Dear all,
The lecture titled Ideology and Economic Change: The Contrasting Paths to the Modern Economy in late 19th Century China and Japan will be hosted on November 6th (Monday) at 15:00 in the Library Room 302, welcome!
Speaker: Debin Ma, Professor of Economic History, Faculty of History, Oxford University
Discussants: Jin Xu, FT China senior editor of economics
Hirata Koji, Assistant Professor, Monash University
Inviter: Wang Luman, Associate Professor of History, Institute of Humanities
Introduction: This talk revisits the old thesis of the contrasting paths of modernization between Japan and China. It develops a new analytical framework regarding the role of ideology and ideological change—Meiji Japan’s decisive turn towards the West pitted against Qing China’s lethargic response to Western imperialism—as the key driver behind these contrasting paths. Our analytical framework, developed from a comparative historical narrative, sheds new insights on the importance of ideology and ideological change for our understanding of political and economic change.