William H. Overholt, a scholar dedicated to Asia who engaged deeply and broadly in the world, passed away on September 27, 2024, at the age of 79. Bill’s experiences and expertise spanned countries and continents: starting with research in Ethiopia and the Philippines while an undergraduate at Harvard, his curiosity with emerging markets took him from Brazil to Zimbabwe 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 Deng Xiaoping. Since 2008, Bill was a fellow at Harvard and a valued member of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government community.
“Bill was a great inspiration to me and many others. He was committed to engaged scholarship—understanding Asian economies and societies in service of a more prosperous and peaceful world. No one else did it better or with Bill’s combination of hard-headed analysis and generous spirit. He will be missed even as his contributions endure,” said M-RCBG Director Lawrence H. Summers.
M-RCBG Co-Director John Haigh also remembered Bill's impact. “Bill was an exemplary Senior Research Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. His exceptional research will stand the test of time. His humanity and intellect will be missed.”
Bill’s creativity and dynamism connected with his willingness to defy conformities and some professional conventions. Bill did so from an early moment. 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 Harvard mentors like Ezra Vogel. Yet at Yale, Bill found that many professors were contemptuous of research on Asia and pressured him to study Europe instead.
Bill graduated in just two years with a PhD and went to work with Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute. Kahn supported Bill’s work on Asian development, encouraging him to visit rural areas and see the reality beyond what U.S.-based researchers had theorized. At Hudson, he became interested in nuclear issues and published his first book, Asia’s Nuclear Future (1977).
After several years working with the U.S. Defense Department and other security agencies, Bill transitioned to a career in investment banking, pioneering political-economy research in emerging markets, 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 analyzing 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 Cory Aquino organize her campaign against Ferdinand Marcos, and was the architect of her personal security.
For decades, he led a cadre of leading American businessmen from Hong Kong to testify before Congress on behalf of China’s Most Favored Nation status. That leadership resulted in him being tapped to represent Hong Kong businesses in front of 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 organizing American bankers to pressure 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 on behalf of democracy, 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 realize, as many authoritarian rulers focused more on enriching themselves, maintaining delicate political coalitions, funding militaries, or favoring 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 Cory Aquino and Kim Dae-Jung who promoted democracy and human rights.
Bill’s observations of Korea, the Philippines, and other Asian states grounded his early insights into China’s economic rise. He saw that, while the Soviet Union and 1990s Russia prioritized reforming heavy industry, China under Deng and Jiang Zemin was following a path similar to Korea’s in improving conditions for agriculture, light industry, small-scale commerce, and health and education. Bill first presented his argument in an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune. He was so persuasive he was asked by the Hong Kong business community to turn it into a book. He did, with The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (1993). At the time, only a few years after the Tiananmen 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 U.S., Southeast Asia, and Japan expressed growing concerns about Beijing’s geopolitical activity. Bill remained hopeful that Beijing could better understand and mitigate neighbors’ 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 organized around personal dignity.” Otherwise, China’s recent performance would not continue: “the property bubble bursting is just the first wave of a tide,” he argued in 2022.
His concern extended to U.S. policymaking, notably criticizing the lack of Asia expertise in successive Washington administrations that pledged to “pivot to Asia.” Despite illnesses in recent years, he hoped to address these problems—leading a China seminar series at Harvard, completing a book on U.S.-China relations last summer that his children will publish on his behalf early next year, and organizing a landmark Ford Foundation-supported series of exchanges of leading Chinese and American economists, an initiative that formally launched shortly after his passing. It is this last project, he told his children, that he hoped would be a lasting legacy of his commitment to fostering communication and peace between the two nations.
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 American 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.