On March 12, Ambassador Katerine Tai ’92 spoke at the annual Zeidman Lecture. The event, titled Clash of Titans: China and the United States, informed members of the Sidwell community on U.S.-China trade over the past 25 years.
The Zeidman Lecture is an integral part of Sidwell Friends’s China Studies Program. While John Fisher Zeidman ’79 was studying at Beijing Normal University in 1981, he contracted viral encephalitis and died. After his death in 1982, his family established the John Fisher Zeidman China Studies Fund to honor his love of China. The Sidwell’s China Studies Program materialized shortly after in 1983, with Historian John King Fairbank acting as the Zeidman Lecturer.
Though the China Studies Program is now a part of Sidwell Friends, it had a shaky start, Bryan Garman said. Lucia Pierce, the first chair of the Zeidman Program and member of the Advisory Board that selects a speaker each year, helped to establish the program in its early days.
She recalled that in the beginning stages of its creation, “there was nothing like this before, so there was concern for the funding and for the board and faculty and students to accept it. There was weariness and there was wondering if it would work.”
Despite these limitations, Pierce feels that the Zeidman Program has been successful. Each year, the Zeidman Program Committee invites an expert on China to speak at Sidwell Friends about China’s impact on current events.
Tai attended Yale University, where she received a bachelor of arts in History. She taught English at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangdong, China, from 1996-1998, during the changeover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese Control. She then returned to the U.S. to attend Harvard Law School.
She started serving in the trade representative’s Office of General Council in 2007, kickstarting her federal career. Four years later, Tai was nominated as the Chief Trade Counsel for China. In 2014, Tai became Trade Counsel for the House Means and Ways Committee, then became Chief Trade Counsel in 2017.
In December 2020, then President-Elect Joe Biden nominated Tai as the 19th United States Trade Representative; on March 17, 2021, the Senate confirmed Tai’s nomination in a rare unanimous 98-0 vote. As Trade Representative, Tai worked to forge a relationship between the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The Advisory Committee was unsure who to invite but decided on Tai after the presidential election, as she would have time to “think about it,” said Pierce. According to Pierce, Tai is not only an alumna with a strong background in China studies but is also “very dedicated to public service and the country.”
Pierce added that “it was wonderful to have an alumna” come speak — an alumna of both Sidwell Friends and the Zeidman Program. In fact, Tai is the first alumna of the Zeidman Program to return as a Zeidman Speaker.
Tai said that the Zeidman Program taught her to “humaniz[e] China,” not only its people and society but also its government and politics, and reflected on how novel it was for a school to have a Chinese language program at that time
Tai noted that China is a global manufacturing and export powerhouse, whose “success [is] at [the] direct expense of manufacturers in other countries.” This impact, referred to as the China Shock, can be strongly felt in the Midwest, where blue-collared workers lose their manufacturing jobs, thus being forced to find new, lower-paying ones.
However, “[n]one of this is sustainable,” affirmed Tai. She foreshadowed that a “[c]lash of two titans” — the United States and China — will happen as a consequence of this unsustainability.
Tai remarked that her motivation for her speech was to “really [connect] with the Sidwell Friends community and the Zeidman Program,” which have impacted her profoundly. As a result, her speech, she noted, had an “unusual set of remarks, with stories [she] want[ed] to share that this community would understand.”
This resonated with listeners. Lucy Webb, an audience member, described the speech as “amazing.” She added that it was “[d]one with humor and humanity.”
Pierce noted that the speech was “terrific” because it was “very thoughtful and measured.”
It was also a full circle moment for Tai to speak in RLS. She explained in her speech that she graduated from Sidwell in the Robert L. Smith Meeting room and had spent countless meetings for worship there.
Despite all the changes since Tai graduated from Sidwell Friends, she feels that the Quaker Spices and the concept of the light of God in everyone have always grounded her.
