China at the Dawn of Reform: The Oberlin Connection

Tom Gold ('70) was a member of the first group of American government-sponsored exchange students to go to China, spending a year at Fudan University in Shanghai, starting in February 1979, just as China began its tentative opening to the outside world. Tom had been a Shansi representative at Tunghai University in Taiwan (1970-1972) and was a PhD student in the Sociology Department at Harvard University when he left for China. He began his study of Chinese at Oberlin on a dare, and for several years had a side gig as an interpreter for Chinese delegations traveling in the U.S. From 1981-2018, he taught in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University from 2000-2016. He has published on a wide range of topics dealing with social change in China and Taiwan.