Professor Brian Hook
Visiting Professor of China Studies, Middlesex University Business School
Professor Brian Hook is a Visiting Professor of China Studies at Middlesex University Business School and Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.
His present research foci are the Pan-Pearl River Delta, i.e. 9+2 project, and the response of major British business interests in China, including HSBC, John Swire & Sons, Jardine Matheson and SCB, since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong.
His career has included a period in the Overseas Civil Service, when he served as Assistant Secretary for Chinese Affairs and Assistant Secretary in the Colonial Secretariat in Hong Kong before returning to academe as a founding member of the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds of which he subsequently became Head; Editor of The China Quarterly, 1980-91, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Vice Chairman of the Great Britain-China Centre; the award of an Emeritus Leverhulme Fellowship which led to research at Oxford and Cambridge Universities as a member of Merton, Oriel and Wolfson Colleges.
He has published widely on China and on Anglo-Chinese relations, including work on the history of the retrocession of Hong Kong in journals, books and other media, and for ten years, the main section of the Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation in The China Quarterly. He edited both editions of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China.
He has lectured widely on China in Asia, Europe and the United States.