On the walls of the stunning new multimillion-dollar Stanford Center here are hand-painted Chinese landscapes and scenes from the Palo Alto campus -- signs of a new cross-Pacific partnership that offers great promise as well as some perils for the university.
The facility -- which provides Stanford with its first center for research and teaching for its faculty and students in China but will not offer degrees -- blends traditional Chinese courtyard architecture with state-of-the-art classroom technology. Stanford, one of many Western universities scrambling to set up outpost in the world's second-largest economy, begins its experiment in just a few weeks, when the initial wave of Stanford faculty begin arriving to use it for the first time as a base for research and lectures. ...