Professor Peter Nolan CBE

Director of the China Centre, Jesus College Cambridge; Director of the China Executive Leadership Programme

Professor 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 epoch of the Global Business Revolution; the transformation of large Chinese firms since the 1980s; and the evolution of China’s system of political economy. Professor Nolan’s current research focuses on the interaction between Chinese and global firms in the epoch of the Global Business Revolution, and the contradictory character of capitalist globalisation. He has written numerous books, including more recently: Crossroads (2009); Is China Buying the World? (2012); Chinese Firms, Global Firms: Industrial Policy in the Era of Globalization (2014); Understanding China: The Silk Road and the Communist Manifesto (2016); China and the West: Crossroads of Civilisation (2019).

Professor Nolan is Director of the China Centre, Jesus College Cambridge, Chong Hua Professor in Chinese Development (Emeritus) and was Founding Director of the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, a post he held until early 2017. He is the Director of the China Executive Leadership Programme. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Copenhagen Business School. Professor Nolan has spoken at the Chinese Government’s annual China Development Forum since its inception in 2000. He has testified at the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission of the US Congress. In recent years, he lectured to the Board of the US-China Business Council and the Group of Thirty (G30).

In 2009 he was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for services supporting China’s integration into the global economy.