BiographyWakeman was born in Kansas City, Kansas. His father was the novelist Frederic E. Wakeman, Sr. (publishing as "Frederic Wakeman"), who often moved the family to live abroad in places like Bermuda, France, and Cuba. He graduated from Harvard University in 1959, where he majored in European history and literature. After Harvard, he went on to earn master's degrees from the University of Cambridge and at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris. While studying at the Institut d'études politiques, he switched to Chinese studies. In 1962 he published a novel, Seventeen Royal Palms Drive, under the name "Evans Wakeman." Wakeman received his Ph.D. in Far Eastern history at University of California, Berkeley in 1965, under the supervision of Professor Joseph Levenson. That year he began teaching at Berkeley, where he remained his entire career and retired as the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Asian Studies. Wakeman served as the director of "Institute of East Asian Studies" at Berkeley from 1990 to 2001. Upon his retirement from Berkeley in May 2006, he received the "Berkeley Citation", the highest honor given at U.C. Berkeley.
Academic CareerStarting in the early 1970s, Wakeman also chaired academic committees formed to expand cultural and scholastic relations with China. In 1987, he helped draft an appeal signed by 160 American scholars calling on the Chinese government to stop oppressing intellectuals. Wakeman was also the president of American Historical Association in 1992 and served as the President of the Social Science Research Council from 1986 to 1989.
He was the author of ten books, seven published by the University of California Press. His first monograph, published in 1966 and based on his doctoral disseration, was Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861. Strangers at the Gate focused on social disorder in the Pearl River Delta in the aftermath of the First Opium War and extensively utilized documents seized by the British from the Guangdong-Guangxi Governor-General's office. The most extensive and voluminous of Wakeman's works is The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in the 17th Century. published in 1985. Another notable work is Modern East Asia: essays in interpretation, published in New York in 1970.
In the mid 1970s Wakeman began to focus on the history of Shanghai. Best known of these works are the Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service, and his Shanghai Trilogy: Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937; Shanghai Badland, 1937-1942, The Red Star Over Shanghai, 1942-1952 (posthumous). These works encompassed the city's history under the various regimes since the formation of the city, that is, from the Nationalist government, to the Wang Jingwei's puppet regime, and to the communist's takeover.
Wakeman retired from teaching in May 2006. He died later that year in Lake Oswego, Oregon of liver cancer at the age of 68.