Duke Law in China: Establishing an Exchange
By Frances Presma
Establishing an Exchange...
The student pro-democracy protests in Beijing in May 1989–and the
central government's violent suppression of them–changed the way Duke Law's China program was administered, says Horowitz.
"From the spring of 1989 on, the scrutiny of Chinese students admitted to study in the U.S. became very severe, and obtaining a visa at the U.S. consulate meant overcoming a major hurdle." Only one Chinese student joined the LLM class of 1990, although two more transferred into the JD program from the LLM program at Columbia Law School.
While the faculty, headed by then-Dean Pamela Gann '75, still strongly supported the mission of the Law School to help develop the legal system and profession in China, it decided, to cut back the numbers of Chinese students admitted to and supported by the School. Through the 1990s, scholarships were extended to about three JD students and one LLM student annually. In the early 1990s, Gann also ended the policy of having law firms that employed Chinese students in summers make payments directly to the School; they instead paid the students directly, and Gann simply asked those students to make suitable contributions, at their own discretion, once they graduated and were in the work force. Most have done exactly that with some, like Li and Xianping Wang, who has served as a member of the board of directors of the Duke Law Alumni Association, also assuming leadership roles within the alumni community.
As China has become more prosperous, so have the Chinese applicants to the Law School, Horowitz observes. Starting in the late 1990s, an increasing number of applicants had sound legal training and solid work experience, and most could pay their own tuition; a member of the Board of Visitors helps support some worthy students who need assistance.
It had always been the hope of the Law School that most of its Chinese students would return home to China after graduation or a few years of work at an American firm, but Tiananmen Square had a chilling effect for some; they temporarily lost confidence in China's commitment to openness and reform. While it was somewhat difficult for them to find jobs with American firms due to the frosty state of U.S.-China relations at that time, the U.S. government granted extensions of all student visas, allowing the Chinese graduates to stay.
Wang, known as Ping to his friends and clients, arrived at Duke with two Chinese law degrees and the clear intention of returning to his Beijing law firm, the first private firm in China.
My thought was that the country needed lawyers who understood both the Chinese and the U.S. legal systems, and were fluent in English," says Wang. "Everything suddenly changed.
Following his graduation, Wang joined the Washington, D.C. firm of Galland, Kharach, Mores & Garfinkle, and immersed himself in its specialty, aviation law, becoming a partner in 1994. Far from disconnecting from his homeland, though, Wang saw it "as an aviation market to be explored." He has traveled to China almost monthly since his graduation, establishing communications with airlines, airports, manufacturers, regulatory agencies, local governments, and diplomats, first on behalf of his law firm, and then as a principal of the strategic consulting firm to the aviation, energy, and water resources sector that he and other firm partners established. Garfinkle & Wang Associates, which does business as GCW Consulting, represents a large number of U.S. aviation companies operating in China, and now has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, and has plans for a fourth. Today Wang's confidence is strong.
The aviation industry is, in many ways, a barometer of China's openness and growth, as well as a barometer of the China-U.S. relationship," says Wang who was appointed as one of 15 special advisers to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) in March, the only one outside of the PRC. "China is of the same geographic size as the U.S., but with five times its population. It has fewer than 140 commercial airports, whereas the U.S. has 5,500. Last year in China, each citizen traveled by airplane 0.23 times; in the U.S., each person traveled four times. And in the last 20 years, China has had double-digit GDP growth annually, and the aviation growth has been double that. China plans to double its airports in a decade and purchases more than half of its fleets from the U.S. The potential there is clear."