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Paul French (born 27 August 1966) is a British author. In addition to articles about a range of subjects, he has specialised in books about modern Chinese history and contemporary Chinese society, including the murder mystery Midnight in Peking .
French was born in the London Borough of Enfield. He attended Raglan Junior School and Edmonton County School, North London. He gained an M.Phil from the University of Glasgow and studied Chinese at the City Lit. After university French worked briefly for Time Out magazine and Euromonitor in London before relocating to Shanghai. In 1997 he co-founded the independent research firm Access Asia. It specialised in analysing Chinese consumer and retail markets. In September 2011 Access Asia was acquired by the London-based market research company Mintel. French left the company and China to become a full-time writer of articles and books about China, based in London. His forthcoming novel is purportedly about the time Wallace Simpson spent in Shanghai between 1936 and 1938. A movie adaptation of Midnight in Peking is also in pre-production.
French was columnist for the China Economic Quarterly and the China Economic Review . He wrote for and was China Editor of Ethical Corporation magazine. French has contributed to Foreign Policy , The Washington Post , South China Morning Post , Shanghai Daily , The Guardian , The Cleaver Quarterly and The Diplomat . French is a contributor to the UK's Real Crime magazine.
As a book reviewer, French has contributed to the (British) Literary Review , The Washington Post , The Asian Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books . He is the author of the fortnightly "Crime and the City" column for Literary Hub . French has also made contributions to the Asia Literary Review and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal . His 2023 column 'The Ultimate China Bookshelf' for The China Project was described as for those 'struggling to keep up with contemporary China affairs'.
He is a former board member of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club and a member of the Korea Research Hub (KRH) based within Leeds and Sheffield universities. French was also a member of the editorial advisory board for Anthem Press's ‘China in the Twenty First Century’ series and the Honorary Research and Publications Director for the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland – China Branch. In 2011 French launched the Asian Arguments series of books for Zed Booksacting as the Series Editor.
French maintains the blog China Rhyming: A gallimaufry of random China history and research interests .
Shu Qingchun, known by his pen name Lao She, was a Chinese novelist and dramatist. He was a writer of 20th-century Chinese literature, known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse (茶馆). He was of Manchu ethnicity, and his works are known for their vivid use of the Beijing dialect.
Shen Dehong, best known by the pen name of Mao Dun, was a Chinese novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright, literary and cultural critic. He was highly celebrated for his realist novels, including Midnight, which depicts life in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Mao was one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and participated in a number of left-wing cultural movements during the 1920s and 1930s. He was the editor-in-chief of Fiction Monthly and helped lead the League of Left-Wing Writers. He formed a strong friendship with fellow left-wing Chinese author Lu Xun. From 1949 to 1965, Mao served as the first Minister of Culture in the People's Republic of China.
Treaty ports were the port cities in China and Japan that were opened to foreign trade mainly by the unequal treaties forced upon them by Western powers, as well as cities in Korea opened up similarly by the Qing dynasty of China and the Empire of Japan.
The Convention of Peking or First Convention of Peking is an agreement comprising three distinct unequal treaties concluded between the Qing dynasty of China and Great Britain, France, and the Russian Empire in 1860. In China, they are regarded as among the unequal treaties.
Lin Yutang was a Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator. He had an informal style in both Chinese and English, and he made compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English. Some of his writings criticized the racism and imperialism of the West.
Tu Weiming is a Chinese-born American philosopher. He is Chair Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. He is also Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University.
Dai Jinhua is a Chinese feminist cultural critic. She is a Professor in the Institute of Comparative Literature and Culture, Peking University. Her research interests include popular culture, film studies, and gender studies.
Chinese-United Kingdom relations, more commonly known as British–Chinese relations, Anglo-Chinese relations and Sino-British relations, are the interstate relations between China and the United Kingdom.
David Hawkes was a British sinologist and translator. After he was introduced to Japanese through codebreaking during the Second World War, Hawkes studied Chinese and Japanese at Oxford University between 1945 and 1947, before studying at Peking University from 1948 to 1951. He then returned to Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. and later became Shaw Professor of Chinese. In 1971, Hawkes resigned his position to focus entirely on his translation of the famous Chinese novel The Story of the Stone, which was published in three volumes between 1973 and 1980. He retired in 1984 to rural Wales before returning to live in Oxford in his final years.
Odd Arne Westad FBA is a Norwegian historian specializing in the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history. He is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he teaches in the Yale History Department and in the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, Westad held the S.T. Lee Chair of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Westad has also taught at the London School of Economics, where he served as director of LSE IDEAS. In the spring semester 2019 Westad was Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University.
Carl Crow (1884–1945) was a Highland, Missouri-born newspaperman, businessman, and writer who managed several newspapers and then opened the first Western advertising agency in Shanghai, China. He ran the agency for 19 years, creating calendar advertisements. He was also the founding editor of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.
The Peking Legation Quarter was the area in Beijing (Peking), China where a number of foreign legations were located between 1861 and 1959. In the Chinese language, the area is known as Dong Jiaomin Xiang, which is the name of the hutong through the area. It is located in the Dongcheng District, immediately to the east of Tiananmen Square.
Joseph Edkins was a British Protestant missionary who spent 57 years in China, 30 of them in Beijing. As a Sinologue, he specialised in Chinese religions. He was also a linguist, a translator, and a philologist. Writing prolifically, he penned many books about the Chinese language and the Chinese religions especially Buddhism. In his China's Place in Philology (1871), he tries to show that the languages of Europe and Asia have a common origin by comparing the Chinese and Indo-European vocabulary.
The Shanghai Pathé Record Company was one of the first major record companies in Shanghai, Republic of China, and later relocated to colonial British Hong Kong following the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The company was an Asia-Pacific subsidiary of the Pathé Records based in France, and later of EMI Group, which was broken up in 2012.
Kelly & Walsh was a notable Shanghai-based publisher of English language books, founded in 1876, which currently exists as a small chain of shops in Hong Kong specializing in art books.
Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner (1864–1954) was a British diplomat in Qing Dynasty China and sinologist specialising in superstition, myths and magic in China.
Phillip Y. Kim is a South Korean-born American writer and editor in London. His first novel, an Asian financial thriller titled Nothing Gained, was published by Penguin Books in Australia and Asia in 2013. Since 2015, Kim has been co-owner and Managing Editor of the Asia Literary Review. In 2020, he acted as Project Manager and Senior Editor for an autobiography by dancer, actor and artist Sergei Polunin, FREE: A Life in Images and Words, published by teNeues Media.
Endymion Porter Wilkinson is a British sinologist and diplomat who served as the European Union Ambassador to China and Mongolia from 1994 to 2001. He is particularly noted for Chinese History: A New Manual, the first version of which appeared in 1973, an authoritative guide to Sinology and Chinese history for which he was awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien for 2014. The 2022 revised and enlarged Sixth Edition consists of two volumes, 1.7-million-words, covering topics, primary sources, and scholarship from earliest times to 1976.
Paul G. Pickowicz. is an American historian of modern China and Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at University of California at San Diego. He specialises in the history of China in the 20th century.
The Lincheng Outrage, also known as the Lincheng Incident, refers to the seizure of the luxury "Blue Express" train traveling between Shanghai and Beijing and the taking of over 300 hostages by bandits near the town of Lincheng County, Shandong Province, China on the night of May 5–6, 1923.
