Making Meritocracy
Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present
Edited by Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi
Author Information
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.
Michael Szonyi is Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
Contributors:
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.
Michael Szonyi is Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between history, anthropology, philosophy, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, and Professor of Political Science, Brown University, where he also directs the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Previously, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Battles Half Won: India's Improbable Democracy; Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India; Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India; India in the Era of Economic Reforms; and Collective Violence in Indonesia. His honors include the Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships and the Gregory Luebbert and Daniel Lerner Prizes. His academic articles have appeared in leading professional journals of political science and development. He is a columnist for The Indian Express, and editor-in-chief of the Modern South Asia series, Oxford University Press, New York.
Daniel A. Bell is dean at the school of political science and public administration at Shandong University in Qingdao. His books include Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the West, co-authored with Wang Pei, and The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy.
Sudev Sheth is Senior Lecturer at the Lauder Institute and in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches perspectives on entrepreneurship, global capitalism, and leadership across the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the history of South Asia, business history of emerging markets, family enterprise, and business-government relations in societies past and present.
Lawrence LC Zhang is assistant professor at the Division of Humanities of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His primary research interest is on the intersection of money and politics in Late Imperial China, focusing on the formal sales of government positions and associated questions of elite status preservation and their implication on the rhetoric of meritocracy.
Sumit Guha is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at the St. Stephen's College, Delhi, the Indian Institute of Management Kolkata, Brown University and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author most recently of History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000.
James Z. Lee is Yan Ai Foundation chair professor of social science and chair professor in humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Chen Liang is a professor and associate dean of the School of History at Nanjing University. In 2019, the PRC Ministry of Education named him an "Outstanding Young Talent."
Bamboo Yunzhu Ren is a PhD candidate in social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a 2018-2022 Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme Fellow.
Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics and Founding Director of Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) at Ashoka University. She is the author of Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India, and Affirmative Action in India.
Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India, chronicles a spatial politics of rights on India's southwestern coast. Her second book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, analyzes meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle and its implications for democratic transformation.
Zachary M. Howlett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College at the National University of Singapore. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who researches education, migration, and marriage in China. He is the author of Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China.
Vincent Chua is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. His research areas include social networks and the meritocracy, educational inequalities, gender, race and neighborhoods. His latest work Social Capital in Singapore: The Power of Network Diversity investigates the network correlates of national identity.
Randall Morck is the Jarislowsky Distinguished Chair in Finance and Distinguished University Professor of Business at the University of Alberta, Research Associate with the NBER, and Senior Research Fellow at the ABFER. He has advised governments and multinational institutions.
Bernard Yeung is the Stephen Riady Distinguished Professor in Finance and Strategic Management at the National University of Singapore Business School where he was Dean from Jun 2008 to May 2019. He is also the President of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research. His research covers topics in Economics, Finance, International Business, and Strategy.
William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a University Distinguished Service Professor. Professor Kirby serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. At Harvard he has served as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Chairman of the History Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His current projects include case studies of trend-setting Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States. His most recent books include Can China Lead? and China and Europe on the New Silk Road.
D Shyam Babu is Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. A former journalist, Mr. Babu now focuses on how economic changes in India have been shaping social change and transformation for the benefit of marginalized sections, especially Dalits. He is co-author (with Devesh Kapur and Chandra Bhan Prasad) of Defying the Odds, which brought to light the phenomenon of Dalit businesspersons hitherto ignored by both intellectuals and policymakers.
Devesh Kapur is Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies and Director of Asia Programs, Johns Hopkins University. Earlier he served as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India and the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his tenure at Penn, Professor Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard.
Chandra Bhan Prasad is Dalit ideologue and Affiliate Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University. A widely cited public intellectual, Mr Prasad has been profiled by, among others, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is India's first Dalit columnist and his commentary appears in The Times of India, The Economic Times, and a host of Hindi newspapers.
Varun Aggarwal is a technology entrepreneur, an AI researcher and a policy enthusiast. He co-founded one of the world's largest skills assessment company. He has published a non-fiction book on the science ecosystem in India and a fiction book on the impact of AI and internet on our society. He recently co-founded a philanthropic initiative on science policy in India.
