About CCUSC
Founded in 1998 by the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS), the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation (CCUSC) is the only institution in the Rocky Mountain region that has devoted to building a bridge in the search for mutual understanding, the development of prudent policies, and possible resolutions of disputes among the people of the United States and Greater China.
The creation of the CCUSC stems from the realization that the necessity for such an institution in the Rocky Mountain region had long been growing. With its increasing economic importance, along with its disproportionately powerful political standing in the affairs of the nation due to its tendency to swing between the major political parties, the region was experiencing an economic and cultural transformation.
The region's commerce and industry has become increasingly transnational, and like transnationally-oriented enterprises in other parts of the country, its companies and investors are becoming increasingly involved in China. Moreover, the Denver metro area has a cohesive and prosperous Chinese community that includes persons who maintain important business ties to the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In other words, in Denver alone there is a large potential base of support for an institution that will provide balanced analysis of development in China and in China's relationships with the rest of the world, above all with the U.S., and one that will provide links to China's rapidly growing civil society and to government agencies. Such an institution is needed to inform public discussion and understanding of China and to multiply human contacts between China and people in our region.
The roots of the University of Denver's formation of CCUSC lie in the set of relationships developed over the past decade between the University of Denver and a number of important institutions in Beijing, in particular Peking University and Renmin (People's) University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR - the premier foreign policy think tank reporting through the Ministry of State Security to the State Council). In founding CCUSC, the University of Denver was drawing together the threads of these various relationships into a single tapestry.
The University of Denver brings many strong assets to the success of a center for relations between China and the U.S. In addition to the already existing high level support and leadership for CCUSC described above, there are two major facets to the University of Denver's comparative advantage. One is GSIS itself. As the only professional school of international affairs between the Mississippi river and California, it provides the University of Denver with a very able core of faculty whose diverse interests and competencies - supplemented by faculty from the law and business schools and departments of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences - permit broad intellectual engagement with Chinese scholars and officials on topics as varied as the limits of national sovereignty, American politics and Sino-America relations, the Asian debt crisis, inter-modal transportation policy and U.S. grand strategy. The other is the trust and confidence, the sense of mutually respectful partnership, that have grown up between the University of Denver and important actors in China, including actors that have not enjoyed a wide range of close contacts with U.S. educational institutions.
Our close ties with research institutions embedded in the Chinese state--that is CIIS and CICIR--and looser but rapidly evolving connections with the Shanghai Institute of International Studies (SIIS) and the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) of the National Defense University--are still more unusual. The University of Denver has consciously sought and has obtained the role of interlocutor with these and other influential institutions. Personal and institutional links have formed as the result of annual reciprocal visits and the scholars and professors we have received at GSIS. Inter-institutional trust rests in part on accumulated inter-personal bonds. The relationship of trust and confidence that has grown up between GSIS and these organizations enables us to draw our Chinese colleagues into unusually frank and probing discussions of highly sensitive issues. Our goal, of course, is to encourage discussion beyond traditional normative and rhetorical boxes, in other words to encourage real intellectual engagement rather than the exchange of ipse dixits.