Why letting go of Professor Feng Zhang was a mistake.
46 Hillhouse Avenue at Yale, home of Yale’s International Security Studies program. (Credit: Buckley Institute)
Benjamin Nuland
Contributor, The Buckley Beacon
Yale College has long shaped how Americans understand China, with generations of scholars like Professor Jonathan Spence training undergraduates like Joe Tsai and Tim Steinert who went on to influence business and policy. But at the undergraduate level, that legacy feels increasingly hollow, especially in the study of contemporary Chinese geopolitics.
While peer institutions like Harvard and Brown have built accessible ecosystems like the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Yale, much of this infrastructure sits within Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, which largely excludes undergraduates. The result is simple: undergraduate students interested in U.S.–China relations are often left out.
The classroom gap is stark. There is effectively only one tenure-track professor focused on contemporary Chinese politics. The courses that do exist on this topic are oversubscribed and highly selective to the point of exclusion (sometimes less than 10% acceptance rates). There is no dedicated undergraduate survey course on Chinese geopolitics for Fall 2026; Daniel Mattingly’s Rise of China was only offered in the spring semester last year. Students can study Tang poetry, but not the strategic thinking that shapes the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century. When China does appear, it is often filtered through American grand strategy or security frameworks, reducing it to a case study of competition rather than understanding the country itself.
Outside the classroom, institutional caution narrows student engagement further. Groups like the Yale-China Association and the Council on East Asian Studies emphasize less politically sensitive topics, while major forums skew toward graduate audiences. Students have responded by building their own initiatives like the Yale Dialogue on U.S.–China Relations, but without institutional backing, they remain fragile. Yale College helped define the field of China Studies, and its undergraduates are now struggling to reconstruct it.
The consequences are clear: students are trained to analyze flashpoints like tariffs, semiconductors, and AI, but not to interpret how Chinese leaders think. The result is an interpretive gap where American students can describe tensions, but struggle to explain the reasoning behind Chinese positions.
In a recent weeklong dialogue on AI and US-China Relations between Yale students and their peers at Beijing’s Renmin University (of which 30 students from each side were selected from hundreds of applications), much of the discussion I observed when I was did not center on policy solutions, but on managing misperceptions. This signaled to me a deeper problem: a complete imbalance in familiarity, where the Chinese students demonstrated detailed knowledge of U.S. institutions and debates, but my American peers struggled to show fluency in Chinese political logic. This asymmetry limits mutual understanding, but also our ability to persuade, negotiate, or even disagree productively. If Yale is serious about training future leaders in US-China relations, it cannot produce graduates who can cite tensions but not interpret them.
Together, these dynamics point to a broader structural issue. At a moment when U.S.–China relations are reshaping global politics, Yale undergraduates should not have to rely on themselves to understand China. The university has immense resources, spanning from its Beijing Center to its global alumni network to build a coherent pipeline for studying China; it just lacks the prioritization to implement it.
Until recently, Yale employed a professor who could’ve changed these dynamics. Professor Zhang Feng has a deeply grounded mainland Chinese perspective on international relations that fills a critical gap. Other faculty offer exceptional expertise, but their perspectives are often shaped by diaspora or external vantage points. By contrast, Zhang, trained within China’s academic and policy ecosystem, brings a mainland perspective and interrogates Chinese political jargon from within.
His contribution to Yale’s China education was not just perspective, but methodology. Where much of Yale’s curriculum emphasizes empirical analysis, Zhang focused on the intellectual foundations of Chinese political reasoning. His concept of “Graded Relationalism” (差序格局) helped students understand how hierarchy, proximity, and relational ethics shape decision-making. Zhang didn’t use these terms to justify Chinese policy; he could show students how Chinese policymakers understand and defend their actions.
His interpretive approach extends to political language. Rather than treating terms like All Under Heaven (天下无外), ‘Vertical’ and ‘Horizontal’ Alliances (合纵连横), Active Defense (积极防御) or Common Future for Mankind (人类命运共同体) as slogans, Zhang situates them within their historical and philosophical contexts, revealing the implicit assumptions and contradictions embedded in contemporary Chinese discourse. Just as importantly, he connected students to the intellectual communities shaping these ideas. Through ties with institutions like Tsinghua and Peking Universities and ongoing dialogue with China’s leading scholars and government advisors, he brought structured exchange into the classroom through three virtual dialogue sessions with professors and students at a top Chinese university, Tsinghua. He did much more than simply add another voice; he addressed a structural deficiency in Yale’s scholarship.
Despite his popularity with students, Yale, due to budget constraints and limited space for undergraduate Chinese geopolitics courses, did not extend his contract even though he was eager to stay. “I’ve taught some of the best students of my career at Yale,” Zhang told me. “I would love to return and contribute to Yale’s teaching and research on China’s role in the world.”
If Yale is unable to engage scholars deeply embedded in Chinese political thought the University risks falling behind in a field it once helped define. The result is predictable: talent will leave. Yale’s loss of Dan Wang to Stanford and Jessica Chen-Weiss to SAIS are cases in point. Without a permanent position at Yale, Zhang recently accepted an appointment at the National University of Singapore. Following that he will be highly sought after by leading US universities if Yale does not act deliberately.
This is not just a hiring issue but is an intellectual strategy problem. Yale students must be trained to interpret China from within, and to grasp the implicit assumptions, histories, and concepts that shape Chinese decision-making. As Kaiser Kuo argues, effective engagement requires “strategic empathy,” understanding how the other side thinks, not just what it does.
Yale has the resources to close this gap but the issue is alignment. Expanding undergraduate access through the Paul Tsai China Center and integrating initiatives like the Yale Dialogue on U.S.–China Relations would help. But most importantly, Yale needs faculty like Zhang Feng who can teach China through the prism of China’s own intellectual frameworks. Without that commitment, Yale risks ceding leadership at precisely the moment it matters most.