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EDGS Speaker Series: “Society and Politics in the Asia-Pacific”

Co-sponsored with Political Science and WCAS

Elizabeth Perry, Harvard

Western social scientists from John Dewey to Seymour Martin Lipset have associated state investment in higher education with liberal democratic regimes. Authoritarian regimes, it is often suggested, do not tend to support higher education because an educated citizenry is seen as a threat to their survival. The case of China, past and present, challenges this conventional wisdom. Imperial China, the most enduring authoritarian system in world history, thrived in large part precisely because of its sponsorship of higher education. The durability of the contemporary PRC may also hinge in no small measure on its support for higher education.