ABOUT

Karl Gerth

Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of History, UC San Diego​

Karl Gerth writes, teaches, and speaks on the history and contemporary implications of Chinese consumerism and capitalism.

In his latest book, Unending Capitalism, Gerth uses archival materials, periodicals, memoirs, and interviews conducted in China to investigate the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt after 1949 to end capitalism. Despite the party’s socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, its policies continually expanded capitalism and consumerism, negating the goals of the Communist Revolution since the Mao era (1949-1976). For more information, click here. 

Gerth is the author of two additional books on Chinese consumerism and capitalism that span the twentieth-century and down to the present. His second book, based on over thirty years of living and traveling to China and East Asia, As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers are Transforming Everything explores whether Chinese consumers can rescue the global economy without creating even deeper problems. His first book, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation examines the connections between nationalism and consumerism in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to these three single-authored books, he has published and presented papers on comparative aspects of modern Chinese and world history, including “Consumption and Consumerism in East Asia,” “The Origins and Implications of Chinese Brand Nationalism,” and “The Ecological Implications of Chinese Consumerism.”

To research and write these books and articles, Gerth has won numerous grants and fellowships. In 2018-19, to complete Unending Capitalism, he was awarded two prestigious fellowships, the Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. fellowship of the American Council on Learned Societies and a yearlong fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In addition, he has received awards from the British Academy, the British Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Fulbright Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Blakemore Foundation, the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and the Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship for two years of study at Tokyo University.

Gerth regularly presents his research at academic institutions around the world including, in recent years, the Gramsci Institute in Rome, Cornell University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, Harvard University, Yale University, East China Normal University, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and King’s College London. He also speaks to nonacademic audiences about contemporary Chinese consumerism, including to multinational companies such as J.P. Morgan, Shell, and Aviva as well as at international events such as the FutureChina Forum in Singapore. In addition, he was the Chinese co-team leader of the Oslo-based Ceres21 Project that investigated innovative adaptations in the automotive and power industries to climate and environmental change on three continents.

After receiving his PhD in modern Chinese history from Harvard University in 2000, Gerth taught at the University of South Carolina until his 2007 move to Oxford University, where he was the Dame Jessica Rawson Fellow and Tutor in Modern Asian History at Merton College. In 2013, he succeeded Joseph Esherick as the Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he now teaches.

Curriculum Vitae
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