U. appoints Liu as director of Princeton Center in Beijing

Jin Liu was named the director of the new Princeton Center in Beijing and officially began her job working at the first administrative center abroad set up by the University in mid-July.

The center was approved by the trustees of the University in April last year and is under the administrative oversight of Diana Davies, the University’s vice provost for international initiatives.

Located on the campus of Tsinghua University, a top research university in China, the center offers assistance to faculty on their collaborations with different Chinese partner universities and helps students with logistical aspects of research and internships. The center will also connect local alumni to University scholars visiting the area.

Davies explained that the University needed to open an administrative center in China because it had difficulty finding a Chinese universitywith which to have a strategic partnership. She added that many Chinese universities specialize in one particular area, noting as an example that Tsinghua University is top-notch in engineering but perhaps not as strong in other areas.

Strategic partnership differs from regular partnership in that strategic partnership requires institutional oversight of a shared governance board. The board, consisting of representatives from the University and its partner university, works to ensure a growing relationship between the two institutions.

The University currently has strategic partnerships with the University of Tokyo in Japan, Humboldt University in Germany and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

“We couldn’t pick a strategic partner in China, so we knew we had to try a different approach because it’s critical that we have a presence in China because of its incredible importance,” Davies explained. “Even though we are based on the Tsinghua campus, we are going to continue to have collaborations and programs with all these other universities as well.”

Davies said she is very happy with the new director, noting that Liu has had more than 12 years of experience working in the United States and that she most recently served as the assistant director of the Columbia University Global Center in East Asia, which is also located in Beijing.

“I have pretty much gone through all of the processes like registration, legal compliance, the operations, how to run an office center for top universities and how to do alumni outreach and how to deal with relationships with the local academic community and those top scholars in the region. So I know what globalization means for those universities,” Liu said. “That’s why [the University] took me, I think.”

Chung Law, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been collaborating with Tsinghua University for years and was instrumental in the establishment of the center on Tsinghua campus. Law, who met Liu this summer in Beijing, said he is very pleased with her.

“Of course she can speak both languages very well, which I think is important, and she is very articulate,” Law said.

Liu, a Shanghai local, graduated from Shanghai Maritime University with a bachelor’s degree in business English and then later went on to pursue two master’s degrees at New York University and Kansas State University. Liu was offered the job last November and signed a three-year renewable contract with the University.

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The center occupies one floor and consists of three rooms. The renovation of the 90-square-meter space will begin by the end of September and Liu, who is currently the only person there, said she expects the center to be fully renovated by the end of October.

Davies explained that the intention was to start small and then they'll decide later on whether they need to scale up their size.

“Princeton is always very deliberate in doing things," Law said. "We don’t rush into things. We wait and see and learn the lesson from others. And when we are ready to go, we go in full force and do it right.”