Colin Mackerras

Biography

Professor Emeritus Colin Mackerras 马克林 is a specialist on Chinese history, musical theatre and ethnic minorities, as well as Australia-China relations and Western images of China, and has published widely on all those subjects. He has written or edited over 40 books and authored nearly 200 scholarly papers about China.

He is an Officer in the Order of Australia and a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities of Australia. He won a Centenary Medal (Australia) in 2003 ‘for distinguished service to education and international relations’. He won a Friendship Award 友谊奖 from the Chinese government in 2014 and in 2015 a Special China Book Award 中华图书特殊贡献奖, given to foreigners who have made outstanding contributions in spreading Chinese culture through their writings.

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1939, he has visited China over 70 times. He worked at Griffith University from 1974 to 2004 and has been a professor Emeritus at the University since retirement. He was founding Australian director of the Tourism Confucius Institute at Griffith University and is currently honorary director. He taught first at the Beijing Foreign Studies University from 1964 to 1966 and has taught there many times since. He has also taught many times at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.

His most important books include
(1) The Rise of the Peking Opera, 1770–1870 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972); (2) Chinese Drama, A Historical Survey (New World Press, Beijing, 1990); (3) China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1994); (4) China’s Minority Cultures: Identities and Integration Since 1912 (Longman Australia, Melbourne, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1995); (5) Western Images of China, Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1999); (6) China’s Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation (RoutledgeCurzon, London, 2003); (7) Western Perspectives on the People’s Republic of China, Politics, Economy and Society (World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 2015); and (8) 我看中国1949 年以来中国在西方的形象, translated by Zhang Yongxian 张勇先 and Wu Di 吴迪 (Zhongguo Renmin University Press, Beijing, 2013).

He has also attended numerous conferences on Asia, especially China, in Australia, China (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Korea and the United Kingdom