China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know

UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Jeffrey Wasserstrom on his book, which provides an invaluable window onto China's past, present, and future.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History, UC Irvine

China’s dramatic return to global centrality, symbolized by everything from the omnipresence of Chinese-made goods in big box stores to the Beijing Games, is one of the great stories of the new millennium.  This book, organized around an expert’s simple but sometimes surprising answers to commonly asked questions, provides an invaluable window onto China’s past, present, and future for anyone who seeks to better understand this complex tale.

China in the 21st Century addresses common sources of misunderstanding that bedevil Western and particularly American thinking about the world’s most populous country.  It also shows how things that have happened during the last two decades and at times the last two millennia influence contemporary events.

It presents a China that is complex and more diverse than Westerners often imagine it to be, yet is by no means “inscrutable” (as the cliché would have it). Understanding today’s China is far from impossible, but it does require a willingness to cast aside ideas that fill much soundbite driven commentary, and to think about things that the PRC has in common with—as well as things that differentiate it from—other large nations, such as India that stands across the Himalayas from it in one direction and the United States that stands across the Pacific from it in the other. 

The author, a Professor of History at UC Irvine who hold’s a master’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Berkeley, has written three previous books on China and edited or co-edited several others.  He has been traveling to the PRC regularly for more than two decades, is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, has been interviewed about China for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” and has contributed to many newspapers, magazines, and blogs, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Time, and Newsweek. 

Introduced by Andrew F. Jones, Chair, Center for Chinese Studies