When a child becomes fixated on a topic, you never know where it might lead. For Stanford scholar Amy Zegart, a childhood fascination became a lifelong calling.

Zegart remembers being 11 years old and watching the evening news in Kentucky during Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s historic 1979 trip to the United States. The sight of Xiaoping donning a cowboy hat at a Texas rodeo transfixed her.

“I was mesmerized. I was like, ‘What is this country?’ ‘Who is this man?’” she recalls.

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