Shades of Autocracy
Michael Sheridan is a well-known foreign correspondent who worked as the Sunday Times Far East Correspondent from 1996 to 2016. He has covered the rise of China, handover of Hong Kong and news across the region from Peshawar to Pyongyang. This lecture will draw on his 2024 biography of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping ‘The Red Emperor’ to examine models of authoritarian governance, compare the Chinese version to other examples in Asia and discuss how globalisation has furthered the export of political ideas and the promotion of alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy.
225th Lecture Series Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow
Date: Wednesday 04 November 2026
Time: 19:30 - 21:30
Venue: Charles Wilson Building
Category: Public lectures,
Michael Sheridan read history at Jesus College, Cambridge, and became a
foreign correspondent in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. As well as his work for the Sunday Times, he worked for Reuters, ITN television news and The Independent reporting on wars in the Middle East, international diplomacy and European politics, with postings in Rome, Beirut and Jerusalem.
He is also the author of The Gate to China (2021), an acclaimed history of Hong Kong, chosen as a Book of the Year by BBC History. He has interviewed many historical figures including the Burmese icon Aung San Suu Kyi and the first leader of independent Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. His book The Red Emperor, (2024) has been translated into fourteen languages, including Polish, Japanese and Ukrainian.
His first book, Romans: Their Lives and Times (1994), was described by Richard
Holmes in the Daily Telegraph as "a subtly unfolding series of ten essays, each
shaped and crafted like a short story…brilliantly revealing." His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, The Spectator, The Tablet, The Times Literary Supplement and the Hong Kong Economic Journal. His new book Beirut 1983 examines the origins of the Long War in the Middle East and is to be published by Hachette in January 2027.