Ramsay Lectures
The party that ate China: the subsuming of a great culture
An exclusive lecture by Rowan Callick OBE
Rowan Callick OBE
In the second Ramsay Lecture for 2022, Walkley Award winner and distinguished China commentator Rowan Callick OBE offers unique insight into the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) and argues that the Party’s actions are subsuming China’s great culture as we know it.
Drawing on some 20 years of reporting, Rowan Callick lists examples of manipulation of Chinese life by the CPP to ensure its own survival. He discusses how the CCP control over media and social media, national celebrations and events, education, and even printing presses has worked to suppress traditional elements of Chinese culture so that only Party-friendly elements remain. During his lecture, Rowan discusses the achievements of China’s ‘marvellous civilisation’ and its cultural treasures and laments that ‘an extraordinarily pervasive and ambitious CPP’ has seen these fade into memory as it creates its own ‘grim simulacrum of a civilisation’. Despite the CCP’s tight grip over Chinese society, he believes that the will and genius of the Chinese population will ultimately see their civilisation survive.
Please join us for this insightful lecture and discussion between Rowan Callick and Ramsay Centre CEO Professor Simon Haines.
Rowan Callick OBE
Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute. He is an author, and a writer and speaker on contemporary China. He grew up in England, graduating with a BA Honours from Exeter University, and worked for a daily newspaper before moving to Papua New Guinea in 1976, becoming general manager of a locally owned publishing, printing, and retail group. In 1987 he moved to Australia, working for almost 20 years for The Australian Financial Review including as Hong Kong based China Correspondent, and for two years as a senior writer for Time magazine.
He worked for The Australian from 2006 to 2018, including two postings to Beijing as China Correspondent. He was Asia-Pacific Editor of both The Australian Financial Review and The Australian. His work has also been published by The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, and The Times. He is a member of the advisory board of the Australian Government’s National Foundation for Australia-China Relations, a governor of the Foundation for Development Cooperation, and a member of the advisory boards of La Trobe Asia and of the Australia China Relations Institute at the University of Technology, Sydney.
He was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute for International Affairs and has won two Walkley Awards and the Graham Perkin Award for Australian Journalist of the Year in 1995. He was awarded the OBE in 2015, at the nomination of the government of PNG, for services to the training of PNG journalists. He has written three books, each published in English and Chinese, the most recent being Party Time: Who Runs China and How (Black Inc in Australia, and internationally by Palgrave Macmillan as The Party Forever: Inside China’s Modern Communist Elite).