Ezra Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus and the author most recently of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Before contemplating democracy’s future in our authoritarian age, he revealed in the Zócalo green room that he doesn’t know much about the Beatles, but he was always intrigued by Yoko Ono.
Q. What word do you use most often?
A. Perhaps “potential.”
Q. Do you have a favorite Americanized Chinese dish?
A. Some kinds of dumplings.
Q. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
A. When I got my Ph.D. at Harvard, one of my teachers said to me, “You’re so provincial. Before you go out and teach about American society you’ve got to go out and live in another country for a while.” She recommended Japan because it was a very different yet modern society, so I had to go there for a couple of years, and that became the beginning of my career in East Asia.
Q. How many countries have you traveled to?
A. Perhaps 40. In 1990, I was looking at what Japan was doing around the world, so I made it a point to visit all the continents of the world and see what Japan was doing in all those countries.
Q. Who is your favorite Beatle?
A. I didn’t know the Beatles, but wasn’t one a Japanese woman? [Do you mean Yoko Ono?] Because I do Japan I was interested in her.
Q. What’s the last book you read?
A. I’m reading a book now on Mao that’s in proofs by Alexander Pantsov. He’s a Russian scholar who was very helpful to me in my book on Deng [Xiaoping]. It’s going to be the best book we have on Mao.
Q. Whose talent would you most like to have?
A. This morning Jon Huntsman gave a talk, and his capacity to put things in a humorous way and be so effective, and yet know so much about what was going on in Asia with that kind of context and background, I found very impressive. Somebody like Kissinger obviously with his mastery of world affairs and depth of history. One of my friends at Harvard, Joe Nye, has a great capacity to coin words, like soft power is one of his words. He has the capacity to keep his desk clean and be wll-organized, and yet have profound things to say that are relevant, and to say them in a very concise way.
Q. What’s your drink of choice?
A. Probably root beer.
Q. What item would you bid for on eBay?
A. I can’t think of anything I want that way. I buy simple things that I need, and at an advancing age I feel what the hell’s the use of accumulating things for yourself?
Q. What promise to yourself do you break most often?
A. Cleaning my room. I vowed to get it all clean and organized, and had great trouble carrying that out. It’s a promise not only to myself but to my wife. I tell her it’s not an absolute promise but an intention. I’ve learned if you promise you have to deliver.
Q. What do you wish more Americans got about China?
A. I wish they realized that you can’t tell them to behave just like we do, and do all the good things that we do. Things are really very complex there, and they will solve their problems in their own way, not because we tell them to but because they have looked at the world and made their own judgment.
*Photo by Andolina Photography.