People’s Republic of China at 60

William C. Kirby is Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration and T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University, as well as Chair of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. His many books include Can China Lead? Reaching the Limits of Power and Growth. Paul A. Cohen is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History Emeritus at Wellesley College. Merle Goldman is Professor of History, Emerita, at Boston University and Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Elisabeth Köll is the William Payden Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Klaus Mühlhahn is Professor of Modern China Studies and President of Zeppelin University. His Criminal Justice in China won the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. Dwight H. Perkins is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, at Harvard University. Elizabeth J. Perry is Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Robert S. Ross is Professor of Political Science at Boston College and a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Michael Szonyi is author of The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China and Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line and coeditor of The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power. He is Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Xiaofei Tian is Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Andrew G. Walder is Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. His previous books include Fractured Rebellion, which won the Barrington Moore Book Award, and China Under Mao (both from Harvard). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Guggenheim fellow, Walder has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Science, and the Ford Foundation. Martin K. Whyte is John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Sociology, Emeritus, Harvard University.

These impressive conference papers by China specialists from across the world offer instructive views on the 60-year history of the People's Republic of China (PRC). From varied angles and in different tongues, the contributors discuss in fine interdisciplinary fashion important political, social, and cultural aspects of the PRC from 1949 to 2009...For a balanced, realistic understanding of China's past, present, and future, this assemblage of academic musings calls for a new paradigm to substitute for the conventionally Western-centered way of looking at China.