Peter Nolan

Director & Professor, the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge Scholars

Peter Nolan is Emeritus Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development and was the Founding Director of the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge.  He is the Director of the Chinese Executive Leadership Programme (CELP), which each year brings CEOs from China’s largest firms to the University of Cambridge for a three- week training programme, taught by a combination of academics and the leaders of international firms.

Peter Nolan has spoken at the China Development Forum since its inception in 2000.  He has testified at the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission of the US Congress and lectured to the Board of the US-China Business Council.  He is a member of the UK Government’s Asia Task Force and the China Council of the World Economic Forum.  He holds an honorary doctorate from the Copenhagen Business School.  In 2009 he was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) ‘for services supporting China’s integration into the global economy’.

Peter Nolan has researched, written and taught on a wide range of issues in economic development, globalisation and the transition of former planned economies.  He has researched on comparative development in China and India; on Chinese agriculture; system change in China and the former USSR; poverty, famine, inequality and migration; restructuring large global firms in the era of the Global Business Revolution; the transformation of large Chinese firms since the 1980s; the evolution of China’s political economy; the inter-action between Chinese and the global firms in the era of the Global Business Revolution; and the contradictory character of capitalist globalisation.

Peter Nolan’s books include Inequality: India and China Compared (1976) (with T.J.Byres); Growth processes and Distributional Change (1983); The Political Economy of Collective Farms (1987); State and Market in the Chinese Economy (1993); China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall (1995); Indigenous Large Firms in China’s Economic Reform (1998); Coca-Cola and the Global Business Revolution (1999); China and the Global Economy (2001); China and the Global Business Revolution (2001); Transforming China (2004); China at the Crossroads (2004); Global Business Revolution and the Cascade Effect (2007) (with Chunhang Liu and Jin Zhang); Integrating China (2007); Capitalism and Freedom (2007); Crossroads (2009); Is China Buying the World? (2012); Chinese Firms, Global Firms: Industrial Policy in the Age of Globalization (2013); Re-balancing China: Essays on the Global Financial Crisis, Industrial Policy and International Relations (2015); and Understanding China: The Silk Road and the Communist Manifesto (2015).