James Gao Remembered

Colleague James Gao Remembered

Our colleague James Gao is remembered by a former colleague, Anthony Santoro, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus and former President of Christopher Newport University. Newport News, VA.

Many of us who were at CNC-CNU during the years 1992-1998 will recall with fondness James Zheng Gao, a historian of the Chinese Revolution, who was on our History Department faculty. This month's issue of the American Historical Association Perspectives on History, Volume 60:1 (January 2022) reports that Professor Gao died of cancer at age 73 on October 26, 2021. Zheng was a productive scholar who contributed much to our school and to the wider community of scholarship on Chinese studies.  He went with me to a formal dinner at the Chinese Embassy in Washington as part of a planned trip to the Peoples Republic of China consisting of an eight-president consulting group of which I was a member put together by The Carnegie Foundation at the request of the Chinese Ministry of Education.  Professor Gao translated into Chinese a recruitment brochure for our university that I used to sign arrangements for student exchanges with several Chinese universities and paved the way for one of our colleagues to do a one-year exchange with one of those Chinese universities. He was tall in bearing and elegant in his demeanor.

January 17, 2022