Liu Yawei was a university freshman in Xi'an when China and the United States announced the establishment of diplomatic relations in December 1978. It was such a dramatic event that its vividness stayed fresh in his memory.

"Waking up in the morning, we were quite surprised by the news. We never dreamed of having a relationship with the very 'enemy' we tried to destroy for years," said Liu, director of the China Program at the Carter Center and an adjunct professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

He had no inkling that because of that announcement, years later he would go to the US to study, and one day he would end up working for former president Jimmy Carter, the man who signed the normalization agreement and decided to accept Chinese students to US universities.

"I wouldn't be here without Carter and Deng (Xiaoping), as wouldn't many other Chinese who now live and work in the US," said Liu.

Liu worked in publishing as an editor for a few years after graduating from Xi'an Foreign Languages Institute in 1981. He went to the University of Hawaii in 1987 and continued on to Emory University to obtain a PhD in history in 1996 on a Woodruff fellowship sponsored by Coca-Cola, one of the first US brands to enter China.

It's by chance that Liu ended up working at the Carter Center. One of Liu's former professors was working at the center when its officials were invited by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs to observe village elections in the mid-1990s.

"I was teaching at a local community college at that time. The professor asked me to help, and I began to work as volunteer, translating documents for the China project. In 1998, the professor left the post and asked me to take over. That's how I landed at the Carter Center," Liu said.

With the Carter Center, Liu ran the China village election program for more than a decade. In the end, the program helped more than 600,000 Chinese villages standardize election practices.

The Carter Center also invited numerous Chinese officials to observe US elections.

The primary function of the program was observing and reporting China's elections at the local level.

"Our reports improved China's image when it comes to China's grassroots elections," Liu said.

In 2005, Liu helped the Carter Center establish the China Program, dedicated to advancing US-China relations by building synergy between China and the United States on issues of global importance.

"We always try to find areas (where) the United States and China can work together. The Carter Center has a focus in Africa, so our program shifted its focus on how to help the US and China to work together in Africa around 2010," said Liu.

"China started to send medical aid teams to Africa in 1963; the United States also has a long history of aiding African countries. However, the two major countries did not communicate with each other on what they are doing in Africa, and we have been trying to change that," he said.

Besides organizing annual conferences since 2014 to discuss how China and the US can better work together to benefit Africa, Liu said the next step is to find an African country to evaluate the public healthcare programs run by both countries.

"We will invite the three parties to evaluate the program to identify effective and ineffective programs as well as local needs. I believe that by sharing information, resources and eliminating duplicates, China and the United States can find ways to cooperate in Africa to better help Africa," Liu said.

Liu said the China Program also intends to facilitate business cooperation in Africa. "China has investments in Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative. Many US companies also have invested there. We hope to help connect them to push for more social responsibilities in Africa," he explained.

Seeking US-China collaboration is not limited to Africa. The program is considering expanding the scope to Asia and Latin America.

In 2014, the China Program also started the Forum for Young Chinese and American Scholars, a program aimed to nurture the next generation of leaders who can shape the US-China bilateral relationship to be a cornerstone of global peace and prosperity. The program is a collaboration between the Carter Center and the Global Times Foundation. The forum has been held every year since.

For years, numerous forums on US-China relations also have been organized through the China Program at the Carter Center to foster understanding and bilateral cooperation, including the recent symposium "United States and China at 40: Seeking a New Framework to Manage Bilateral Relations"

The China Program also launched the US-China Perception Monitor site to identify bias from both the United States and China when it comes to viewing each other on various issues.

"Forty years have passed since the birth of modern US-China relations. To both sides and the world at large, this relationship is today one of the most consequential bilateral relationships on earth," Liu said.

"However, this relationship is under strain, facing a serious crisis of trust and a broad spectrum of urgent challenges. It is therefore important for those deeply involved — both practitioners and academics — to come together and share their views on what factors have made the relationship in the past mutually beneficial and what will be required to sustain a viable US-China relationship in the future," Liu said of the symposium.

Contact the writer at mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com