We are pleased to announce that Professor Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu from Lingnan University (Hong Kong) will join our conference. She will give a keynote talk “Hong Kong Amusements, Film Entrepôt“.
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh is Lam Wong Yiu Wah Chair Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Yeh is a scholar of Chinese and Asian cinema studies, with a focus on film theory, film history, and media industries. She has published 11 books and over 70 academic articles. Her work examines the aesthetic, institutional, and economic dimensions of cinema, film culture, and media industry. In the past decade, she focused on producing new materials for the study of early cinema and has published two online databases, several articles, and three edited volumes: Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Republican China (University of Michigan Press, 2018); Beyond Shanghai: New Perspectives on Early Chinese Cinema (Beijing UP, 2016); and Rethinking Chinese Film Industry: New Methods, New Histories (Beijing UP, 2010). Her most recent works are 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2022, with Darrell Davis and Wenchi Lin) and The Colonial Screen: Early Cinema in Hong Kong (Oxford University Press, 2025).
This year, BACS is having its first keynote plenary session “The Future of Sino-British Relations” with Professor Kerry Brown (KCL) and Professor Steve Tsang (SOAS). The plenary session will be chaired and moderated by Cindy Yu (The Times).
Cindy Yu is a columnist and contributing editor at The Times and Sunday Times. She was formerly Assistant Editor (Broadcast) at The Spectator, a British current affairs and arts magazine, where she also hosted the magazine’s Chinese Whispers podcast. The podcast was a deep dive into all the intriguing themes of Chinese politics, society and history that often go under the radar of mainstream China reporting. She was born in Nanjing, China. She read politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Oxford, where she also read for a master of science in contemporary Chinese studies. She has written extensively about China for The Spectator, the Telegraph, Foreign Policy, among others. She is a frequent commentator on China issues for the BBC, TalkTV, RTE News, Channel 4 and GB News.
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He is an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run from the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg. He is President of the Kent Archaeological Society and an Affiliate of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University. From 2012 to 2015 he was Professor of Chinese Politics and Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this he worked at Chatham House from 2006 to 2012, as Senior Fellow and then Head of the Asia Programme. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He lived in the Inner Mongolia region of China from 1994 to 1996. He has a Master of Arts from Cambridge University, a Post Graduate Diploma in Mandarin Chinese (Distinction) from Thames Valley University, London, and a PhD in Chinese politics and language from Leeds University. Professor Brown directed the Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN) giving policy advice to the European External Action Service between 2011 and 2014. He is the author of almost 20 books on modern Chinese politics, and has written for every major international news outlet, and been interviewed by every major news channel on issues relating to contemporary China.
Steve Tsang is Professor of China Studies and Director of the China Institute, SOAS, London. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He previously served as the Head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and as Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. Before that he spent 29 years at Oxford University, where he earned his D.Phil. and worked as a Professorial Fellow, Dean, and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at St Antony’s College. He has a broad area of research interest and has published extensively, including five single authored and fourteen collaborative books. His latest (with Olivia Cheung) is The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is currently completing a new book, ‘China’s Global Strategy under Xi Jinping’, which will be published by OUP in 2026
