Stephen R. Platt

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Stephen R. Platt is a historian of modern China who explores the cultural, intellectual and military aspects of China’s encounters with the wider world in the 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent book is The Raider (Knopf, 2025), a biography of an enigmatic WWII Marine named Evans Carlson, who embedded with China’s Communist army on a personal mission from FDR in the late 1930s and tried to transplant their guerrilla tactics and a variation on their ideological training into the US military after Pearl Harbor. (He’s the man who gave “gung-ho” to the English language.) Library Journal and History Today both picked it as one of the best books of 2025 and it won the Col. Joseph Alexander Book Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.

Prof. Platt’s previous book was Imperial Twilight (Knopf, 2018), a history of the long-term origins of the Opium War that was shortlisted for the UK’s Baillie Gifford Prize. Imperial Twilight was also a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice, and was picked as a best book of the year by the Sunday Times, Financial Times and Spectator. Prior to Imperial Twilight, he wrote Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (Knopf, 2012), a military history of the Taiping Rebellion in global context that won the $75,000 Cundill History Prize. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom was also a Washington Post notable book of 2012, a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice, and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. His first book was Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China  (Harvard, 2007). Aside from his books, he has also written for the New York Times, Chinafile, the Atlantic online, the Wall Street Journal, and Late Imperial China, among other venues.

Prof. Platt has a PhD in Chinese History from Yale, where his dissertation on Hunanese nationalism won the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize. He teaches courses on modern Chinese history from the 17th century to the present day, as well as seminars on US-China relations and the writing of history.

• The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II (Knopf, 2025)
• Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018)
• Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (Knopf, 2012) 
• Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Reviews of Imperial Twilight

• New York Times Book Review
• Wall Street Journal
• Washington Post
• The Guardian (UK)
• The Spectator (UK)
• Financial Times (UK)
• Booklist (starred review)

Recent interviews (on Imperial Twilight and other subjects)

• The New York Times
• Literary Hub
• ChinaFile
• Bloomberg Benchmark podcast
• ChinaEconTalk podcast

Reviews of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

• New York Times Book Review
• Wall Street Journal (starred review)
• Washington Post
• Publishers Weekly

Interviews on Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

• Asia Society’s Asia Blog interview
• Interview with Maisonneuve Magazine
• Podcast interview with New Books on East Asian Studies

• Is China Ripe for a Revolution? New York Times op-ed)
• A Little Trouble in Big China (New York Times “Disunion” blog)
• China’s Long History of Defying the Doomsayers (Atlantic.com)
• “The United States of China,” 100 Years Later (ChinaFile)