Author and historian

Born in Cambridge, UK, in 1952 I was shaped in my upbringing by two major influences.  I had the good fortune to spend several early years at a boarding school run by a wonderfully unconventional head who not only tolerated individualism but even encouraged it.  Seeing that I detested organised sport he quietly spared me the playing fields five times out of six and instead let me curl up in the school library with an endless succession of books.  I also benefited from an unusually early exposure to the outside world, travelling far and wide with my parents, the novelists CP Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson.  In autumn 1960, at the age of eight, I was deposited for a term at San Rafael, California while my parents gave lectures at Berkeley, and found myself in the thick of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election.  Four years later I accompanied my parents on a trip to meet writers in the former Soviet Union:  I still remember the Moscow streets draped with portraits of Nikita Khrushchev just two months before his deposition.  By the end of the Sixties I was travelling solo, making my way through East Africa at a time when no Lonely Planet guidebooks had yet been created to smooth the traveller’s path.  To this day I like to think of myself as a xenophile and a citizen of the world, and unlike certain British politicians I don’t consider this to be tantamount to belonging to nowhere.

Shaped by this kind of environment I was drawn from the start to the study of languages, from Latin and Ancient Greek to French and Russian.  At Oxford University I obtained a First Class degree in Classics (Honour Moderations) in 1972, and might have continued in that field if my attention hadn’t been caught by the emergence of China from two decades of isolation and the likelihood that it would play an increasing part in all of our lives.  Changing course to Chinese I graduated with a BA, First Class Honours in 1975, and then worked for some years in a trade promotion capacity for the Sino-British Trade Council (1976-79) and the China Group of The First National Bank of Chicago (1979-80).  Since that time I have devoted myself to researching and writing books on the relations between the Chinese and other peoples. 

I am the author of The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988 and Cornell University Press, 1989) and The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press, 2003).  My latest book, China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023), exploring a subject which has intrigued me since my undergraduate days, is the product of almost two decades’ study of Chinese, Russian and Western research materials.  Smaller scale projects of mine have included a chapter on Sino-African relations contributed to Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (eds. Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994) and eleven entries contributed to the Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography (eds. May Holdsworth and Christopher Munn, Hong Kong University Press, 2011).  In the course of my researches I have been appointed at different times a Research Associate of the Oriental Institute at Oxford University and an Honorary Research Associate of the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. 

In December 1994 I moved from the UK to Hong Kong, where I remain based together with my wife Amanda and our three grown-up children, Renata, Alexander and Isabella.