Ryan Etzcorn (Chinese Studies and Public Policy ’16) brought his masters’ degrees to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, a Fulbright research fellowship on Chinese NGOs, and the Ford Foundation. Now a senior director at Ankura China Advisors, he works with global businesses and NGOs and sees every day why understanding China matters.
In this edited Q&A transcript, we discussed his studies and research in China's non-profit sector, and how the Michigan training led him to a China-focused career.
Michigan Time
What first drew you to Chinese studies?
Most things start with a good teacher, right? I had a great teacher in high school, in 10th grade world history. I still remember very vividly the first day learning about some of the basics of Chinese history: who Mao Zedong is, how many people live in China, what the Cultural Revolution was, what an emperor means. That teacher taught us a little about how the language has tones and things like that, and it just sounded so interesting to me. As an American who had gone through 10 years of school, I was sick of American history. I didn't care about George Washington's cherry tree anymore.
I was in Southwest Michigan. My high school had 1,000 students across four grades, which is considered big for the U.S. But there was no interest in China. I don't even think there was a person of Chinese heritage in my school. When I went to college, I started studying Mandarin and continued from there. Then I had a period after Michigan State where I was a professional musician for four years and did nothing related to China. But the touring life as a musician became really exhausting.
At the end of those four years, I was in Ann Arbor and went to Hatcher Graduate Library. Thankfully, U.S. universities still allow the public to walk into their libraries. I found a giant book listing graduate programs in the United States, and several of them were related to China. I thought to myself, that seems like a wonderful thing to learn more about and research, and a good direction to orient my career toward.
The whole time I was on tour, even in the back of the tour bus, I was still studying Chinese for fun. And I met a bunch of other musicians in America who were surprisingly interested in China. Some had been to China, or were studying Chinese as a hobby. I don't know if that happens anymore or that much.
Why did you choose the MPP and Chinese studies dual degree?
I would not have gone to the Center for Chinese Studies if it weren't for FLAS, the Foreign Language and Area Studies program. It's a State Department program that provides funding for students. If it didn't [exist], I wouldn't have been able to afford going to U-M.
The Lieberthal-Rogel Center was amazing because I could take courses at U-M's law school, in Chinese constitutional law with a law professor from Tsinghua, or I could go over to the Ross School of Business and study Asian business strategy alongside MBA students.
Then I took one class at the Ford School for Public Policy, because I was interested in how China approaches civil society and whether it even exists in China. The “Nonprofit Management” class gave me theoretical tools and talked about the function of civil society in America. That’s when I decided to pursue a dual degree at Ford.
That's one of the most beautiful things about the University of Michigan - how flexible it is in structuring degrees for students, and how it allows students to package different programs together. [I was able] to put myself into a course that was not about China at all, but making it about China for myself - keeping that comparative lens and thinking across boundaries.
How do you evaluate programs like FLAS - their importance and influence in supporting American students studying critical languages?
I think language learning and learning about China should be a completely bipartisan issue. Right now in Washington, a lot of thinking about China on the Republican right happens through a security lens, and thus you need people who can speak the language and understand China in a more three-dimensional way, to have a smarter strategic approach. And then on the left, the Democrats are also quite security-focused, but there are still opportunities for bridging the two communities, for dialogue or Track II conversations.
A Career in China
What did you do after graduating from U-M?
I moved to Washington in the last year of the Obama administration, then Trump was elected, and everything changed in terms of America's policy toward China. I had an opportunity to work at USTR (United States Trade Representative). When I got there, I found that the majority of people working at USTR had started during the Obama era. They were people who had lived in China, really knew China, respected the Chinese people very much, and had love for the people, food and the culture. And yet they were working at USTR, leading a long-term turn toward a tougher trade policy posture with China.
These were people who spoke beautiful Mandarin and had lived in Beijing for years, and I looked up to them because I had only lived in China for two or three months. I knew I needed to get back to China and spend more time there if I wanted to feel more credible on foreign policy toward China.
So I applied for the Fulbright and then received a fellowship to study civil society comparatively in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Honestly, it was really only during that year there that my Mandarin finally got significantly better and I could have real conversations, because all my friends in Guangzhou were Chinese.
The whole thing was researching NGOs (社会组织) and the new laws on the regulation of foreign NGOs that came out in 2016: how they were affecting civil society, and how civil society in Shenzhen differs from civil society in Guangzhou. I found that they are such different cities in their social makeup. Shenzhen is so much more like America in a way, because it's so new. In Shenzhen, you have community foundations that provide really important functions in bringing the community together or facilitating volunteering. In Guangzhou, it's families. There’s less need for an outside organization to help them connect with each other.
Trade policy was very fascinating too, but for me at that time, it was 100% intellectual. I cared more, in a deeper and more holistic way, about issues like civil society.
Right when I was finishing the Fulbright in Guangzhou, a friend forwarded me a job posting for the Ford Foundation. I had wanted to work for Ford Foundation ever since graduate school. I had written my master's thesis on the Ford Foundation's history in China and civil society. I applied, got the job, and it was just the best thing that had ever happened to me professionally. I worked there for three years.
What was your sense of how NGOs and civil society were operating at that time?
I think Chinese civil society is not only really interesting, but also very important to understand in the global context. In a lot of cases, that motivation was less about political expression than it might be in America. You saw a lot of Chinese young people who look at civil society as a vehicle to deliver more effective public welfare outcomes for ordinary people (老百姓). The most effective practitioners were often those who were really skilled at negotiating between local government officials, state-backed social workers, and communities that were otherwise difficult to govern and manage, especially migrant populations in larger cities.
What you saw was grassroots groups doing things that were somewhat politically risky, like working with migrant communities, labor rights groups, or even LGBTQ groups. Chinese NGOs were remarkably sophisticated at fundraising through multiple channels. In some ways, they acted like a chameleon. They might present as a private enterprise one day, offering fee-for-service programs to generate revenue. Then they turned around and presented as an NGO (社会组织), applying for grants from a local foundation. Then they shifted again to look more like a government-contracted service provider. They stayed in motion, because they had to, if they were going to survive and keep working toward their mission.
Could you introduce your career path in China after the Fulbright?
Around the time I joined [the Ford Foundation], the grant-making had shifted to organizations in the Global South that are trying to grapple with China's growing influence in their regions. I helped with monitoring, evaluation, and learning. I got to see how NGOs like Ford can be really critical in facilitating dialogue, providing a platform for people to talk that isn't government-to-government. It serves an important bridge function between peoples, while maintaining neutrality.
Then I moved to the role I've been in for the past three years, doing strategic advisory for Ankura. This team in Beijing was founded to work with large NGOs and multinational companies, helping them be more strategic about their operations and positioning in China, including their government relations on both sides.
It's more about bridge-building, and really, that's the intended theme of my career so far. Thanks to FLAS, I'm now in this role, going on my seventh year of living in Beijing, and my whole career has been devoted to being an American in Beijing who speaks Mandarin, who can talk about China to Americans and about America to Chinese, and hopefully facilitate more mutual awareness and understanding, which is so important as these two countries continue to deal with each other, including competing with each other.
It's really critical for strategic advisory firms to be on the ground in China, because China is fundamentally different from America in this one aspect that information is almost never exchanged publicly. You can't just read reports or read People's Daily all day to know what's happening in Beijing. The only way to really learn is through personal connections on the ground, over dinner or coffee with someone who knows something. It is a city of rumors and secrets. Washington, D.C. may think it's a city of rumors and secrets, but nothing is like Beijing.
How has your Michigan training helped you navigate your career development? What has remained most valuable?
I can't imagine being here without my Michigan training. First of all, it helped me with the language. That was just foundational. Beyond that, I got to take very wide-ranging courses and read scholars discussing China from a more humanistic perspective. That well-rounded, liberal arts approach helped me orient myself in China and feel relevant in a much larger variety of conversations once I got on the ground here. I always stay humble and try to just listen mostly.
An Observer of the U.S.-China Relations
What do you see as the most important changes in the U.S.-China relations in recent years?
In the 10 years since I graduated from Michigan, things have changed very, very quickly. In the beginning, China wasn't yet seen as America's most obvious number one adversary. The dominant voice in Washington was probably still: we need to keep talking to the Party and everything, to try to manage our relationship with each other.
But in the last 10 years, we've seen a really dramatic shift away from the pro-engagement camp of U.S.-China relations, toward more direct confrontation. Everything is viewed primarily through a security lens. Pro-engagement people are sometimes marginalized in the debate.
China and the United States are going to remain competitors. Our governments are not going to be best friends anytime soon and serious trust may have been irreversibly lost in recent years. But there's also no real need for us to be complete enemies, either. There's so much opportunity to understand how similar the United States and China actually are. Climate change, socioeconomic inequality…these are problems that the people of China and the United States face, in ways that are more similar to each other than either is to most other places on Earth. So they have so much to learn from each other, and we need to keep the communication lines open. That's what I'm trying to do, whether I'm in Beijing or Washington.
