Date: Thursday 25 August 2022
Time: 4.00 – 6.00pm AEST
Location: IAC at Building EA, Western Sydney University Parramatta South Campus
Corner of Victoria Road and James Ruse Drive, Parramatta, NSW 2150
About this event
The Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (IAC) has launched a distinctive, face-to-face conversation series entitled My China Story. The aim is to build an understanding of multifaceted China through sharing lived experiences and insightful stories from China by Australians from a wide range of fields and professions. We are thrilled to announce that Episode Three will feature one of the foremost experts on China and East Asia, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Richard McGregor.
Richard McGregor has a distinguished career as a journalist, researcher and author in Australia and internationally. He is a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute, Australia’s leading foreign policy think tank. He was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a top think tank in the world in Washington D.C. (2015) and a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University (2016). Richard has lectured widely in the United States, Asia, Europe and the Pacific on Chinese politics and foreign policy.
Richard started his journalistic career as a student at the University of Sydney by writing for Honi Soit, the student newspaper; Glebe & Western Weekly, covering local council politics; and Rolling Stone magazine, writing about rock music. After graduation, he worked at The Sydney Morning Herald and later the ABC while studying Chinese part-time. In 1989, he moved to Taiwan to work as a freelancer and his work included delivering the morning news on the old US Armed Forces radio station. Richard was then posted to Japan for the ABC. After five years in Tokyo, he moved to Hong Kong and then Beijing to establish the Beijing office for The Australian from 1995 to 1998. After two years back in Canberra as the political correspondent for The Australian, Richard was hired by the British newspaper, The Financial Times, as a bureau chief in Shanghai and then Beijing (2000 to 2009). This was the period when China joined the world trading system and took off, growing at 10% plus a year. China became the workshop-of-the-world, which meant, for a reporter for The Financial Times, spending a lot of time in factories. Following that, Richard worked for The Financial Times in London and then as Washington bureau chief for four years (2011 to 2015).
In 2010, Richard published his bestseller, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers. It was described as a “masterpiece” by The Economist and won numerous awards including the Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award in New York for the best book on Asia and the Mainichi Shimbun Award in Japan. This book was translated into seven languages. In 2017, Richard published his next book Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century. The book was described as “shrewd and knowing” by The Wall Street Journal, and a “compelling and impressive” read by The Economist. It won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in Australia (2018).
In this conversation, Richard will share his stories on his fascination over China and Asia, and his many insights into Chinese society and the Party.
The session will be opened by Professor Jocelyn Chey AM, the founding director of IAC and Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney. Professor Chey was Cultural Counsellor in the Australia Embassy in Beijing (1975–1978); Senior Trade Commissioner in the Australian Embassy in Beijing (1985–1988); and Consul-General for Australia in Hong Kong (1992–1995). The program will conclude with Chinese Music Appreciation 3: A historical and contemporary account of the yangqin, featuring the highly accomplished yangqin performer Hu Lei 胡磊 and her students.
