Issue of Democracy in China to be Addressed at Williams College
WILLIAMSTOWN - Chinese business historian Sherman Cochran will give a talk at Williams College on Chinese capitalist and political affairs. His talk, titled "The Past and Future of the People's Republic: Will Capitalism Bring Democracy to China?" is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 p.m. in Griffin Hall, room 3.Michael H. Hunt and Sam Crane will respond. Crane is professor in the Williams College political science department. He teaches Asia and the World, Political Power in Contemporary China and The International Politics of East Asia. Author and historian Hunt, who holds the Everett H. Emerson chair in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes and teaches in the general field of international history.
Cochran, the Hu Shih Professor of History at Cornell University, is the author of four books, his most recent, "Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast and Diaspora in Transnational China" (2007), in which he discusses issues relating to Chinese capitalism and its relationship to the political system. His published articles include Capitalists Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China.
His research was recently recognized with the award of the Joseph Levenson Prize of 2008 by the Association for Asian Studies for his book "Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia" (2006) that makes "the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economics of China since 1900."
Cochran has also served as Henry Luce Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in 2002-03 and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for the Scholars in Washington D.C., in 1998-99.
He received his B.A. and his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale University.
The talk is free and open to the public and is one in a series of International Studies events at Williams. The International Studies Program was established in 2004.
