Thread by @AMFChina

In this short thread I share with you how I became a China watcher & China practitioner.

My journey started in the summer of 1989. Do you remember Tiananmen? Or Michael Chang in the French Open?

That's when I started paying attention to Asia at the age of twelve 1/11

In 1996 I decided to study Mandarin Chinese.

I found mainland China's authoritarian political system rather cruel & arbitrary.

I spent a year in Taiwan and graduated from SOAS in 2001.

I then did a PhD on political development aid to China at Free University Berlin 2/11

I wrote my PhD *in parallel* to my work as International Advisor to the China Association for NGO Cooperation, a government-organised NGO (GONGO).

From 2003-07 I raised funds & implemented a range of capacity building projects for Chinese civil society organisations 3/11

After relocating to the UK in 2007 I continued to implement civil society projects in China on behalf of international clients such as the American Bar Association, European Union & FCO, and Geneva Global.

After Xi Jinping came to power, such projects gradually stopped 4/11

Luckily I had a second leg to stand on. Since 2007 I was working as a lecturer at the University of Nottingham. This allowed me to share my insights with my students and compare my practical experiences in China with the evolving academic discourse about contemporary China 5/11

And here you have it. This is my journey over the past thirty years in six tweets. In the following I would like to highlight five academic articles / books which are informed by my consultancy-based research. In my scholarship I always try to combine theory and practice 6/11

In 2011 I reflected on my role as an academic practitioner in the article "Bridging the Gap: Pracademics in Foreign Policy", which I co-authored with Ann Marie Murphy. You can read the open access article here. 7/11

eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3234/1/Bridgin…

In 2015 I published an edited book on "Civil Society Contributions to Policy Innovation in the PR China", which included contributions by both leading academics and Chinese civil society practitioners. In @LizEconomy's podcast I talk about the book. 8/11

cfr.org/podcasts/podca…

In 2017 I published "The Contested Role of Foreign and Domestic Foundations in the PRC: Policies, Positions, Paradigms, Power", which was based on 12 in-depth interviews conducted in 2014 with foundation representatives and CSO leaders. 9/11

bacsuk.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

In 2019 I published an open-access article on "The Emergence of Citizen Diplomacy in European Union–China Relations". Here I portrayed practitioners who I had met during my consultancy work in mainland China. You can access the article here. 10/11

tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…

And in 2020 I published my monograph "The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Sharp Power and its Discontents" with Routledge. You can watch the video below for a brief introduction to the book. 11/11

https://twitter.com/AMFChina/status/1162838680714665984?s=20