Elizabeth Perry

Elizabeth J. Perry is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and served as Director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (1999-2003), President of the Association for Asian Studies (2007-2008) and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2008-2024). Her research focuses on the history of the Chinese revolution and its implications for contemporary Chinese politics.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, Professor Perry is the author or editor of more than 20 books including, most recently, Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Harvard, 2011); Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (California, 2012); What is the Best Kind of History? (Zhejiang, 2015); Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared (Harvard, 2018); Similar yet Different: Case Studies of China’s Modern Christian Colleges (Zhejiang, 2019); and Ruling by Other Means: State-Mobilized Movements (Cambridge, 2020). Her book, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, 1993) received the John King Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association; her article, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao – and Now” (Perspectives on Politics, 2008) received the Heinz I. Eulau Prize of the American Political Science Association.