Julia Chang Bloch

Julia Chang Bloch
United States Ambassador to Nepal
In office 1989–1993

Julia Chang Bloch (simplified Chinese: 张之香; traditional Chinese: 張之香; pinyin: Zhāng Zhīxiāng; born 1942) is a Chinese American diplomat, who was the first U.S. ambassador of Asian descent. She is also the founder and current president of the US-China Education Trust.

Bloch was born in Chefoo (now Yantai), Shandong Province, China, and moved to the United States when she was nine. She earned a master's degree in government and East Asia studies from Harvard University, and entered the civil service. From 1971 she was a staffer for the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, and thereafter worked in a number of other roles, including administering a food-aid program. She was appointed ambassador to Nepal by President George H. W. Bush in 1989, a post she held until 1993. In 1993, Bloch left the public sector to become group executive vice president at Bank of America, where she created the Corporate Relations Department, heading the bank’s public relations, government affairs and public policy operations.

During her career Bloch has engaged in a variety of non-profit educational endeavors, the majority of which seek to promote educational and cultural exchange between the United States and China. In 1988, she and her husband Stuart Marshall Bloch established the F.Y. Chang Foundation in honor of Bloch’s father, Chang Fuyun, the first Chinese national to graduate from Harvard Law School. The foundation currently offers scholarships to Chinese students to study at Harvard Law. From 1996-1998, Bloch was president and CEO of the United States-Japan Foundation. In 1998, she turned her energies back toward China, first serving for a year as a visiting professor at the Institute for International Relations of the American Studies Center at Peking University. At this time, Bloch became an advocate for expanding academic collaborations between Chinese and American universities, and in particular for expanding the role of American Studies programs on Chinese university campuses, and simultaneously served as executive vice chairman of Peking University's American Studies Center.

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