Overseas Chinese T.D. Lee Builds a Bridge

Silicon Valley Tech V.P. Dr. Tong Liu was born in 1961 in the countryside near Yangzhou, the southern part of China. (See post one.) He never expected to go to university--not because he didn't want to or because he wasn't intelligent enough--but, the politics of the country made it seem impossible. (See post two.)

When Liu graduated from Nanjing University, China was still just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Society was still a bit chaotic. Relations with the U.S. had also just begun again. 

At the time, T.D. Lee, a famous Nobel Prize Laureate (and one of the first two Chinese men given such a distinction) was a professor at Columbia University in New York. 

Professor Lee and several people in the Physics community got together and developed a way to identify candidates for study in the  U.S: the CUSPEA (China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application).

“About 40-50 universities joined that program. Through the (Chinese) Educational Minister they gave the exam for all the colleges. It’s not a government-sponsored program, because the government is not spending any money for it.  But the government facilitated it.”

Liu took the exam—given nationwide-- the second year it was offered. Only a hundred students (out of what was already the top 1% of China’s intelligentsia) were chosen to study in the U.S. Liu was one of those. He came to the University of Virginia to get his Ph.D.

(To be continued. Next: Accents Make English Challenge.)