Daniel A. Bell was born in Montreal, Canada. He obtained his B.A. at McGill University and his masters and doctoral degrees at Oxford University. He taught at the National University of Singapore, the University of Hong Kong, the City University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and he has held research fellowships at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is currently Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy and Director of the Center for International and Comparative Political Theory at Tsinghua University (Beijing).
He is the author of The Spirit of Cities (with Avner de-Shalit) (2011), China’s New Confucianism (rev. ed. 2010), Beyond Liberal Democracy (2006), and East Meets West (2000), all published by Princeton University Press. He is also the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1993). He has edited and coedited nine books, including four with Cambridge University Press and three with Princeton University Press. He is the series editor of the Princeton-China translation series. He coedited and wrote the introduction for the first book in the series Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power
(2011) as well as the second book, A Confucian Constitutional Order (2012), both published by Princeton University Press. His coedited book The Idea of Political Meritocracy will be published next year by Cambridge University Press. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, Project Syndicate, and to Chinese language publications (Chinese name:
贝淡宁). His writings have been translated in 23 languages. He has been frequently interviewed on BBC, CBC, NPR, CNN, ABC, as well as Chinese and Francophone media outlets. He is a regular participant at World Economic Forum meetings in Davos and China.