Daniel A. Bell

Education and career

Bell was born in Montreal, educated at McGill University and the University of Oxford, has taught in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, and has held research fellowships at Princeton's University Center for Human Values, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Hebrew University's Department of Political Science. In his book The Dean of Shandong he writes about his experiences as a dean at Shandong University between 2017 and 2022 and what they say about China.

He has put forward his views in favour of China's political meritocracy and against one person one vote as a mode of selection for political leaders in his books and in comments published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, and in regular columns published in The Huffington Post, in Project Syndicate, in The Guardian, as well as the Chinese-language periodical South Reviews (《南风窗》) and a Chinese-language blog site on Caijing (《财经》). He was the recipient of the Huilin Prize in 2018. In his book China's New Confucianism (Chinese: 中国新儒家), he argues that Confucian social hierarchies actually contribute to economic equality in China. He also pointed out that Confucianism influenced how he acts a political theorist and a teacher.