Wednesday May 4, 2:00 – 3:30 pm, via Zoom
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Faculty Dialogue: Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong in conversation

In this dialogue between two of the world’s most renowned China scholars, historians Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong exchange thoughts on four broad areas related to the past, present and future of China in the world context. These include Chinese urbanization and persistent political concern about rural China, China’s domestic economic development and the economy’s evolving presence in the global economy, the meanings of political reform in China, as well as China’s place in the world. The two will also address the inadequacy of some widely used social science binaries (e.g. liberal vs. authoritarian) to capture the dynamics and complexity of Chinese development. They argue that understanding China requires a more nuanced and interconnective approach of reciprocal and encompassing comparison, which, among other things, means evaluating the country’s activities according to the same set of standards to which we hold other countries or world regions accountable.

Kenneth Pomeranz is University Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the College at the University of Chicago. His work focuses mostly on China, but also touches on comparative and world history. Most of his research is in social, economic, and environmental history, though he has also worked on state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and other topics. He has written, edited, or coedited 11 books, including the prize-winning The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993), and The World that Trade Created (with Steven Topik). He is a fellow both of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy, and was President of the American Historical Association in 2013. He was awarded the Dan David Prize for 2019, and the Toynbee Prize for World History for 2020.

Bin Wong is Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. He has published two books in Chinese and English —China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, and Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (w/ J-L Rosenthal)—as well as 100+ articles in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese. Other recent books include Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy (ed. w/ Masayuki Tanimoto) and 鑑往知来 [Understanding the Past & Pursuing the Future). He serves on the Conseil Scientifique, (Paris School of Economics) and the External Research Evaluation Committee (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature [Japan]). He currently studies historical and contemporary natural resource governance regimes in China, the E.U., and the U.S.

Co-sponsored by the UHM Departments of History, Asian Studies, Anthropology and Sociology