25 Mar 2026 Britain, China, and the World: 400 Years of Turbulence, Reversals, and Talk

The China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Research Hub, Faculty of Arts, presents:

Britain, China, and the World: 400 Years of Turbulence, Reversals, and Talk

Speaker:

Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies, King’s College London

Moderator:

Daniel Vukovich, Professor of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Time: 5:00–6:50 pm Hong Kong Time

Venue: CPD-LG.34, LG/F, Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome. Registration is required.

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=105827

In this lecture-discussion, Kerry Brown will critically examine how Britain’s relationship with China has shaped the modern world. Chinese art, philosophy and science have had a profound effect upon British culture, while the long history of British exploitation is still bitterly remembered in China today. But how has their interaction changed over time, up to the present moment of general global crisis and turmoil? And how might ‘talking to China’ work better in the future?

From the early days of the East India Company through the violence of the Opium Wars to present-day disputes over Hong Kong, Prof. Brown charts this turbulent and intriguing relationship in full. Britain has always sought to dominate China economically and politically, while China’s ideas and exports—from tea and Chinoiserie to porcelain and silk—have continued to fascinate in the west. But by the later twentieth century, the balance of power began to shift in China’s favour, with global consequences. Brown shows how these interactions changed the world order—and argues that an understanding of Britain’s relationship with China is now more vital than ever.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. From 2012 to 2015, he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this he worked at Chatham House, as Senior Fellow and then Head of the Asia Programme. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He is the author of twenty books on modern Chinese politics and a trustee of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, including The Great Reversal: A History of Britain-China Relations, 1600 to the Present and Talking to China: The Future of UK-China Relations (2nd Edition).

cfp: “After the Rise: China in/and the Global Conjuncture.”

Date: June 19-21, 2026 (to be confirmed)
Venue: The University of Hong Kong

Organized by the CHAGS Research Hub @https://arts.hku.hk/research/CHAGS

Funded via HKU Arts Faculty Conference Grant.

Co-sponsored by Fudan University.

• Travel support available for non-local participants.

Outcomes: special issue (journal) and/or edited volume [in 2027, tba]

Expressions of interest & queries welcome.

Conference language: English, but bilingual.

500 word ABSTRACTS by Feb 27, 2026 to:

chags.hku@gmail.com or vukovich@hku.hk

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born ; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Antonio Gramsci [1930].

Structure of Feeling, “New Times,” Conjuncture

 If we hold one thing in common globally, it is the felt sense that we are in a new era that represents a rupture, or break, from the recent past. It is a mood, a feeling, but it has its roots. It reflects world historic changes in the order of things, on top of the manifold, internal crises within and across nations and societies. Whether conceived as interregnum or as a new conjuncture (which implies an outcome), these are new times. This conference seeks to better understand them. We live after the rise of the PRC and during the relative decline of the US-West and its normative powers. What comes next is uncertain, but a return to the past is impossible. How to understand, theoretically and concretely, this new period? A period in which the PRC is absolutely central, and yet cannot and moreover does not wish to constitute a new centrifugal force at the center of the world. A period in which we lack a ready-to-hand language to describe the conjuncture (capitalism vs socialism, authoritarianism vs freedom, e.g.) and do not need the arthritic jargonizing of bad cultural studies or ‘1960s’ (Franco-American) theory. As an old world dies, it takes with it the hippies, the boomers, the weedy ‘new left’ and an epoch of simple-minded anti-statism. Likewise, for the Occidentalist fever dreams of the global 1980s in China, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

 Ours is a period and context further defined by an increasing multi-polarity (via a vis the global south and, e.g., the Belt Road, BRICS,
ASEAN) as well as the demise of neo-liberalism. The shady aftermath of that political-economic movement remains. Brexit, global Trumpism, riots, xenophobia, anarchic yet live-streamed protest movements/riots, conspiracism, tariff and war mongering, Sinophobia, and more, are part of that aftermath. Neo-liberalism exists as a zombie, much like its ancestral discourse from the Enlightenment. Decades of austerity, waves of labor-displacing new technology, new media trumping knowledge production, the hollowing out of social democracy and community, staggering inequalities, all help characterize the present. But so does China.

    For all its own inequalities and problems, the PRC has mostly outflanked neo-liberalism and pursued its own, globally embedded, path of development. It has lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty, radically improved food availability (to pick an untrendy ‘social indicator’), highly developed its technology, and refused to become ‘the same’ as the US-West. It has retained its sovereignty and moreover its state capacity, and moved on its own foundations. This does not mean it has ‘won’ so much as survived (and in many ways thrived). Surely there are lessons to be learned from this, and its ‘example’ has not gone unnoticed worldwide. What however might these be, and moreover what do they tell us about the new, nascent period? What have we learned, and what are we learning?

    We seek neither to mourn nor to celebrate this new conjuncture. We seek to better describe and explain it, and the changes (and potentials) it represents, politically, intellectually, economically, and sociologically. Dialectics, not debunking.

    This new conjuncture comes after whatever the meanings and ambitions of the 20th century were. To arrive at an analysis of it, we must think within and against our received discourses and knowledge about what constitutes development, progress, the future, the meaning of society, growth, globalization, and politics. This applies East and West, North and South, be it the anarchist sublime or liberal catechisms of the West, or the blind faith in free trade, growth, and high tech elsewhere.

    The period we inhabit demands renewed, re-energized thought and criticism, without which we fail to adequately understand either the new world that struggles to be born or the morbid symptoms and positive potentials of the interregnum.