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).

Lyushun Shen earned his doctorate in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He started his career at the School of Law, University of Maryland before deciding to become a professional diplomat.  He has enjoyed a distinguished career serving Taiwan in its overseas missions in America and Europe, including in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Geneva and Brussels.  Prior to his current appointment he was Taiwan’s representative to the European Union. His publications include:  “The Republic of China’s Perspective on the US Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988” (The Chinese Yearbook of International Law and Affairs, 1989), The Issue of US Arms Sales and Peking’s Policy toward Taiwan (Taipei, 1986), “Is Peking’s Claim over Taiwan Internationally Recognized?” Monograph Series of the Asia and World Forum (Taipei, 1984), “The Washington-Peking Controversy over US Arms Sales to Taiwan: Diplomacy of Ambiguity and Escalation” (The Chinese Yearbook of International Law and Affairs, 1982), and “The Taiwan Issue in Peking’s Foreign Policy during the 1970’s, A Systematic Review” (The Chinese Yearbook of International Law and Affairs, 1981).

In this special event, Vice Foreign Minister Shen will reflect on the century-long relationship between the Republic of China and the United States, and address the future prospects and challenges of this relationship. 

Daniel Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  His research focuses on ethnic politics, research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His work investigates, among other topics, the sources of ethnic identification and the political, social and economic outcomes that ethnicity affects-coalition-building, voting, collective action, public goods provision, and economic growth-with special attention to the mechanisms through which it has its impact. His methodological approach is to find creative ways to maximize leverage for making strong descriptive and causal claims, through the use of experiments (in the lab, in the field, and occurring "naturally"), new data sources (including the re-appropriation of data collected for other purposes), and the adoption of techniques from other disciplines such as satellite geography, public health, and behavioral economics.

His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains why and when politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. He has received several awards for his work, including the Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (2006 and 2010), the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (2008), the Michael Wallerstein Award for the best article in Political Economy (2008), the best book award from the African Politics Conference Group (2006), and the Sage Award for the best paper in Comparative Politics presented at the APSA annual meeting (2004). He has been a Harvard Academy Scholar (1995-98), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2001-02), a Carnegie Scholar (2003-05) and, this year, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2010-11). He currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics, PS, and the Annual Review of Political Science. He is the co-founder of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE). He received his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from Harvard University. Before moving to MIT, he taught for twelve years at UCLA.

Egyptian activists made history in February 2011 when they overturned a thirty-year dictatorship, in part thanks to their mastery of social media.

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University together with the Cloud to Street Initiative, will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward. 

The format will include a panel of four activists speaking by live video feed, with participants in North America sending questions by chat. You may log in to the conversation from any internet connection, or you may join us in person from the CISAC conference room in Encina Hall.

Participant Profiles

Sabah Hamamou is one of Egypt’s most acclaimed new media journalists.  A 36-year-old whose Youtube channel has some 370,000 upload views, she is also a deputy editor at Al Ahram, the country’s most prestigious newspaper. Sabah initially joined the protests as a reporter, but when the protesters came under attack on the first evening of the revolution, she posted the videos she had taken from Tahrir Square, and instantly had 90,000 hits.  Sabah then led an in-house revolt at Al-Ahram over the newspaper’s insistence on reporting regime propaganda about the revolution.  When Al Ahram started reporting the truth about the protests in early February, people throughout Egypt began to realize how much the Mubarak regime had lost popular support.

Mona Shahien is a founder of the Revolutionary Youth Union, a group formed out of the masses in Tahrir Square that sparked initiatives to treat wounded protesters and to clean up the Square, two activities that went viral and demonstrated the new sense of civic engagement that underlies Egypt’s revolution.  She recently founded Tahrir Lounge as a space to bring activists together to communicate, train and collaborate.

Abdel Rahman Faris is a one of three independents on the Revolutionary Youth Council, the coordinating group of youth movements that planned the January 25 protests that set off the revolution.  Frustrated by censorship in the mainstream media, Faris set up the blog www.abdofares.blogspot.com, which he uses to mobilize online communities to engage in political activity.