Speaker: Edward Wong, New York Times Diplomatic Correspondent and author
Discussant: Gray Tuttle, Chair and Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, EALAC, Columbia University
One of Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024, At the Edge of Empire is a moving chronicle of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change and gives profound insight into the current leadership of China and how it is transforming the world.
The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he made plans for a desperate escape to Hong Kong.
When Edward Wong became the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, he investigated his father’s mysterious past while assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China. He met the citizens driving the nation’s astounding economic boom and global expansion—and grappling with the vortex of nationalistic rule under Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader since Mao. Following in his father’s footsteps, he witnessed ethnic struggles in Xinjiang and Tibet and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And he had an insider’s view of the world’s two superpowers meeting at a perilous crossroads.
Speaker’s Bio: Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China, named by The Washington Post as a top non-fiction book of 2024 and by The Atlantic as a top summer read. He has reported for the Times for 26 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. Edward was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. While writing his book, he was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Edward was awarded the Livingston Prize for his reporting on the Iraq War and was on a team of finalists for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war. He received the Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University for diplomatic reporting. Edward graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and from U.C. Berkeley with joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies. He received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury Language Schools. He speaks on global affairs on television, radio, and podcasts, including CBS, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, BBC and The Times’ “The Daily.”
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
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