Thank you very much.

Let me begin by thanking the organizers, the Chinese Peoples Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Beida for organizing this memorial. These are two especially appropriate sponsors of an event in memorizing Vogel, and I want to pick up on words that are actually in the names of these organizing bodies for my remarks today: friendship and global understanding. Mark Elliott has spoken already about Ezra’s role as a builder at Harvard. I thought I would develop those thoughts a little bit from my own personal perspective.

In the early 1970s, among the many projects that Ezra was responsible for building and cultivating and nurturing in the early 1970s, was a new undergraduate program, the concentration, or major, in East Asian Studies. This was a program that allowed undergraduates interested in contemporary societies in East Asia to focus on an interdisciplinary study, including language study, of those respective countries. Ezra served as the head of the concentration for almost 20 years. It's the sort of job that faculty typically hold for 2 or 3 years and then pass on to someone else. And over the course of those 20 years, he met with every single incoming undergraduate student to talk to them, to learn about their interests, to make them feel welcome. As I said, he did this for 20 years, and I know this because in 2008, when I took over the job, he advised me to continue doing what he had done. (This was good advice, and I followed it). Faculty at Harvard are pretty busy by and large, and so this was unusual advice to give: to take a couple of days out of every year just to talk to undergraduate students. This was actually quite consistent with Ezra’s larger philosophy of life. Ezra found people interesting. I think this resonates with something that Steven Vogel said as well. And because his interest was genuine, he made friends everywhere. This, I think, helps to explain the outpouring of affection and grief and love at his passing a month ago from all over the world.

Another position that I also inherited from Ezra, was the directorship of the Fairbank Center, a position that's now being ably filled by Winnie Yip, who we’ll hear from in a moment, while I'm on leave. I did not inherit this position directly, since there were other faculty members in the intervening “generation”; I guess I'm a “grand-descendant” in the sense that Mark Elliott spoke of.

Ezra served as the director of the Fairbank Center twice. I think he was the only person yet to have been Director for two terms. He held that role from 1973 to 1975 and then again from 1995 to 1999. In the first term, he led the Fairbank Center at a critical phase in its development, in which it transcended the person of its founder, John King Fairbank, and became, as Mark Elliott said, the leading center in the United States and perhaps even in the world for interdisciplinary study of China. In the second term of Ezra’s directorship, from 1995 to 1999, he established a number of critical aspects of the center, or reinforced those aspects, that continue to matter a great deal today. The first is the importance of engaging with or bridging, to use Mark’s language, the world of policy and the world of scholarship, both directly through exchange of personnel, and of course Ezra served in government for a number of years, but also indirectly by contributing to political discourse, by contributing to public discourse, by serving as a public intellectual, by seeking to change the world through good scholarship. A second dimension that I want to point to is the developing collaboration, cooperation and exchange with colleagues from China. In the early 90s, many of these exchanges were weakened and at risk for reasons we all know,. Ezra was emphatic about the importance of rebuilding those connections, not just because it made us better scholars, but because it contributed to the larger public good. Mark has already spoken about Ezra’s larger legacy for Harvard. Here, I simply want to amplify that his imprint on the Fairbank Center of Chinese Studies is enormous, and it is an imprint that is marked by friendship, by global understanding and by cooperation.

Participating in a memorial like this gives us opportunity to think deeply about the person and about one's relationship with the person, and I’ve been doing that a lot over the last couple of weeks. As I said previously, one way that we can think of Ezra is as a missionary, not a missionary of a religious faith but a missionary of an ideal, of global understanding and cooperation. And he used his teaching and his writing and his public role in support of that ideal, and to overcome misunderstandings, mistrust and historical enmity.

I have compared him to a missionary, Dean Yuan called him a junzi. To throw in another language, he was also a mensch. He sometimes gave the impression, I think all of us are familiar with this, of being, on the one hand, a gentleman, a junzi, but also of being a simple rustic, atu bao zi. I need to be clear, some people may think I'm being rude, but I'm quite sure that Ezra would be very pleased and even proud to be described in this way. But behind this simple, rustic exterior, he actually had a very noble mission in his life. Several of the speakers have alluded to it. It was a mission that revolved around ideas like friendship, like local cooperation, like understanding, not just in the abstract, but in concrete practice, to address the challenges that exist between nations. We need to fulfill and be true to his legacy by doing our best to carry out that noble mission. I think he would be very touched to know that we are devoting ourselves to these memorials to him, but I know that there if were an email coming from somewhere in my inbox from Ezra, I know what it would say. It would say, “Thank you for these memorials, but please get to work.”

Thank you very much.