Kerry Brown (historian)


Kerry Brown is a British academic, author and sinologist specialising in Chinese history, international relations and politics. Brown is a current Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College, London, a Member of the Council of the Kent Archeological Society, and Associate Fellow at Chatham House. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and from 1998 to 2005, he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office as First Secretary of the Embassy of the United Kingdom, Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. From 2011 to 2014, he led the Europe China Research and Advice Network funded by the European Union. Brown's main interests are around the development of politics and society in China from 1949 onwards, and he has written in particular about the Communist Party of China as a cultural rather than a purely political organisation and about contemporary elite political figures such as Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, and about China's international relations. He has also published work academically on the uses of language and its relationship to institutions and power structures in China, and in 2017 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Education

Brown holds an M.A. from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Chinese politics and language from Leeds University. He has a postgraduate diploma in Chinese from the University of West London.