The scale, complexity and rapidity of change within China and in its external relationships means that scholarship focussed on China and the Chinese increasingly requires a more innovative, international and interdisciplinary approach. No single institution, no matter how large or keen its focus on Asia, can fully embrace the range of expertise and perspectives necessary to move forward with the depth of coherent understanding that would most benefit the analysis of China and the Chinese – to better explore and explain current and potential future economic, policy and structural developments.

The Contemporary China Center is a collaborative framework to support a global community of faculty and graduate students working together across centers of excellence around the world. It is based on, but not exclusive to, the Worldwide Universities Network and has as its partners in China the Universities of Nanjing, Zhejiang and Sichuan.

The Center addresses China as a geographical unit of research and explores geographical, political, economic, environmental, social and cultural perspectives, involving Chinese studies, politics, economics, development studies, environmental studies, geography, physical sciences, genomics, law, business studies, linguistics, cultural studies, media and communication studies, social anthropology and other disciplines that take China and the Chinese as their object of study. Its broad scope allows it to support both area and disciplinary studies of China, including research agendas in environment and sustainable development, technological and economic development, and science and technology policy. It also facilitates collaboration amongst scientists who do not take China as the object of their research but who are engaged in research through which developments in China will impact on the world more widely, e.g. stem cells, nanotechnology, and advanced engineering.

As such, the center bring together expertise in cross-institutional, cross-national and cross-disciplinary constellations to achieve innovation and critical mass in cutting-edge research on China and the Chinese. The center supports research training, networking and coordination relevant to the study of China. The center also helps researchers to reach out to research users across geographic and disciplinary borders.

The Center has a number of research themes and activities that have as their foundation long standing relationships and activities. This provides a substantive base on which new initiatives can be built to provide a wide-ranging scope of activity involving leading scholars form many leading centres of study. Founding activities include the substantive and long-standing links that UW, Seattle have with Sichuan University in West China - this supports an unusually broad geographic focus to allow better exploration of some of the issues and opportunities facing China

last revised October 7, 2009