Members of the Advisory Council included conductor Leonard Bernstein, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, playwright Arthur Miller, architect I.M.

Other prominent figures who made professional visits to China under the center's auspices, were Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Ming Cho Lee, Alwin Nikolais and many others in all the fields of the visual, literary and performing arts.

Participants as diverse as architects, museum designers, shamanists and amphibian experts took part in projects to support the endangered lifestyle and landscape of Yunnan's ethnic minority groups.

The Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange was established at Columbia University in 1978 as a cultural response to the political rapprochement of the U.S. and the People's Republic of China following a hiatus of thirty years.

Shortly after President Nixon made his historic trip to Beijing in 1972, Chou visited China for the first time since his departure twenty-six years earlier.

China was still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and communication was restricted, but he managed to meet with old classmates from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and plant the seeds.

Officials put him in touch with Wang Bingnan, director of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a "people-to-people" agency.

Three months later, on January 1, 1979, the United States and the People's Republic of China normalized diplomatic relations in an agreement signed by President Jimmy Carter.

In 1990, the Center expanded its scope to include programs of cultural and environmental conservation in support of ethnic minorities in rural Yunnan Province.

[2] Born in Yantai, China in 1923, Chou Wen-chung came to the United States in 1946 and studied composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston with Nicholas Slonimsky.

Written for Western instruments, but inspired by Chinese poetry, "Landscapes" was premiered in 1953 by the San Francisco Symphony orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski, launching the young immigrant onto a promising career.

The membership revolved throughout the years and included the following illustrious members: The center's programs supported specialists in all the visual, literary and performing arts.

During China's thirty years of isolation from the west, and most intensively during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), both Western art forms and traditional Chinese genres were restricted or banned.

Visitors typically offered lectures and master classes, held discussions with teachers and students, and visited local cultural institutions.

Visitors from China were of an equally high status, although well known in China their names were new to most Americans: playwright Cao Yu, actor Ying Ruocheng, writer Ding Ling, qin master Wu Wenguang, costume designer Li Keyu, composers Chen Gang and Mao Yuan, and conductor Chen Xieyang were among the first batch for whom the Center created programs.

The new program of cultural conservation focused on the indigenous people of China's southwestern Yunnan Province, which is home to twenty-five ethnic minority groups.

American specialists in the fields of museum administration, arts education, archival management, anthropology, archaeology and ethnography visited Yunnan to learn about the cultural realities in China and to share information on existing best practices in the United States.

The initial experience focused on the need to devote more attention to the component of nature as intrinsic in the artistic and cultural expression of indigenous people.