Ezra F. Vogel Harvard University
Asia Center, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Ezra F. Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. In 1960-1961 he was assistant professor at Yale University and from 1961-1964 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard, becoming lecturer in 1964 and, in 1967, professor. He retired from teaching in 2000. After retirement he worked on a book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, completed 2011.
Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard's East Asian Research Center and Second Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was Chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was Director of the Fairbank Center (1995-1999) and the first Director of the Asia Center (1997-1999). He was Chairman of the Harvard Committee to Welcome President Jiang Zemin (1998). He taught courses on Japanese and Chinese society and for many years a Core Curriculum course, Industrial East Asia.
Drawing on his original field work in Japan, he wrote Japan's New Middle Class (1963). A book based on several years of interviewing and reading materials from China, Canton Under Communism (1969), won the Harvard University Press faculty book of the year award. The Japanese edition of his book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) is the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. In Comeback (1988), he suggested things America might do to respond to the Japanese challenge. He spent eight months in 1987, at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the progress of the province since it took the lead in economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published in The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (1991). He updated his views on Japan in: Is Japan Still Number One? (2000). His most recent book is Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011). He has visited East Asia at least once a year since 1958 and has spent a total of over six years in Asia. He lectures often in Asia, in Chinese and Japanese. Since 2000 he has organized a series of conferences between Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars to work together to examine the China War from 1937-1945.
Vogel has received ten honorary degrees. He received The Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008 he received the Harvard Graduate School Centennial Medal for contribution to society.
From 1993 to 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. He directed the American Assembly on China in November 1996 (Vogel, ed., Living With China) and the Joint Chinese- American Assembly between China and the United States in 1998. He served as Co-director of the Asia Foundation Task Force on East Asian Policy Recommendations for the New Administration (2001). He chairs the advisory board of the University Service Centre, Hong Kong.
He is married to Charlotte Ikels, professor of anthropology emeritus at Case Western University. His three children -- David, Steven, and Eve –all teach at universities, respectively in psychology, political economy, and the environment.
