Ross Terrill is a China specialist and Research Associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. He is the author of ten books, including The New Chinese Empire (2004), China In Our Time (1992), and Wo yu Zhongguo (Myself and China) (published in Chinese in Beijing, 2011). Among his other books are Socialism as Fellowship: R. H. Tawney and His Times (1973), 800,000,000: The Real China (1974), Flowers on an Iron Tree (1976), Mao: A Biography (1985, revised edition 2000), and Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon (2000). Professor Terrill is a contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. For a decade he was an Atlantic Monthly contributing editor. He won the National Magazine Award for Reporting Excellence, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the George Polk Memorial Award for his writing on China. Recently, Professor Terrill has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and Monash University in Australia. In 2008, he was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Last Updated: April 3, 2014

My First Trip

09.24.11

An Australian Gets to Beijing, 1964

Ross Terrill
In the early 1960s, few Westerners set foot in the People’s Republic of China. Australians needed permission from their own government to go there. Some got a green light, but Beijing guarded visas for people from non-Communist countries like...

Up Against the Wall at Tsinghua U.

Ross Terrill from New York Review of Books
Some Chinese refer to their lives before and after the Cultural Revolution as if that storm of the Sixties were a religious conversion. Like John Bunyan writing with enthusiastic horror of his unregenerate days, the cadre or craftsman today says he...