Bulletin No. 2, 2013

Engaging the World 19  Yale-China Association The Yale-China Association was founded in 1901 by Yale graduates who decided to devote their lives to education in China. In 1954, following the Korean Conflict, the association moved its base from Hunan to New Asia College in Hong Kong in 1954. One of Yale-China’s signature programmes, the Yale-China Teaching Fellowship Programme, has been bringing graduates of Yale College to teach at New Asia and, later, CUHK since 1956, and is still going strong. Dr. Nancy Chapman, former executive director of the association, was an alumna of the programme and began her long association with CUHK at that time. Dr. Chapman recalled that in the early years, Yale-China also sponsored advanced study in the US for CUHK faculty members and helped to establish the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre, which has been fully run by CUHK since 1974. ‘Perhaps Yale-China’s most significant contribution to internationalization at CUHK came when it proposed and helped to establish the International Asian Studies Programme (IASP), which has provided opportunities for thousands of overseas students to study side-by-side their CUHK counterparts on the CUHK campus,’ said Dr. Chapman. The IASP provides an array of cultural activities to all exchange and study abroad students at CUHK, such as orientation, excursions, the Rural Schools Service Project, and Teaching- in-China Programmes. Yale-China also collaborates with New Asia on an undergraduate exchange and a community service exchange, which brings New Asia students together with their Yale counterparts for focused cross-cultural learning experiences. The New Asia College/Yale University Student Exchange programme, launched in 1993, enables eight students from each institution each year to make two-week reciprocal visits to each other’s campus Dr. Nancy Chapman