Gordon White
Professor of Development, Politics,and China
Gordon White died aged 55 from a stroke on April 1st 1998, at the start of the digital era. This website has been created for his 20th anniversary to centralise some of the research which scholars who worked with him feel should be remembered in the present and developed in the future.
About Gordon
Gordon White was a citizen of the world. Born and brought up in the Staffordshire Potteries region of the UK, he was educated in classics at Oxford and in archaeology at Cornell where the 1968 student mobilisations against the war in Vietnam kindled his interest in East Asian politics. He was then able to immerse himself in the study of Chinese and to develop expert knowledge in Chinese politics under John Lewis at Cornell and at Stanford. After a spell teaching at ANU he returned to the UK to spend over two decades as Professor of Politics, researching and teaching China’s development as well as comparative politics, at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University.
Research
Watching China at first from Hong Kong and then through fieldwork, he was hugely disciplined about – and dedicated to - his work. This spanned class formation, social and regional inequality, the roles of intellectual and political workers, revolutionary socialist states, the developmental state, the politics of markets, the politics of finance, of economic reform in China, of democratisation and civil society and of social welfare policy. He made the most of opportunities for collaboration, appreciating colleagues with different points of view, while maintaining a distinctively critical attitude to development concepts, insisting on clarity and valuing empirical research.
Teaching
Committed to equality, rationality and emancipation, he was much intrigued and occupied by the tasks and the possibilities for democratic socialism. He nonetheless taught across a wide spectrum of theory and history, giving students the analytical tools they needed to make up their own minds. The worlds of young people also fascinated him and he became a trusted mentor to many.
Music and Show
Gordon White had a second life as a talented keyboard player and guitarist with a compendious knowledge of jazz and popular music, and blessed with the ability to write and arrange lyrics. He played in rock bands from his teen years onward and gave his last gig three weeks before he died. He also had a fine – and some say wicked - line in wit and comedy. We post the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ here but he is also well remembered as impresario of some 20 years of annual Pantomime at IDS.
Courage
Despite being progressively disabled, in pain much of the time, and being a wheelchair-user for his last decade, his love of life and adventure, joie de vivre and curiosity about the world had highly infectious properties. In the 1990s, despite – or because of – his part-time retirement, he wrote prolifically and was at the height of his powers when he died.
Contact us
This website is a space to showcase his work - and for people to discuss his life and work. To contribute, contact gordon.white1942@gmail.com.