Peter Nolan

Professor, Cambridge University Scholars

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 is Director of the China Centre, Jesus College, Cambridge, Chong Hua Professor in Chinese Development (Emeritus) and was the Founding Director of the University’s 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. He has written numerous books, including, more recently: 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); Understanding China: The Silk Road and the Communist Manifesto (2015); and China and the West: Crossroads of Civilisation (2019).

Peter Nolan 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 and the Group of Thirty (G30). He holds an honorary doctorate from the Copenhagen Business School. In 2009 he was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by the UK Government. He has spoken at the China Development Forum since its inception in 2000.