Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights. Andy writes on Chinese politics and foreign policy and on sources of political legitimacy in Asia, the latter research based on data from the Asian Barometer Survey, a multi-national collaborative survey research project active in fourteen countries in Asia. He teaches and writes about norm creation and norm change in the international system, focusing on the international struggle over human rights norms.
At Columbia, Andy is chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) and of the Steering Committee of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science, 2003-2006, chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2002-2003, and director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 1991-1995. Off campus, Andy is a member of the board of Human Rights in China and a former board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House. He is a member of the steering committee of the Asian Barometer Surveys; the regular Asia and Pacific book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine; and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy, The Journal of Contemporary China, China Information, and others. Andy does frequent interviews for the print and electronic media, has advised on several film documentaries on China, and has consulted for business and government.
Nathan’s books include Peking Politics, 1918-1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Chinese Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, co-edited with David Johnson and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Human Rights in Contemporary China, with R. Randle Edwards and Louis Henkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); China's Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security, with Robert S. Ross (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); China's Transition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); The Tiananmen Papers, co-edited with Perry Link (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001); Negotiating Culture and Human Rights: Beyond Universalism and Relativism, co-edited with Lynda S. Bell and Ilan Peleg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files
, co-authored with Bruce Gilley (New York: New York Review Books, 2002, second edition 2003); Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization, co-edited with Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, and Kavita Philip (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003); How East Asians View Democracy, co-edited with Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, and Doh Chull Shin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); China’s Search for Security, co-authored with Andrew Scobell (Columbia University Press, 2012); Will China Democratize?, coedited with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and China’s Influence and the Center-Periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific, coedited with Brian C. H. Fong and Wu Jieh-min (London: Routledge, 2021).
Andy's articles have appeared in World Politics, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Daedalus, The China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Asian Survey, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. His research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and others. He has directed five National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars. Andy was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2013.
Dr Nathan received his degrees from Harvard University: the B.A. in history, summa cum laude, in 1963; the M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies in 1965; and the Ph.D. in Political Science in 1971. Andy taught at the University of Michigan in 1970-71 and has been at Columbia University since 1971.
