His message centered on the key to answering that question and is at the heart of the mission of the Zeidman lecture: knowledge. The more average citizens of each country know about each other, the better off the relationship between the two countries will be.
That knowledge, however, has to be accurate.
In pre-Obama, pre-iPhone 2007, a study of Chinese high school students asked them to think of America and name the first five words that came to mind. Bill Gates, Microsoft, the NBA, Hollywood, democracy, presidential elections, 9/11, Bin Laden, McDonald’s, oil, “police officer to the world,” and Harvard and Yale made the list.
“That’s a kaleidoscopic image of the US to us,” says Evan, adding that this is the same kind of partial-picture portrait that we have of China.
He noted that, “For a long time, those things were so out of reach for most people. That’s changing incredibly fast.” Chinese citizens, mainly the middle class, are traveling to the West more than ever now. And, as he personally saw while living there, they are extraordinarily hungry for information about the rest of the world—information that they did not have access to, and still need more of.