Timothy Brook is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of History of the University of British Columbia. He writes on a broad range of political, social, and cultural topics, with a focus on China’s engagements with the world. Brook has published thirteen books, which have been translated into several Asian and European languages. A graduate of Harvard University, he has taught at Toronto, Stanford, and Oxford, and has held the Republic of China Chair at the University of British Columbia since 2004, until this year.

“President Xi  Jinping is in this awkward position. He has inherited the Great State modality, but he doesn’t think like a Mongol. He thinks like a Chinese who wants to go back to the way the world might have been before the Mongols ever invaded China. This has produced China’s greatest foreign policy problems, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, all of these areas. China has perhaps the most unstable set of borders of any country in the world, and it’s precisely because of this historical heritage that they can’t think their way out of.”

– Timothy Brook