Speaker: Feng Wang, Professor, Sociology, UC Irvine

China’s spectacular economic growth of the past four decades is a happy outcome of numerous historical junctures and opportunism. One pivotal factor was China’s population, particularly its healthy and literature rural population on the eve of the economic take-off. China’s hyper-growth era commenced at the same time as the large migration flows is coming to an end, and as the country embarks on an irreversible journey of population aging and decline. In this talk Professor Wang revisits the crucial role of China’s population in its economic transformation, explore the forces shaping the country’s demographic future, and highlights the social and political challenges as well as the opportunities, that China faces as China enters a post hyper-growth era.

WANG Feng is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is a scholar with expertise in global demographic change, social inequality, public policy, and comparative population and social history. Between 2010 and 2013, he was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and directed the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. Wang Feng is the author of several award-winning books in his research areas and has contributed to many other publications. His latest book, China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, examines the underlying forces driving China’s four-decade-long historical transformations. Wang Feng is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.