Duke Law in China: Ross Katchman
Senior Counsel and Co-Manager, Worldwide Mergers and Acquisitions:
Hewlett-Packard Corp, Palo Alto, CA.
Katchman describes himself as "heading down the straight and conventional road" in his second year at Duke Law, when Dean Paul Carrington asked if any students would consider spending a year on exchange as "visiting scholars" at People's University Law School (Ren Da) in Beijing. Five Duke Law students did just that in the 1985-86 academic year.
That I went to China after my second year at Duke Law was so improbable that it had to be an accident–or Yuan Fen, roughly translated as the lot or luck by which people are brought together.
It was a great adventure. The Western students couldn't speak Chinese and the Ren Da faculty couldn't teach in English. The official plan was to study Chinese for the first semester and then study some Chinese law during the second semester. But it was more than optimistic to hope that our Chinese language skills would advance to a level that would enable any of us to study under the Ren Da law faculty during the second semester, and we quickly (and correctly) concluded that our most constructive study program would be to focus on developing our language skills and to be out-and-about in Beijing and China as much as possible. We lived in a small dormitory reserved for foreign students, teachers, business people, and even what appeared to be Eastern-bloc espionage operatives. [There were] 60 or so of us from places as diverse as the U.K, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, U.S.S.R., Equatorial Guinea, Mexico, Benin and Durham (England and North Carolina).
It's impossible for me to adequately describe the fun and excitement of being in China at that time as the country was just transitioning from 35 years of Maoist isolation. We traveled extensively, made great friends (some of whom I have been in almost daily contact with for the past 20 years) and experienced the beginning stages of an economic transformation of historic proportions. For five somewhat wayward Duke Law students, it was both a year of "intoxicating expectations" and, because China is an experience that transforms your view of the world, one from which we could never completely recover.