Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who teaches Chinese history and world history at the University of California at Irvine, will be joining us to discuss his new book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink with NPR's London Correspondent Frank Langfitt. Book signing to follow discussion.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who teaches Chinese history and world history at the University of California at Irvine, will be joining us to discuss his new book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink with NPR's London Correspondent Frank Langfitt. In Vigil - a well-structured and strikingly relevant work - Wasserstrom argues that the designation of Hong Kong by China and Britian in the handover of 1997 as a Special Administrative Region enjoying 'a high degree of autonomy' is being threatened. This is a passionate, important study of the current affairs of a volatile region. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is chancellor's professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. A specialist in Chinese studies and world history, he has written, co-written, edited and co-edited more than ten books, most recently China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (third edition, 2018), coauthored with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, and Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (2016). He will be spending this spring as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London.Frank Langfitt is NPRs London correspondent, covering Brexit, terrorism and other stories in Western Europe. Before coming to the United Kingdom, he spent a decade as a reporter in China, most recently as NPRs correspondent in Shanghai, where he drove a free taxi around the city for a series on a changing China as seen through the eyes of ordinary people. Langfitt got the idea for the series from his experience decades earlier driving taxis in Philadelphia during summers home from college. The NPR radio series inspired his first book, The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China.
