Kenneth Pomeranz, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the College at the University of Chicago.

R. Bin Wong, Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA

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.