Suggestions for Improving Sino-Japanese Relations

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size About the authorEzra F Vogel is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University. After completing his PhD at Harvard in sociology in 1958, he spent two years in Japan studying the Japanese language and the Japanese family that became the basis for his first book on Japan, Japan's New Middle Class (1963). After spending a year in Japan during 1975–76, he wrote Japan As Number One (1979) to inform Americans of some of Japanese society's strong points.Vogel began studying Chinese at Harvard in the fall of 1961 and has been doing research both on China and Japan ever since. In his research on China, he first focused on Guangdong and wrote Canton Under Communism (1969) and One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). He retired in 2000 and devoted a decade to study Deng Xiaoping. The resulting book (Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011) was awarded the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English language book that year on foreign affairs for deepening public debate on international affairs. When a translation was published in China in January 2013, it became a best seller.Vogel became a professor at Harvard in 1967. From 1972 he became founding director of the undergraduate concentration of East Asian Studies at Harvard University and remained in that position until 1990. He has received an Imperial decoration and awards from the Japan Foundation, and the US-Japan Foundation.Vogel is the only scholar from any country to have written a book on Japan that became a best seller in Japan (Japan As Number One) and a book on China that became a best seller in China (Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China).