Roger Garside, Born 1939
diplomat, consultant & author
Roger Garside first became interested in China when he was posted to Hong Kong as a Gurkha officer during his National Service. It was 1958, and Mao was running the disastrous Great Leap forward. After attending Clare College Cambridge he joined the Foreign Office and served as a diplomat in China for seven years, which gave him a sense of everyday life in the country and the constructed nature of the Chinese regime’s narrative of what was happening. In addition, Garside’s experience as a development banker and capital market development advisor to many countries transitioning to market economies put him on the frontlines of social and economic change, where he witnessed the benefits of democracy. He has written two books on China: China after Mao, and China Coup.
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Source: This life story is a chapter from Roger Garside’s book China Coup, published by the University of California Press in 2021. It was archived here in 2021 with the kind permission of the author and the publisher.