Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along", adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years".
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.
Starting in the early 1970s, Wakeman chaired academic committees formed to expand cultural and scholastic relations with China.
[2] In 1987, he helped draft an appeal signed by 160 American scholars calling on the Chinese government to stop oppressing intellectuals.
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 on the Qing is the two volume The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in the 17th Century (1985), which won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for 1987.