Professions: One of the nation's top China scholars; UC Berkeley professor of Chinese history; helped open scholarly exchanges between the United States and China in the 1970s; served as educational adviser of the U.S. Inter-Agency Negotiating Team on Chinese-American International Exchanges; his books described topics as diverse as the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, the decay of its successor dynasty in the 19th century, unrest in China's Canton region after the Opium War, the philosophical influences on Mao Zedong and the role of the police in the extension of republican authority in the 20th century Chinese republican state; was fellow of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served terms as president of the American Historical Association and the Social Science Research Council.

Awards: His work The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (1985) won the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies; it was the first scholarly narrative depicting the Manchu conquest and the fall of the Ming Dynasty; Wakeman received the Berkeley Citation, the campus's highest award.

Degrees: Ph.D., Berkeley; A.B. Harvard, 1959.

Death: September 14, 2006 at his home in Lake Oswego, OR.

From the [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/26/BAG5NLCJD61.DTL&hw=harvard&sn=001&sc=1000 San Francisco Chronicle].