West Meets East
Stories of Americans in China
How better to learn another culture than through personal connections.
Author Bill Brown, who expected to stay in China just two years and instead found a home for thirty-five, has lived the power of intercultural exchange. In this powerful collection, he offers the stories of twenty Americans who have stayed in China long enough to know it deeply. Although the two countries have had a difficult relationship at times, the subjects of this collection have found that the China Dream and the American Dream are both the universal dream of peace and prosperity for our families and our nations.
In 2023, China President Xi Jinping emphasized the value of people-to-people relationships when he met US President Joe Biden at the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in San Francisco. President Xi stressed that “the hope of the China-US relationship lies in the people. Its foundation is in the two societies, its future depends on the youth, and its vitality comes from exchanges at subnational levels.” President Xi’s speech was lauded by those wishing for friendlier China-US relations, including Professor Hu Min, international education expert and chairman of New Channel International Education Group. Hu Min suggested publishing tales of friendships forged by Americans living in China and asked his friend to spearhead the project. The choice was self-evident, as Brown had worked diligently for two decades collecting stories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans in China, even endeavoring to track down and interview their descendants in the US.
West Meets East is an opportunity to see China from a new perspective, where friendship brings countries closer together. For two great powers, we have much to gain if we pursue cooperation—and the entire world has much to lose if we do not.
William N. Brown
Bill Brown served in the US Air Force in Taiwan from 1976 to 1978. Since 1988 he has been professor of leadership and strategy at the MBA Center of Xiamen University, where he is also OneMBA academic director.
In 1992, Bill became Fujian Province’s first permanent resident (PR) foreigner, and in 1994, Bill drove with his wife and small sons more than 40,000 km around China, including through Inner Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Tibet. He repeated the drive in 2019 to see the changes in the previous twenty-five years.
While serving as Fujian governor in 2001, Xi Jinping named Bill as an Honorary Citizen of Fujian and encouraged him to write more books. In total, Bill has written twenty books, including two textbooks, hundreds of articles, and has written and co-hosted over 400 TV episodes about Chinese history and culture. He has also consulted with cities on urban and rural development, received China’s Friendship Award, and was listed by China’s Foreign Experts Bureau as a Top Ten Educator, 1954–2014.
In 2019, he received CCTV’s Top 10 Moving China award, and President Xi sent Bill New Year congratulations on his book Off the Wall: How I Fell for China. President Xi shared his confidence that Bill would share even better stories in coming years. In Bill’s view, one of the best stories is the Sino-US relationship represented in this book.
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