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Oldenborg Center
Please join us for a special conversation between a former journalist and writer, Adam Brookes, and a university professor, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, as they discuss China. The speakers will reflect on the tense state of US-China relations in 1999 and again in 2018, while also talking more generally about their experiences writing about Chinese current events for different kinds of publications, from newspapers to novels to scholarly journals.
This presentation will take the form of a conversation between the two men, who first met in Beijing almost 20 years ago at a dramatic moment in recent Chinese history: NATO bombs had just hit the PRC Embassy in Belgrade and in response young people were holding anti-American and anti-British demonstrations.
Brookes covered the event as a correspondent for the BBC. Wasserstrom, who happened to be in the city to speak at an academic conference, watched the protests and was later interviewed about them by Brookes, who was then a journalist but now writes spy novels for a living.
Brookes is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of spy novels that move between China, the United States, Britain and other settings. Before writing "Night Heron," the first work in that series, he worked for the BBC covering, among other places and topics, China, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the Pentagon. His most recent book is "The Spy's Daughter." Wasserstrom is Chancellor's Professor of History at UC Irvine. He has written for many newspapers and magazines as well as for academic journalists and his most recent book, as co-author, is the third edition of "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know," published in March.
