In 1981 he entered the United States Foreign Service via the examination system and served two years as vice consul at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
Sage obtained initial details from a consular contact, whereupon the embassy investigated and lodged a formal protest with the Bulgarian government.
Sage's book Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China presented a seemingly paradoxical thesis: the central, i.e. decisive importance for Chinese antiquity of a peripheral region.
Victor Mair stated, "Sage rightly focuses on Qin as the agent of incorporation in bringing Sichuan securely within the orbit of China writ large.
"[1] Recognition came in the form of an honorific title as Senior Research Fellow of the University of Massachusetts Amherst' Warring States Project, and also with the (unauthorized, abridged) translation into Chinese of Ancient Sichuan and its serialized publication in the Chengdu archaeological journal Si chuan wen wu (四川文物).
The University of Oslo history professor Hans Fredrik Dahl wrote in Dagbladet: "More thorough than anyone before him, Steven Sage has gone through the material around the young Hitler and his literary sources.
[4] Having entered Holocaust-related research, Sage went on to explore the question of Bulgaria's repression of its Jewish minority during World War II.
In a forthcoming book, Sage explains how 80 percent of the country’s Jews survived, though they endured forced labor, loss of civil rights, expropriation of all assets, eviction, and ghettoization.