Distinguished Professor of History, UCLA and former Director of the UCLA Asia Institute
Working in both Chinese and Global history, his work has addressed issues of economic development, state (trans)formation, political economy, and collective action. Two of his books appear in Chinese and English-- China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997) [转变的中国：历史变迁与欧洲经验的局限] and with Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (2011) [大分流之外：中国和欧洲经济变迁的政治].He has written or co-authored more than one hundred articles published in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese. His most recent books are a volume co-edited with Masayuki Tanimoto, Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy (University of California Press, 2018) and Jingwang zhilai (鏡往知来) [Understanding the Past & Pursuing the Future] (國立交通大學出版社2019). He was previously Chancellor’s Professor of History and Economics at UC-Irvine (2000-2004) and Distinguished Guest Professor at the Fudan University Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (2009-2013). Currently, he serves on the Conseil Scientifique of the Paris School of Economics and the External Research Evaluation Committee for Japan’s National Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. His current research includes studies of the ideologies and institutions of the political economies in different world regions and a project on contemporary Chinese, European, and American multi-level water governance in historical perspectives.
