CANCELED: China Research Center Memoir Series – Crossing Borders: A Memoir by John Garver

February 16, 2023, 9:30 am - 10:45 am

Habersham Building, Room G-17

This is the first book in the China Research Center’s newly launched memoir series. The Center helps to publish China-related memoirs by scholars around the world.

John W. Garver, professor emeritus in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, discusses his memoir Crossing Borders: The Making of an American Asian Specialist, a thought-provoking and personal account of his life that lead to him becoming an expert on China’s foreign relations. Garver’s memoir traces his evolution from a 1960s Student for a Democratic Society radical committed to socialist revolution to an American patriot trying to understand and explain China’s quest for wealth and power. Several years of encounters with variants of dictatorship in the USSR and Eastern Europe, China including both Taiwan and Mainland China, and Burma, shaped his rethinking of United States global containment. Over a career of 30 years at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Garver evolved from a revolutionary activist surveilled by the FBI to a leading academic authority on China’s foreign relations, including Sino-Soviet/Russian, Sino-Indian, and Sino-Iranian relations.

Garver’s book brings to light the shifting geopolitics throughout recent history that have shaped China’s position within the global political landscape through the lens of one who has traveled and studied in much of Asia to gain firsthand knowledge.