How Ezra Vogel strove to break down barriers By CHEN WEIHUA in Brussels | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2020-12-28 08:46 Share CLOSE Vogel is interviewed by China Daily at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct 15, 2011. CHEN WEIHUA/CHINA DAILY Role model for China scholars showed broad vision When 28-year-old Ezra Vogel completed his PhD in sociology at Harvard University in 1958, his thesis was on family and mental health in the United States. His studies had nothing to do with East Asia, an area for which he later became a top scholar. After he graduated, Vogel went to Japan in 1958, where he stayed for two years to study the language and do fieldwork to gauge if his research was applicable in another culture.