Bulletin No. 2, 2013

20 Chinese University Bulletin No. 2, 2013 Universities Service Centre ‘Where would the study of contemporary China be throughout the past several decades without the work done at the Universities Service Centre?’ Ezra Vogel , China scholar and Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University, once asked. 1 The Universities Service Centre (USC) is arguably one of the world’s best libraries on contemporary China studies whose very existence is predicated upon a desire to effect communication between East and West. The USC began as a China research centre, a watch-post for China observers, established by Western scholars in Hong Kong in the early 1960s when it was impossible and also a taboo to enter the PRC for research purposes. As Professor Vogel puts it, ‘In the 1960s and 1970s, without being in Hong Kong and having the support from the Centre, where would we have been in understanding daily life in China? What we learned here at the USC became the core of the courses on contemporary China that we faculty taught in universities around the world.’ 1 Affiliated scholars in the centre could have their own offices, gain access to written materials, interview people from mainland China, and exchange their views with intellectuals with similar interests. Michel Bonnin , author of Génération perdue: Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits à la campagne en Chine, 1968–1980 , has acknowledged the support of the centre in letting him use the venue for free to interview more than a dozen zhiqings (educated youth) in the late 1970s, and in giving him absolute freedom to choose interviewees. 2 Following China’s adoption of the Open Door Policy in 1988, the centre’s role began to change. It focused on its new mission of promoting China