“China today is like an entrepreneur who has had a great run with a very simple organization but must now either reorganize to keep rising or stall out. This is a crisis of success.”
— William Overholt, Harvard University
U.S.-Asia policy expert William Overholt will offer a public lecture on campus Oct. 10 based on his latest book, “China’s Crisis of Success.” Arguing that China’s economic successes require a transformation, Dr. Overholt will describe how China is struggling with a needed transition, though Western views of this process “are frequently both strong and wrong.”
The lecture will be the fourth in the “Red Cap Lecture Series on China & Global Economics,” which was launched by Wisconsin China Initiative former Board Chair Wade Fetzer in 2014 to raise the “China literacy” of the campus.
Overholt’s lecture will be held Wednesday, Oct. 10, starting at 4:30 p.m. in Memorial Union’s Tripp Commons. Offering commentary afterwards will be UW-Madison Political Science Professor Emeritus Edward Friedman, in a discussion moderated by Law Professor John Ohnesorge.
Dr. Overholt received his B.A. (magna, 1968) from Harvard and his Ph.D. (1972) from Yale. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government. His career includes 16 years doing policy research at think tanks, ten years at Harvard, and 21 years running investment bank research teams.
The Overholt lecture is sponsored by the WCI, the East Asian Legal Studies Center, the Department of Economics and the Wisconsin School of Business.
As is the tradition for these lectures, the first 100 attendees will receive a free red WCI cap.
Past Red Cap Lectures:
- March 2015: Peking University’s National School of Development Dean Yao Yang, “Understanding the Political Economy of China’ s Economic Growth”
- October 2014: Peterson Institute economist Nicholas Lardy, “The Rise of Private Business in China”
- April 2014: Wall Street economist Stephen Roach, “America and China: An Unsustainable Codependency”