This year’s Harvard College China Forum (HCCF) included the world’s most respected thinkers on everything China, and the Sampan caught up with two experts, Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center, and Andy Zeng, the co-president of HCCF.

Founded in 1997 as Harvard China Review,  the forum is renowned as North America’s premier student-run conference focused on discussing the challenges, trends, and issues concerning China. Held annually at Harvard College in April, this year’s forum took place on April 12 to 14. The theme was “嘤其鸣矣，求其友声”, translated to “Seeking Resonance, Echoing Friendship.” The phrase is derived from诗经·小雅·伐木”, a section in The Book of Songs; the English theme of this year’s Forum was “Telling the U.S.-China Story”.

Previous star speakers have included Chinese business magnate Jack Ma, co-Founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, as well as American billionaire and notable “shark” from the famous reality television series Shark Tank, Mark Cuban. This year, Daly and Zeng were among 130 other panelists and experts, including former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, economics professor Jason Furman, former Microsoft Vice President David S. Chen, and Dennis Wilder, the former Director for China at the White House National Security Council.

During the conference, Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on United States-China Relations since 2005, spoke about how his interest in Asian studies led him to a critical realization when his teacher advised him to learn Chinese to truly understand Asia. Orlins also expressed the tense and “rocky” state of the current relationship between the United States and China, and concerns about its potential impact on small businesses and low-income families in America.

Hongyi Zhou, founder and chairman of 360 Security Technology Company called himself “Uncle in red.” He gave an entertaining speech, joking that his visit to Harvard was primarily to gain fans and draw attention to his TikTok page. He discussed artificial intelligence passionately, encouraging everyone to embrace the new technology rather than resist it.  AI was one of the hot topics throughout the forum.

Robert Daly spoke to Sampan about the nature of the US-China relationship.

SAMPAN: What was the biggest challenge that the U.S.-China relationship faced 5-10 years ago, and how does it compare to now? 

Daly: Let’s take us right before the trade war. I think that since then, there has been a much broader understanding in the U.S. and China. This is a contentious relationship for the long term. It is a situation that people, although the government wouldn’t use this word, feel like we’re already involved in a new kind of cold war between the two countries.

SAMPAN:  What action should we take in response to the challenge?

Daly: My definition of the challenge is a new cold war. Keep it cold; it’s not about going to war. I believe that higher educational exchanges can play a part in that. I think that if more Chinese people gain a deeper understanding of the United States, and more Americans gain a deeper understanding of China, we would be better off. Unfortunately, the numbers are going down, not up.

Sampan also sat down with Andy Zeng ’24, the co-president of HCCF prior to the conference to gather his insights.

SAMPAN: This year, you’ve gathered an incredible list of speakers for the event. Could you share more about the main goals and themes guiding your selection process? Also, I’m curious about the title of this year’s forum, “ Seeking Resonance, Echoing Friendship”  in Chinese. What inspired you to choose this specific title?

Zeng: Of our selection process, we first of all, we have a very long legacy. This is our 27th year as an organization. First, we started as a Harvard China Review. It was a very sort of student led, but a very academic professional journal. We actually had a preface written by the Nobel Prize economist Robert Merton for, I think, either the fifth or sixth issue.

But then we decided to spin off into a conference to raise money for the Review. But then we thought maybe our conference was better suited to engage with the audience and engage more relevantly with the problems at hand, instead of an academic journal, which in virtue of it being very academic and very scholarly, has a higher barrier to access.

So we’ve had a lot of partners over the years and with our outreach, we start with the sort of the guests who have come before and who really enjoyed speaking at the forum and making connections here and talking to both the professors at Harvard, the administrators  and also the students if they want to return, the executive board is very close. And we think about  what we should do as in, what’s the purpose of creating a forum….  And it’s not just a networking opportunity. We just don’t want people from China and from the U.S. to gather in Cambridge just so they can connect on LinkedIn and get job opportunities. We think clearly about things we can and cannot do as an educational institution.

I mean, Harvard is, you know, a big name, but, as a student organization, there’s a lot we can’t do. We can’t really engage with policy making that much, and we can’t really engage with more down to earth, down to the ground implementations. And what we can do, however, is sort of leverage the soft power interplay between the two countries and try to build off of that bilateral relation. So we think  in the past few years we’ve been very focused on economics. How can we reach out and touch upon the more soft cultural exchanges between us and China? And that’s why we have a Pulitzer Prize winning composer coming. We like artists. We have all production people, not just just not just entrepreneurs. That’s one thing we’re doing, but also recognizing how the entrepreneurial sphere and how things work in China is changing at a very rapid pace and sort of finding people that can speak to that experience.

SAMPAN: Why did you choose the theme “Seeking Resonance Echoing Friendship” for the creative competition? It appears it is the first year you put together this creative competition, why did you choose to do this this year?

Zeng: We want that as part of the soft power initiative. We think the most important thing we have as a student organization is leveraging the power of students, both current and former. So we’ve also connected with alums and future graduates. So we think high school students who are interested in the US and China should be able to have their voice heard in some capacity. And I think the best way they can leverage that is not through doing policy, because they’re so young. But through doing creative work. You know, I think it’s a novel approach and we’re trying a lot of things. And we’re very happy with the submissions we received thus far.