Steven M. Goldstein, longtime Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop, died on Monday, February 10, 2025, at age 84.
Steve taught at Smith College as the Sophia Smith Professor of Government for almost five decades, from 1968 until his retirement in 2016. During his career he was also a visiting faculty member at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Columbia University. In the spring of 2012, he was named Van Beuren Chair Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Naval War College.
For more than two decades, Steve was also a core member of the Fairbank Center’s intellectual community, convening countless dialogues, workshops, and discussions on Taiwan, the United States, and cross-Strait relations. He was deeply committed to the idea that dialogue and mutual understanding are the best ways to prevent war.
With that goal in mind, Steve led Harvard delegations on annual trips to Taiwan and mainland China for many years, meeting with experts on both sides. Steve’s knowledge was so extensive—and his dedication to the truth so stubborn—that he never failed to challenge disingenuous talking points on those trips, no matter where they came from.
In addition to his work on Taiwan, Steve also wrote about the Chinese Communist revolution, Sino-Soviet relations, the emergence of a Chinese Communist view of world affairs, and the reform process in post-Mao China. He authored or edited a dozen monographs, including his final publication, China and Taiwan (2015, Polity), which offers an intricate assessment of the complex relationship between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, and the mediating role that historically often has been taken on by the United States—a perspective that’s even more vital today than it was at the time of the book’s publication a decade ago. Richard C. Bush, Director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies (CNAPS) of the Brookings Institution, called China and Taiwan “the best guidebook through the maze…of the China-Taiwan-U.S. triangle.”
At the Fairbank Center, Steve played a crucial role in mentoring students and fellows, including our Hou Family Fellows in Taiwan Studies. His positive energy, his enthusiasm, and his belief in the power of dialogue to build understanding will live on in our community.
Steve’s funeral service was held at the Temple Reyim on Wednesday, February 12 in Newton, MA. His wife of many decades, Erika Kates, shared fond remembrances of Steve and their life together, including their early courtship at Smith College and humorous anecdotes about Steve’s love for various extracurricular activities, including sailing, squash, and wrestling.
We will all miss him dearly. Below, some of our faculty members share their own memories of Steve and their work with him at Harvard over the years.
Everyone who knew Steve will attest to his good humor, kindness, generosity, and intelligence. I certainly benefited from his comments on my manuscripts. Sometimes I hated his comments, especially when he was right!
One reminiscence is of our return from perhaps our first trip to Taiwan and Beijing. Steve’s wife, Erika, was at Logan airport to greet us (well, actually, to greet Steve) and seeing the bunch (four or five) of us, she was stunned. We were all laughing and smiling and Erica could not believe that we had just spent ten days traveling together and were not at each other’s throats. It was Steve who kept the group together and in good humor. Perhaps it was the chocolate he carried. In any case, he earned his title of “tuanzhang” (團長, delegation leader) on that trip (and many others).
In one of our meetings, one of our Chinese hosts referred to Richard Nixon as the “honorable Nixon.” That crossed Steve’s limit and he just about exploded — “Honorable?!” Steve bellowed. Not sure we ever got back to cross-Strait relations.
Steve was not pretentious, and he was not a fan of people who showed off. This did not stop him from interacting constructively with movers and shakers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Steve led the Fairbank Center’s Taiwan working group on its annual visits to Taipei and then Beijing where it would compare how the two sides understood trends in their relationship. The group would meet with ROC presidents, Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ying-wen, and then head to Beijing to meet with senior officials from the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office, the PLA, and PRC intelligence. Steve would diplomatically but firmly call the interlocutors on both sides of the Strait when he thought they were ignoring some key flaw in how they thought about cross-Strait relations. Sometimes he did so with a mischievous gesture. In 2011, President Ma gave Steve a scarf with “ROC 100” emblazoned on it in honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ROC. He took it to Beijing and in a meeting promptly re-gifted it to a very senior PRC intelligence official as a gesture, perhaps, that the PRC needed some ‘new thinking’ in how to handle cross-Strait relations.
Most of all, I remember Steve’s insistence that we talk about China or Taiwan. His passion was inexhaustible, especially concerning U.S.-China and U.S.-Taiwan relations. Aside from teaching, writing, and “talking China,” he had no patience for academic struggles. “Don’t get involved in College politics,” he told me in 1998, my first year at Smith. He advised me to join the Fairbank Center. I did, in 1999, and it was at the Center that he mentored me. At Smith, I would catch sight of him running to class. “See you at work,” he’d joke.
Sabina also shared a lovely X thread🧵in Steve’s memory.
I first met Steve in 2022 during my Hou Family pre-doctoral fellowship at the Fairbank Center, and from the moment he asked, “What can I do for you to better help you fit in and do your research at Harvard?” I knew I was in the presence of a mentor whose generosity of spirit and depth of insight would leave a lasting mark. Steve’s passion for Taiwan Studies not only enriched the Fairbank Center but also shaped my understanding of Taiwan-China relations, connecting me with invaluable resources that guided my dissertation. His wisdom, kindness, and unwavering dedication will be deeply missed, yet his legacy in Taiwan Studies will forever illuminate the paths of those fortunate enough to have learned from him.
I first got to know Steve Goldstein in 2017, after he had retired from a nearly 50-year career as a chaired professor of government at Smith College. I had been hired to fill the position that Steve vacated at Smith, and he left big shoes to fill (years later, I am still regularly introduced as “the new Steve Goldstein”). I imagine that observing the changing of the guard might be difficult for some, but Steve was unfailingly welcoming and generous to me. His funny, opinionated introduction to Smith—who to meet, who to avoid, key pieces of departmental and institutional history—helped to prepare me for my new position. I was especially struck by his affection for the students, and his enthusiasm for teaching—particularly, and somewhat to my surprise, the introductory political theory course required of all government majors.
I got to know Steve better through the Fairbank Center’s Taiwan Studies Workshop, where he could be counted on to lead off meetings with tough questions rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of cross-Strait relations, and to fill the participants’ inboxes with enthusiastically highlighted and annotated copies of recent speeches and news articles. Even late in his life, Steve approached the Workshop’s trips to China and Taiwan with curiosity and enthusiasm; he soldiered through long days of meetings and then carved out time to go shopping for new gadgets. Steve had little patience for ceremony and wasted time—and sometimes did not hesitate to express his frustration! On those trips, though, we also got to see Steve’s best qualities on display—he was a warm, generous colleague, always eager to contribute and to learn. Our community will not be the same without him.
Steve and I spent much time together in Taipei, Xiamen, Shanghai, and Beijing. He could always be counted on to challenge our hosts’ political spin on past policies and commitments with his deep knowledge of the history, the details, and the subtleties of the many U.S.-China and mainland-Taiwan negotiations and agreements. Our hosts were not always happy with Steve’s corrections of their respective and self-serving accounts, but Steve possessed unsurpassed knowledge of cross-Strait diplomacy and I do not recall that he was ever wrong on the history. On the contrary, I recall that he always got the better of the argument. Steve was an important and valued member of our many visits to China and Taiwan and all of the participants, including the American’s, learned a great deal from his contributions. Steve’s perspective and his contributions to our discussions reflected his persistent expectation that governments develop policies that manage differences and promote cooperation, rather than pursue contentious policies that serve the personal domestic political interests of policy makers. We all benefitted from his wisdom.
I will also always be grateful to Steve for his recognition of my insatiable appetite for Peking duck. He bestowed on me the title of “two duck.” I continue to use this title with both pride and fond memories of our time together.
I got to know Steve best during several Taiwan Studies Workshop trips to Asia. One of these was immediately after I became Director of the Fairbank Center. For protocol reasons, I was therefore the “Head of Delegation” (團長, tuanzhang) when we met President Tsai. Steve was incredibly gracious about having someone with almost no background in Taiwan Studies take precedence over him, perhaps the senior scholar of the field in the United States. Then he upstaged me with a private gift to the President, a pair of colorful socks. It takes some chutzpah to give a pair of socks to a head of state!
After each trip I swore that I had learned more about the 1992 consensus than I ever wanted or needed, enough to last me a lifetime. But Steve’s dogged persistence and incredible knowledge of cross-Strait relations meant that he could always wrestle something interesting from interlocutors whose talking points seemed carved in stone.
He was always a source of wise counsel; my last communication with him was to ask that we meet so I could ask his advice. I’m sorry that meeting won’t happen.