Tribute to William Overholt
Published: 30 December 2024-
Richard Yarrow
Harvard Kennedy School
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Larry Summers
Harvard University
In Brief
William H. Overholt, a renowned scholar deeply engaged with Asia, passed away in September 2024 after an impactful career spanning national security planning to economics. Known for his creativity, dynamism and non-conventional approach, Overholt was instrumental in international politics, making significant contributions such as predicting China's economic rise. His legacy endures, including through a forthcoming book on US–China relations and his facilitation of Ford Foundation-supported exchanges of Chinese and US economists.
William H. Overholt, a scholar dedicated to Asia who engaged deeply and broadly in the world, passed away on 27 September 2024 at the age of 79. Bill’s experiences and expertise crossed many countries, from Brazil and Ethiopia to North Korea and Japan. His career also crossed many areas, from think tanks and national security planning to high finance and Southeast Asian street politics, and finally academia. He was intrepid, adventurous and a sharp analyst who was one of the first to predict China’s rise as an economic superpower following the reforms of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Since 2008, Bill was Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Bill’s creativity and dynamism connected with his willingness to defy conformities and some professional conventions. Bill did so from early on. After college, he enrolled in a political science doctoral program at Yale, where he hoped to develop interests in Asia that had been nurtured by earlier mentors like prominent Asian studies scholar Ezra Vogel.
Yet at Yale, Bill found that many professors were contemptuous of research on Asia and pressured him to study Europe instead. Finding little place for himself in academia, Bill graduated with a PhD and went to work with strategist Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute. At Hudson, he became interested in nuclear issues and published his first book, Asia’s Nuclear Future (1977). Kahn supported Bill’s work on Asian development, encouraging him to visit rural areas and see the reality beyond what US-based researchers had theorised.
After several years working with the US Department of Defense and other security agencies, Bill transitioned to a career in finance, first with Bankers Trust and then BankBoston and Nomura. Based in Hong Kong and Singapore, Bill became a successful head of economic research without any economics degree. He formulated methods for analysing political risk in markets which grounded a series of articles, reports and books, such as Political Risk (1982) and Strategic Planning and Forecasting (1983).
More remarkable, though, was his activity in international politics on the side of a career in finance. Trekking from Hong Kong, Bill camped in the forests of northern Myanmar advising Aung San Suu Kyi, Michael Aris, and the National League for Democracy while the party was fighting for free elections. In the Philippines, he helped organise Cory Aquino’s campaign against then-President Ferdinand Marcos.
He represented Hong Kong businesses in arguing with China’s then-Premier Li Peng on the city’s legal system leading up to the 1997 hand-over. Bill was perhaps most proud of his role in organising US bankers to pressure South Korean ruler Chun Doo-Hwan to spare opposition leader Kim Dae-Jung from execution. Kim was spared and ultimately served as president of South Korea from 1998 to 2003.
Though he campaigned for democrats, Bill was not doctrinaire when thinking about development — as his Bankers Trust colleague Rob Ferguson wrote, ‘he is anything but ideological, the facts drive him’. His experiences in South Korea — where a sometimes vicious military-dominated regime achieved record-breaking growth rates — persuaded him that strong leaders who were genuinely and pragmatically focused on improving conditions for the broader populace could achieve growth better than many democratic politicians could.
The necessary qualities were easier to claim than to realise, as many authoritarian rulers focused more on enriching themselves, maintaining delicate political coalitions, funding militaries, or favouring dramatic yet unproductive industries, than they did on improving conditions bottom-up. Bill respected leaders like Park Chung-Hee, Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping who did the latter, while also admiring and helping figures like Aquino and Kim who promoted democracy and human rights.
Bill’s observations of South Korea and other Asian states grounded his early insights into China’s economic rise. He saw that, while the Soviet Union and 1990s Russia prioritised reforming heavy industry, China under Deng and Jiang Zemin was following a path similar to South Korea’s in improving conditions for agriculture, light industry, small-scale commerce, health and education. Bill presented his argument in The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (1993).
At the time, only a few years after the Tiananmen Square protests, not all readers took kindly to his points — one review in China Quarterly complained that Bill had too much ‘admiration’ for China and ‘no references to the pertinent development literature’. Fifteen years later, the astonishing success of China’s reforms was clear for all to see.
By the 2010s, Bill’s perception of China shifted, as voices in the United States, Southeast Asia and Japan expressed growing concerns about Beijing’s geopolitical activity. Bill remained hopeful that Beijing could better understand and mitigate neighbours’ concerns — he particularly highlighted problems of Chinese vessels’ overfishing in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
On economic growth, Bill feared that China was not adjusting well to what he termed greater ‘economic complexity’, which required social, political and educational changes to maintain growth similar to South Korea’s. China needed to foster a society and economy ‘more organised around personal dignity’. Otherwise, China’s recent performance would not continue, arguing in 2022 that ‘the property bubble bursting is just the first wave of a tide’.
His concern extended to US policymaking, notably criticising the lack of Asia expertise in successive Washington administrations that pledged to ‘pivot to Asia’. Despite illnesses later in life, he hoped to address these problems — leading a China seminar series at Harvard, completing a forthcoming book on US–China relations and organising Ford Foundation-supported exchanges of Chinese and US economists, an initiative that formally launched shortly after his passing.
Bill truly lived his work, because he knew that to change the world for the better, one has to understand the world well. It is a pity for US academia and government that there are not more people with his kind of broad expertise in business, scholarship and policymaking who know China and much of East Asia. A man who combined high principles with an open-minded attention to improving lives, his keen insights and his ability to bridge both sides of the Pacific will be dearly missed.
Richard Yarrow is Research Fellow in the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Summers is Charles W Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard University, and directs the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.