Kerry Brown leads the Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN) and is head of the Asia Programme at Chatham House.  He was born in 1967, and educated at Dartford Grammar School, Kent, and then Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (MA in English), London (Post Graduate Diploma in Mandarin Chinese, Distinction) and Leeds (Ph D in Modern Chinese History, Politics and Language). He worked in Japan as a teacher from 1990 to 1991, and then in the Inner Mongolian region of China from 1994 to 1996, before returning to the UK. He worked in business dealing with China from 1996 to 1998, before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, he worked on the Greater China desk at the Foreign Office, London, and then from 2000 to 2003 he was First Secretary at the British Embassy, Beijing. He worked as Head of the Indonesia, East Timor and Philippines Section at the Foreign Office in London from 2003 to 2005, before being appointed Head of Policy at UK Visas in 2005. He left the Foreign Office in late 2005 and was appointed Associate Fellow on the Asia Programme at Chatham House, then Senior Fellow, and, in early 2011, Head of the Asia Programme.

Dr Brown is an Associate of the Centre for International Diplomacy at SOAS, the Centre for Chinese Studies at Nottingham University, an associate scholar at the Mongolia and Inner Asian Studies Unit at Cambridge University and of the IDEE centre at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia: A Function of Language, Politics and Violence  (2006), Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press, London, 2007),The Rise of the Dragon – Chinese Investment Flows in the Reform Period (2008), Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China  (2009),  Ballot Box China: Village Democracy in the PRC (2011) and editor of China 2020(2011).  He has just finished a political biography of Hu Jintao, to be published in early 2012.  He has one daughter.