Asia Times contributor William Henry Overholt, an East Asia expert, banker, research manager and policy advisor, has died at 79, his family reported. His final post was at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he was a senior research scholar.
Bill Overholt wrote a prescient book, The Rise of China, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that China would continue to languish, ossifying like the Soviet Union. Published in 1994, the book carefully detailed how China’s reforms were different from the death throes of the Soviet Union.
Nearly a quarter century later, again ahead of his time, Overholt predicted the growing problems of China in managing its own economic achievements and the slowdown of its economy, in his 2017 book, China’s Crisis of Success.
While ill with cancer for the last few years of his life, he completed yet another China book, which is scheduled for release in the new year.
Born March 7, 1945, Overholt was a Harvard graduate and received a PhD in political science from Yale. His commitment to international development began very early, greatly magnified by a gap year he took with his parents and sister before entering Harvard, traveling to many countries and living and studying dance in the Philippines. During his lifetime, he witnessed the meteoric economic rise and splendors of some Asian countries, only to watch some of them be degraded by subsequent conflict and corruption.
His insights on the importance of socioeconomic institutions that fall prey to corruption distinguished his career from that of many other analysts who looked at only the overall economic trends.
Overholt completed his PhD after just two years in 1972. He began his think-tank career at the Hudson Institute, based on a tour de force analysis of conflict and development in the Philippines, working closely with Herman Kahn on issues ranging from nuclear strategy to East Asian political economy.
During his nine years with Hudson, he also collaborated with Zbigniew Brzezinski to found, in 1976, and edit the highly influential semiannual Global Political Assessment. The publication was pathbreaking for its focus on anticipating trends in all world regions rather than simply reporting on current events.
His growing reputation for country risk assessment led him in 1980 to be asked to bring that expertise to Bankers Trust, the seventh largest US bank at the time. During his 18 years there, he was involved in both line responsibilities, involving massive loans in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and staff responsibilities in directing teams conducting political and economic risk assessment. In the latter role, he was a pioneer in emerging market country risk assessment for investment banking, perfecting the use of scenarios to weave together political and economic patterns.
His approach was widely recognized; for example, his framework for disciplining long-term thinking and strategic planning has long been a core component of the training of high-level personnel in the National Defense University.
After five years in New York, he relocated to Hong Kong to head Bankers Trust’s Asia research, a key position in light of the bank’s huge lending exposure in the broader East Asian region.
It was in Hong Kong that, despite very heavy responsibilities as a banker, he wrote The Rise of China.
The book carefully detailed how China’s reforms were different from the death throes of the Soviet Union.
Nikolai Mladenov credits this book as “the first research to predict China’s economic and geopolitical success that prompted discussions and debates which turned this concept-puzzle into a top global policy project in IR [international relations] scholarship.”
Nearly a quarter century later, Overholt published China’s Crisis of Success.
His ability to integrate economic and sociopolitical understandings with his experiences on the ground led him to adopt iconoclastic positions that led to sharp confrontations with official US government positions as well as the leadership at Bankers Trust.
His emphasis on the importance of institutions, and his willingness to listen to local people during his many trips all over the region, led him to optimism toward South Korea’s prospects, confidence that China would become economically solvent, and the highly controversial but correct assessments of the decay of the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos and Indonesia under Suharto.
His courageous insistence on the shakiness of the Indonesian government’s finances were adamantly rejected by complacent top-level bank executives until the Indonesian economy — and Bankers Trust – collapsed in 1998.
After a brief stint with BankBoston as head of research in Singapore, Overholt returned to Hong Kong as Nomura Securities’ regional head of strategy and economics. He left that post in 2001 to take a position as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but very soon was hired as director of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. In his six years at RAND, he orchestrated many cutting-edge research projects, including on Chinese military technology, energy security and a broad comparison of development in India and China.
While performing his managerial duties and trying to expand the RAND Corporation’s footprint, he wrote his first book-length analysis of US-Chinese relations, Asia, America and the Transformation of Geopolitics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008.
Throughout his career, his insights on economic and political development were based on the premise, confirmed by the cases of the many countries he evaluated, that a strong, disciplined economy was a requirement for social development, whether in a democratic or authoritarian government.
He often noted the socioeconomic stagnation in supposedly democratic India and the Philippines, in contrast to how the authoritarian government of China lifted up hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, he remained highly critical of China’s authoritarian rule and human rights abuses.
Overholt often said that South Korea and Taiwan were the cases to emulate. To support forces in the Philippines dedicated to move that country toward true democracy, he became an advisor, and friend, to Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who was assassinated in 1983 when he returned to the Philippines from exile in the US Overholt then became an advisor, and architect of personal security, for Ninoy’s widow, Corazon “Cory” Aquino, who became the country’s first woman president after deposing Marcos in the People Power Revolution in 1986.
Overholt’s valiant efforts throughout the mid-90s to similarly support the Karen people striving to escape from the suppression by the government of Myanmar was less successful.
After serving at RAND, he returned to Massachusetts and Harvard. There he worked closely with Lawrence Summers and other Harvard leaders in establishing programs on East Asia, and presiding along with Summers over the acclaimed Program on Rising Chinese Economic Power.
In the last four years, while battling several debilitating bouts of cancer, he wrote his most sweeping book, CHINA vs. AMERICA: War. Peace. Truths. Myths. He completed the manuscript before his September 27 death. It will be published in early 2025 under the care of his journalist daughters.
As critical as he was toward Chinese authoritarianism, Overholt recognized as futile the counterproductive fond hope of several US administrations that antagonism toward China would quickly put an end to the dominance of the Communist Party.
His realism about the need for coexistence made him an outspoken critic of both US and Chinese policies that have driven polarization that has hurt both countries’ interests. As he wrote in his upcoming book:
Our leaders, on both continents have taken the greatest generation in human history and turned the Sino-American relationship into one of fear at home and risk of war abroad. They have taken a time of inspiring truths and replaced it with an era of ugly myths. In the face of this disastrous change, fed by a Congress that represents only the extremes of constituents, one feels helpless.
But for our grandchildren, we must reject the helplessness, the fear, the myths. From the military, the scholars, the business community, local governments there is the potential of a coalition of hope.
We do live in a time of peril. We collectively have the ability to make this the time when we eliminate poverty and save the planet.
The book demonstrates that the mutually self-defeating antagonism between the United States and China reflects serious flaws in the political and economic development approaches of both countries.
To help keep his vision of hope alive that communication and peace can continue to be fostered between nations, before his death he organized a landmark Ford Foundation-supported series of exchanges of leading Chinese and American economists, an initiative at the Harvard Kennedy’s School Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government that formally launched this fall.
Bill Overholt is survived by his daughters Christine Overholt Dunn (grandchildren Chantal, Matthew and David) and Alison Overholt (husband Seth Wickersham and grandchildren Madeleine and Grant), and his sister Carolyn.
We have lost a person of great courage and insight
Jeffrey Race