework and preparing students for international careers. One year later, Lucas was preparing for the move to Nanjing!
During his junior and senior years at Wake Forest, Lucas helped to lead the Chinese Studies Club — a student organization with the mission of creating a space for dialogue on Sino-American relations and cultural appreciation on campus. Both years saw increased membership, events, and collaboration with other multicultural student groups on campus. During his second semester at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, Lucas took the lessons and experiences gained from this leadership opportunity to represent the student body as a class representative on the student committee (known as the “banwei”).
Lucas chose to study at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center to connect his interest in Chinese language, experience in consulting, and the education opportunities provided in the school’s Energy, Resources and Environment concentration area to better understand the environmental problems facing China and the world and to contribute to solving them. Lucas is currently spending his summer interning in Beijing at Blackpeak, an international investigative research and risk advisory firm.
Ben ScottMaster of Arts in International Studies ’21
Student Representative for Reed College, China Round Table, Student Conference on U.S. Affairs hosted by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point
Boren Fellowship for International Study
Ben first came to China in the summer of 2015 to visit Nanjing, the hometown of a high school friend with whom he had begun practicing Mandarin. Humbled by the warm welcome he received and fascinated by China's history, culture, and rapid development, Ben switched his major from biochemistry to international policy studies shortly after beginning his freshman year at Reed College. Ben's course of study centered around political science, economics, Mandarin, and Chinese history, culminating in a senior thesis that used open-source data to analyze trends in the government response to labor protests in mainland China from 2011-2017. During his year of living in the Chinese Language House, Ben enjoyed coordinating the catering for campus-wide Chinese cultural events, especially running a shaokao-style barbecue stand on the quad during the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations. Outside of China studies, Ben also served as president of the Reed College Investment Club, and led Reed College’s first-ever CFA Investment Research Challenge team (now an annual tradition).
In October of 2018, Ben was selected to represent Reed College on the China round table at the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs, hosted by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Working with West Point cadets and other undergraduate China scholars, Ben helped develop and present policy proposals to advance new dimensions of U.S.-China cooperation and mitigate the risk of conflict. Thanks to a favorable table assignment at dinner, he also had the opportunity to discuss the strategic underpinnings of America's China policy with former national security advisor Susan Rice, who was the conference's keynote speaker.
Since finishing his thesis and graduating from Reed College in January 2019, Ben has been working as a legal assistant and web content creator for a Seattle veterans' law firm. Ben did not apply to any graduate programs other than the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, seeing it as the best possible environment in which to continue pushing himself academically while taking his Mandarin to the next level. Eventually, Ben hopes to bring together economics, politics, and environmental studies in a Master's thesis on the governance of Chinese investment in developing countries, and to pursue a career in international development. Over the next two years in Nanjing, he also looks forward to improving as a martial artist and expanding his repertoire of Chinese dishes.
