A family business on US-China relations

Eye-opening

After enjoying a fruitful year in Beijing, Hart found an internship at the Scowcroft Group in Washington in 2003. It was her first real experience in Washington.

Once a week, Hart was excited to see General Brent Scowcroft, who was twice the US National Security Advisor under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, in a meeting and asked him various foreign policy questions.

That year, the US invaded Iraq, and Scowcroft was a critic of US foreign policy. Hart says she was deeply impressed by Scowcroft's conviction in the best interest of the nation even when it's against the White House.

"To me, that was just amazing. There were people like this in Washington," she says.

"That was an eye-opening experience to me."

Mentor guidance

Hart started to pursue a PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego, but she said she had made up her mind to come back to Washington to do policy work after that wonderful experience at the Scowcroft Group.

Hart was lucky. Susan Shirk, her adviser and mentor at UC San Diego, is an expert on Chinese politics and served as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs during the Clinton administration.

Hart describes Shirk as a "very hands-on mentor who pays a lot of attention to her PhD students, really guides them and pushes them very hard too to make sure they do good work."

"That was really wonderful," she says.

While studying Chinese politics and international relations, Hart found an opportunity, through the introduction of General Scowcroft, to work with the China team at the San Diego-headquartered Qualcomm, a US semiconductor company that was trying to penetrate the Chinese wireless telecommunications market. While her work was mostly in San Diego, she also spent a summer in Qualcomm's Beijing office.

Hart felt lucky again. On the one hand, she was pursuing her PhD program to study China-US relations in an academic way. On the other hand, she was able to work with a global company to work on their China market strategy and to see first-hand how these companies do business in China, what the challenges they face and then come up with good market strategies.