Rise and Fall of Technology in Chinese History

Joseph Needham famously asked why China did not have its own Industrial Revolution. Using a newly constructed database, Yasheng Huang will show that China’s technological collapse happened much earlier than previously thought and the collapse coincided closely with the rise of autocracy and ideological homogeneity.

Speaker: Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management; Professor, Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

 

Moderator: Madeleine Zelin, Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies; Professor of History,

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of History, Columbia University