Harald Bøckman

Photo: Maya Bøckman Vinje

In residence: February-March 2020

After working at the University of Oslo as a researcher on China at the Centre for Development and the Environment, Harald Bøckman (born 1945) has, until recently, been a senior guest researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Bøckman has been studying and researching China for over fifty years, including at Peking University in 1976-77 and as a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University in 1983-85. He co-founded the Nordic Association for China Studies, and for two years in the 1990s he was General Secretary of the European Association for Chinese Studies.

His main research interests have revolved around topics such as China’s past and present political culture, past and present ethnic relations in China and modern Chinese nationalism.

He has translated classical and modern China prose and poetry into Norwegian, some jointly with his late wife, the university lecturer Baisha Liu, as well as two novels by the first Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gao Xingjian. In 2009, together with Baisha Liu and the Chinese poet Xi Chuan, he recreated a large collection of Olav H. Hauge’s poetry in Chinese.

During his residency Bøckman hosted a series of three lectures. The events were live-streamed on our social media platforms. Recordings of each can be watched below (in Norwegian):