On January 17, 2004, our friend and colleague, Jim Townsend, died peacefully in the midst of his family after a long illness. For many years a leading figure among China scholars, Jim received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1965. He was a member of the political science department at Berkeley between 1963 and 1968 when he moved to the University of Washington. He remained at the University of Washington until he retired prematurely in 1992 after a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Defying the odds, he continued to live a happy and productive life for more than a decade after his retirement, a decade during which he saw his beloved wife Sandy Perry through her own losing battle with breast cancer.

Jim was one of the very first Ph.D.s trained in Chinese politics after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (along with his former Berkeley colleague, Chalmers Johnson, and John Wilson Lewis, emeritus of Stanford). As a scholar, Jim was a first-rate thinker and sophisticated comparativist. His scholarship was careful, wondrously detached (at a time when, during the cold war, few scholars really were), and analytical to a fault. They reflect and transcend the time in which they were written, not least because Jim was not inclined to methodological or interpretive fads.

His study of political participation in China (Political Participation In Communist China, 1967, 1969) and his textbook contribution on Chinese politics (Politics in China, 1974, 1980, 1986), along with essays on Chinese nationalism, all remain worth reading. Politics in China was in the famous Little Brown series in comparative politics, but it was no “mere” textbook. Generations of students of Chinese politics were raised on Politics in China, which synthesized the literature on comparative politics and China in state of the art ways. His scholarly work is remarkable for the elegance of his writing and for its clarity—no ideas left blurry or undeveloped, no pretentious language, no false or unnecessarily arcane notes. Intellectually honest and straightforward, he was irritated by academic pretension, arrogance, and self-importance masquerading as intellect.

Jim taught in much the same way that he wrote: with careful preparation, concentration, and simplicity. He took education seriously, allowing it priority over all the other work by which he seemed constantly burdened. During the 1980s Jim served on and chaired more graduate student committees than anyone in the University of Washington political science department. But he was particularly proud of several stints at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American studies where he was teacher and mentor to many Chinese students, some of whom joined him at the University of Washington and who remain devoted to him. His graduate students now hold appointments in universities across the U.S. and Asia.

Jim saw his work in Nanjing as part of a broader project to contribute to the gradual accommodation between China and the United States. Jim was the only social scientist invited by the National Academy of Sciences to travel with the first group of health professionals to visit China when its doors began to open in the early 1970s. The many tributes to Jim at his memorial service reflected a deep influence on his students, on the Nanjing Center, and perhaps even on U.S.-Sino relations.

There were two particularly prominent and contradictory strands in Jim's character. He was, on the one hand, modest to a fault, with a gargantuan sense of responsibility that followed him around everywhere, a weight he could not shake. His intelligence, his good sense, and his utter reliability made him particularly vulnerable in and out of the university. He did so much on and off campus that he really did not want to do, but ultimately could not bring himself to turn down. Always precisely on time, always done by the date promised, always more thorough than just about anyone else would have thought essential, and always hoping he wouldn't have to do it again. It governed his career as scholar and as teacher, and kept his other self too often in wraps and under guard.

That other self, evident enough to his friends and family but often otherwise obscured, evinced a love of art, in which he had a confident and capable eye, of music, of good company and conversation and banter, of his own physical existence and skill, of open air and nature. This was the Jim that Jim himself liked best or enjoyed most, for perfectly good reasons. His wry, sly, and dry sense of humor was as intrinsic to his personality as was his sense of responsibility. To know Jim well was to be needled by Jim and to be invited to needle return the favor. Consider the consolation he offered to a colleague who had undergone traction: “Isn't getting your neck stretched really a hanging?” With reference to that same colleague's wife, Jim reported: “Lee sent me an inappropriate request but if she won't tell you what it was, neither will I.”

Especially revealing of the Jim that we treasure is what he had to say to his son Matt with respect to the impending prospect of hospice care:

To that we and Jim's family and friends can only say Amen!