Award-winning scholar Ezra Vogel will speak on the legacy of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping on April 10. The lecture, titled “Deng Xiaoping and the Opening of China,” will be held at 4:30 p.m. in the Mandel Center Room 108.
Vogel argues than no person in the 20th century affected more people or had a greater long-term impact on world history. Presiding over a period that included unprecedented economic expansion and engagement with the West but also the authoritarian crackdown in Tiananmen Square, Deng was single-minded in his drive to modernize his country. His efforts, Vogel writes, resulted in more people rising out of poverty than in any other period.
The lecture is based upon Vogel’s recent book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, called “a masterful new history of China’s reform era” by the Washington Post.
Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University. During his more than three decades at Harvard, he was director of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center, chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies, director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs, and the first director of the Asia Center. From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence to serve as the national intelligence officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington.
Vogel’s visit is sponsored by the College of Arts and Science’s Program in Asian Studies, Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and the Department of Political Science.
The event is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Paul Schroeder at pes15@case.edu.