Europe dominated the 19th century. The 20th century saw the rise of the United States. Will the 21st century be "the Chinese Century"? Using a series of Harvard Business School Cases, this lecture will explore production, consumption, and education for China's new middle class, and think about China's future, in the light of its past.

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Chairman of the Harvard China Fund.

A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby's work examines China's business, economic, and political development in an international context. He has written on the evolution of modern Chinese business (state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; relations across the Taiwan Strait; and China's relations with Europe and America. His current projects include case studies of contemporary Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States.

This talk is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS).

China and the World: The Stanford China Program, in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies, will host a special series of seminars to examine China as a major political and economic actor on the world stage. Over the course of the autumn and winter terms, leading scholars will examine China's actions and policies in the new global political economy. What is China's role in global governance? What is the state of China's relations with its Asian neighbors? Is China being more assertive both diplomatically as well as militarily? Are economic interests shaping its foreign policies? What role does China play amidst international conflicts?

M. Taylor Fravel is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science and member of the Security Studies Program at MIT. He studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia.  His current projects examine the evolution of China's military strategy since 1949 and the relationship between material capabilities and political influence in China's rise as a great power.

This event is part of the China and the World series.

In his new book, Ancestral Leaves, Esherick tells the story of one family through a tumultuous period of Chinese history. Through the lives of the Ye ("leaves" in Chinese) family members, we see the human dimensions of the grand narrative of modern China: the vast and destructive rebellions of the nineteenth century, the economic growth and social change of the republican era, the Japanese invasion in World War II, and the Cultural Revolution under the Chinese Communists. This is a story of social and political change told through family history. 

The family endures but is transformed from a multi-generation extended family to a linked group of nuclear families. Gender roles evolve as women are educated for careers of their own. In the twentieth century, young people are influenced by new radical ideas from friends and school, and the brothers coming of age in the 1930s each charts a separate course during the War of Resistance to Japan: some becoming Communists, some working with the Nationalist Chinese regime, some joining the liberal Democratic League, and one studying in the U.S. The choices they make during the war will fix their status under the new Communist regime, and when they are targeted during the Cultural Revolution, their families suffer with them.

In his talk on "Family and State in Modern China," Esherick will introduce Ancestral Leaves and explore some implications of the book for our understanding of the relationship between the family and the state in modern Chinese history.

Joseph W. Esherick is Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (UC Press) and co-editor of The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, among many books.