Richard McGregor

Senior Fellow for East Asia
Areas of expertise

China’s political system and the workings and structure of the communist party; China’s foreign relations, with an emphasis on ties with Japan, the two Koreas, and Southeast Asia; Australia’s relations with Asia.

Richard McGregor
Biography
Publications
News and media

Richard McGregor is Senior Fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, Australia’s premier foreign policy think tank, in Sydney.

Richard is a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and the author of numerous books on East Asia.

His most recent book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash, was published by Penguin Australia as a Lowy Institute Paper in August 2019. His book on Sino-Japanese relations, Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century (Penguin Books, 2017), was called “shrewd and knowing” by the Wall Street Journal and the “best book of the year” by the Literary Review in the United Kingdom. In late 2018, it won the Prime Minister of Australia’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His book, The Party (Penguin Books, 2010), on the inner-workings of the Chinese Communist Party, was translated into seven languages and chosen by the Asia Society and Mainichi Shimbun in Japan as their book of the year.

Richard is a Senior Associate (Non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in the United States. He was also a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center and George Washington University in Washington DC from 2014-2016.

So how can China tame Trump? By cribbing from Japan.
Commentary
So how can China tame Trump? By cribbing from Japan.
Originally published in The Washington Post.Richard McGregor
The Beijing way of trade punishment
The Beijing way of trade punishment
China has a bigger adversary to contend with before picking fights with Australia.
With China or without?
Commentary
With China or without?
Originally published in Nikkei Asian Review Richard McGregor
The Boao confidence
The Boao confidence
Xi Jinping didn’t mention Beijing’s current stand-off with Washington, but the contrast he was drawing was clear.
The collapse of the “Chinese collapse” theory
Commentary
The collapse of the “Chinese collapse” theory
Originally published in the Australian Financial Review on 9 April 2018. Richard McGregor
Q&A: China’s mounting great wall of debt
Q&A: China’s mounting great wall of debt
Richard McGregor talks to Dinny McMahon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, about his grass-roots tour of the underworld of Chinese finance.
Xi Jinping must defuse China's debt bomb
Commentary
Xi Jinping must defuse China's debt bomb
Originally published in Australian Financial Review. Richard McGregor
Xi Jinping and the grip of the party
Xi Jinping and the grip of the party
Xi Jinping is determined to consolidate and strengthen China’s ruling communist party’s grip on government and the military, the intelligentsia and civil society.
Xi Jinping’s ideological ambitions
Commentary
Xi Jinping’s ideological ambitions
World communism isn’t Beijing’s goal, but it is encouraging the spread of authoritarianism. Originally published in The Wall Street Journal. Richard McGregor
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