The Berkeley China Initiative brings together UC Berkeley's exceptional resources to strengthen research and teaching about China across all disciplines and professions, forge new international partnerships, and enrich public life by communicating those results.

To accomplish this, we have undertaken a new funding initiative to strengthen several key areas of China Studies at Berkeley. Learn more about this initiative and BCI here.

Libraries

The new C.V. Starr East Asian Library, scheduled to open its doors in March, 2008, will house more than 900,000 volumes of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean materials, including woodblock prints, rare maps and scrolls, contemporary political posters, and Buddhist scriptures. The new library will consolidate the holdings of the Center for Chinese Studies Library and the East Asian Library into one collection.

The Center for Chinese Studies Library (CCSL) closed its doors in December, 2007. The CCSL began as a reading room in the 1960s, and grew to become one of the premiere libraries on post-1949 China in the United States. The holdings included some 100,000 volumes in both Chinese and English, an extensive microfilm collection, a large number of newspapers and journals, and video collections. Its collection included primarily Chinese- and English-language materials, but also contained works in Japanese, German, French and Russian. By agreement with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the CCSL collected newspapers primarily on south China, while Hoover took responsibility for materials from north China.

The East Asian Library (EAL), which also closed in December, 2007, housed a comprehensive research collection of materials in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Stacks, except for Rare Book titles, were open to all users. A large part of the collection could be borrowed for use outside of the Library. Founded in 1898, the library included more than 700,000 bound volumes and serials, and expanded at the rate of 12,000 volumes annually.

The Starr Library is the first freestanding library in the United States constructed exclusively for an East Asian collection. The facility occupies a prominent, central-campus location next to Memorial Glade and Doe Library, reflecting Berkeley's role as a worldwide Pacific Rim hub for students and researchers of East Asian studies.