Yuri Pines

Yuri Pines (Hebrew: יורי פינס; Russian: Юрий Анатольевич Пинес; born 1964) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli sinologist and the Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Pines was born in Kiev, Ukraine and immigrated to Israel in 1979. He studied under Lothar von Falkenhausen at UCLA and under Liu Zehua at Nankai University in Tianjin, earning a PhD at Hebrew University in 1998. He also earned his M.A. and B.A. in East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University in 1994 and 1989, respectively. Pines attributes the endurance of the unified Chinese state, in both the imperial and contemporary periods, "to the fact that philosophers of the Warring States period, whatever their other differences, agreed on the principle of unification under a powerful ruler, and this principle became the basis of Chinese political thought."