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Home: What We Do

WHO WAS MRS. LIN
Fondly called "Mulaohu" (Mother Tiger) by her students
Fiercely passionate about demystifying the Chinese language for her students in the US and teaching in innovative ways that promoted cultural insight as well as technical skill, Mrs. Lin prepared a generation of path breakers and thought leaders in China Studies and an array of other fields as China and the US established diplomatic relations in 1979. She achieved this by defying social, cultural, and professional barriers; taking educated, expansive risks; and pursuing audacious aspirations.

WHO WE ARE
Former students, colleagues, friends & other supporters
Our “tiger community” includes former students and colleagues who studied and worked with Mrs. Lin from 1966 – 1986, a seminal time in China-U.S. relations. We represent a diverse array of sectors and academic fields, from business, journalism, and law to such academic fields as anthropology, art history, language teaching, literature, history, and political science. Some of us devoted our career to China Studies or China-US relations. Some of us did not.
Our community is diverse in background and views. The Helen T. Lin Initiative is not aligned with any government, political party, or partisan organization.

WHAT WE DO
Engage the "Tiger Community" and broader world
We offer opportunities for intellectual exchange, networking, retrospective reflection, and forward leaning inquiry related to China, China-US relations, and China Studies in the rigorous, mischievous spirit of Mrs. Lin.
We encourage lively exchange, thoughtful discourse, and meaningful reflection and do not endorse any particular views, positions, or policies voiced by members of the Tiger Community or participants in our talks, forums or other channels of online sharing of ideas and experiences.
Upcoming Tiger Event

China and the World: A Conversation
June 4, 2023 at 12:00:00 AM
his talk will invite robust audience engagement on a topic of interest to all: China’s place in a changing world. The talk will begin with a lively back-and-forth between Steve Marsheid and Terry Cooke on three focal issues pertinent to the topic: (1) China’s exercise of soft power (economic & cultural), hard power (militarization), and sharp power (economic coercion, as cited by last week’s G7 leaders) internationally; (2) China’s intertwined interests in Ukraine and Taiwan; and (3) China’s bid to build an alternative to the U.S./Western-led liberal, rules-based, democratic global order.
This will set the stage for a longer-than-typical audience involvement segment, structured not strictly as Q&A but more so as open discussion on these and other sub-topics. To engage the maximum number of people in productive and enjoyable consideration of the myriad perspectives that can be brought to bear on this broad topic, we encourage all participants to cultivate a Taoist approach – led more be questions than advocacy of fixed positions and favoring brevity over discursiveness. The idea is that we’re all like the blind-folded Indian sages feeling different parts of the elephant. The whole will ultimately best be apprehended by attending to all the individual perspectives.
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