Roger is a former diplomat who served in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and again 1976-9, when Mao died and Deng launched the Reform Era. He then wrote the highly acclaimed Coming Alive: China After Mao, which was described in the New York Times as “One of the most cogent and elegant accounts of revolutionary China to have appeared in the West.”

Apart from twenty years in diplomacy, Roger has worked in the World Bank and the London Stock Exchange, was a Professor of China Studies at the US Navy Post-Graduate School, and spent ten years running his own company advising countries in transition from state socialism to the market economy on the development of their capital markets, including Russia, Hungary and Vietnam.

His experience on the frontline of radical change in emerging markets and developed economies has equipped to comment on financial and economic as well as political issues. He has broadcast for the BBC World Service and the BBC Chinese Service, reviewed China books for the Economist, the Spectator, Prospect and China Rights Forum, and contributed op-eds to leading daily and weekly publications.