Speaker: R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. Ambassador to China, 2021-2025

As U.S. ambassador in Beijing, Nick Burns led public servants from dozens of U.S. government agencies in overseeing one of America’s most important and challenging bilateral relationships. He travelled widely in China and has called for a major increase in student exchanges and academic links between the two countries.  

In a quarter-century of service in the U.S. State Department, Burns rose to become the highest-ranking career diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, serving as under secretary of state for political affairs from 2005 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, when he helped negotiate the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement and manage U.S.-Iran relations. Previously he served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Burns was the State Department’s chief spokesperson under President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1997. Before that he spent five years at the White House on the National Security Council as director for Soviet affairs for President George H.W. Bush and senior director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Affairs for President Clinton.

In April 2025, Burns will rejoin the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught for 13 years as the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations before assuming his role as Ambassador to China. At the Kennedy School, he founded and led the Future of Diplomacy Project in the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was faculty chair of the School’s programs on the Middle East and South Asia. 

In addition to resuming his professorship at HKS, Burns will also join the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies as a faculty affiliate. 

About the Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture:

Charles Neuhauser was a senior intelligence analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency, from 1958 until October 1981. His career with the CIA spanned the period from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. From 1966 to 1967, just as the Cultural Revolution was going through its most violent phase, Charles Neuhauser spent a year at The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, where he worked on the causes of the Cultural Revolution.

This annual lecture series was established in 1988 thanks to the generosity of Charles Neuhauser’s brother, Paul Neuhauser. Its purpose is to maintain bridges between the worlds of government, policy, and the intelligence community and the university world.