Hien Le Pham

Contact Details:

E-Mail: hien.pham@stud.uni-heidelberg.de

Dissertation Project:

"US Policy towards China on Maritime Territorial Disputes in East and Southeast Asia."

Profile:

Hien Le Pham (Le is her first name) was born in Da Nang, a beautiful city in central Vietnam. She graduated from Foreign Trade University with a major in International Economics. Le worked for HSBC Bank Vietnam for over one year after graduation and started to collaborate with some publishing companies as a freelance book translator. Before moving to Germany for her graduate study in 2016, she had been a fulltime corporate trainer at a US software company for over three years. Le received her Master’s degree in American Studies in April 2018 and decided to go further on her academic journey by staying with the HCA for the PhD program.

Le has a keen interest in American foreign relations, especially in the relationship between the US and East Asia. Her project, which is titled “US Policy towards China on Maritime Territorial Disputes in East and Southeast Asia,” examines America’s involvement and interest in these territorial disputes since the Nixon administration’s famous rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. The disputes involve several of America’s strategic partners and long-time allies in the region. Thus, they pose serious challenges for US policymakers trying to strike a balance between Washington’s interest in establishing constructive relations with Beijing and America’s commitment to its allies. An inquiry into America’s reactions to China’s territorial claims may therefore provide new perspectives on how the United States conceives of its role in a new multipolar. Eventually, the key questions that the project hopes to answer are whether, historically, the dilemma that the United States has to deal with now could have been anticipated earlier in the past, and what are the possible flaws in US modern foreign policy that led to this situation.

Research Interests:

• Sino-American diplomatic history
• US history post WWII
• Maritime disputes in South East Asia