The Lonely Ideas: A History of Chinese Technology

Join the Department of Social Sciences for this Great Problems, Great Minds seminar series event featuring Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation professor of global economics and management at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Using a newly created dataset on Chinese historical inventions, Huang argues that the turning point of Chinese technological development occurred much earlier than conventionally thought. Drawing from a chapter in a new book he is writing, The Rise of the East, Again? Huang shows how stagnation began during the Sui Dynasty (580-618) rather than during the Ming Dynasty (1369-1644).

Huang is the author of 11 books in both English and Chinese and numerous academic papers and news commentaries. He is currently a co-PI in a large-scale cross-disciplinary research project on food safety in China. His current book is on the rise and the fall of technologies in ancient and contemporary China.