Research Fellow and Curator, Hoover Institution

 

Chinese Policy in Latin America

For the past 41 years William Ratliff has been a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Oakland, California and Washington, D.C. based  Independent Institute for public policy research and government reforms. Ratliff has been curator of  the American  collection of the Hoover Archives for 23 years.

He earned his PhD from the University of Washington in Chinese and Latin American histories. He has visited more than 100 countries as professor, researcher and consultant, and has taught or given lectures at universities and institutes on four continents, including the Austrian Defense Academy in Vienna and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

He has published a dozen books and thousands of academic and newspaper articles on politics, political and economic development, and U.S. foreign policy on four continents in English, Spanish and Chinese.

Over the past decade Ratliff has focused on the cultural foundations of societies, and comparative studies of Asia and Latin America, with results published in academic journals, and in major  U.S. and many foreign newspapers. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, PBS, APR, BBC, Voice of America and the Online News Hour with Jim Lehrer. 

In another aspect of his life, William Ratliff wrote classical music reviews for 25 years for the Palo Alto Times, the Peninsula Times Tribune (where he was also chief editorial writer), the Los Angeles Times and the Metropolitan Opera’s Opera News.