Professor Kerry Brown

Kerry Brown is a leading authority on contemporary China in both Australia and the United Kingdom. He is currently Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, where he is Professor of Chinese Politics.

He is also an Associate Fellow of Chatham House, London, and a Senior Fellow at Nottingham University and the LSE. Earlier Professor Brown worked for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London and Beijing, where he was First Secretary in the British embassy. Professor Brown’s main specialities are the politics and society of modern China and its international relations.

He has written, lectured and broadcast widely on these topics, his most recent books (both published in 2014) being Carnival China: China in the Era of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping and The New Emperors: Power and the Party in China. He is also the chief editor of the widely praised Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, also published this year.

Conference presentation

‘The moral basis of Party rule under Xi Jinping, and the Party's search for a system of ethics in the 21st century’