Speaker: Stephen MacKinnon, Emeritus Professor of History; Former Director of Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University

Steven MacKinnon, author of Chen Hansheng: China’s Last Romantic Revolutionary, will discuss the remarkable life of one of most important economic researchers on the Chinese rural economy over a career that spanned the 1930s to his death at 107 in 2004. Long an underground communist, Chen was one of the most perceptive critics of both Nationalist and Communist policies, from the collectivization of 1955 through the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong.

In the late 1970s Prof. MacKinnon met Chen in Beijing and conducted many interviews with Chen and family, proteges, and surviving colleagues. The newly published biography emphasizes the international and Chinese historical context in which Chen operated globally as a celebrated social scientist, political activist, and public intellectual.