Ezra Vogel: “The China-Japan Relationship—A Lifetime's Reflections”

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• published: 12 May 2015
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Ezra Vogel discusses China-Japan relations at the Paulson Institute’s Contemporary China Speakers Series. April 14, 2015 At the APEC meetings in Beijing last November, China’s Xi Jinping and Japan’s Shinzo Abe held their first formal talks since 2012, marking a possible breakthrough in diplomatic relations that have been frosty in recent years. As a rising China faces off with Japan, can the two countries set aside differences to form a mutually strategic partnership? In this lecture, Ezra F. Vogel, one of America’s most respected scholars on both China and Japan, will share his analysis of the ever-changing Sino-Japanese relationship. The Harvard University professor emeritus will draw on his half-century of intimate involvement with both countries to reflect on the China-Japan relationship and explore its future in the 21st century. Ezra F. Vogel, one of the leading American scholars of both Japan and China of the last half-century, is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University. Vogel succeeded John King Fairbank in 1972 to become the second director of Harvard's East Asian Research Center and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies. He was director of Harvard's Program on U.S.-Japan Relations and chairman of Harvard's undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1958, Vogel taught at Yale before moving to Harvard in 1964. He retired from teaching in 2000. Vogel is the author of some of the most well-known books on East Asia in print, including Japan as Number One (1970), which remains the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author, One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989), and his recent pioneering biography Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011). From 1993 to 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. http://www.paulsoninstitute.org/events/2015/04/14/paulson-institute-hosts-ezra-vogel-for-contemporary-china-speakers-series/