Ezra Vogel, a professor emeritus at Harvard Universit, dies at 90, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard said on Sunday.

Vogel passed away on Sunday in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a scholar on China, Japan and Asia studies, he served as director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 1973–1975 and 1995–1999. He officially retired in 2000 but remained active in research and East Asia related activities.

He wrote a number of masterpieces on Japan and China, including "Japan as Number One”in 1979 and monumental biography about former Chinese leader “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China” in 2011. Vogel once lived in South China's Guangdong Province a total of a year and visited China regularly since the late 1980s.