BHP Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University (the Chair) was an initiative of the Australia-China Council (ACC), the Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC), BHP Group and Peking University. Established in 2012, it was the first high-profile, privately funded Australian Studies Chair in China, and reflected the growing academic engagement between the two countries. Providing academic leadership to a network of more than 30 Australian Studies Centres in various Chinese Universities, the Chair has given more Chinese university students the opportunity to learn about Australia. The Chair role was fulfilled by Emeritus Professor David Walker AM (2013-2016), Emeritus Professor Greg McCarthy (2016-2019) and Emeritus Professor Pookong kee (2019-2022).  

Third Chair (2019 - 2022) – Emeritus Professor Pookong Kee

KEE Pookong was the third BHP Chair of Australian Studies, located in the School of International Studies, Peking University.  He is also a member of the Academic Committee of the Institute of State Governance Studies at Peking University’s School of Government.  

Before his secondment to the BHP Chair in China, he was Professor and Director of the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne from 2010 till 2018. He has held various senior academic and public service positions in the Asia-Pacific region, including as Director of the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore, Professor of the Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies and Director of the Ritsumeikan Center for Asia Pacific Studies at the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan.

He was closely involved in research on migration, population and multiculturalism at two federal policy research institutes, the former Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs (AIMA) and the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research (BIPR).  As the Bureau’s Assistant Director, he served as an Assistant Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. He has served on various national and international boards, including the Museums Board of Victoria, Asialink, inaugural Board of the Immigration and Hellenic Antiquities Museum at Old Customs House, Promote Mandarin Council of Singapore, and Japanese Association for the Promotion of State-of-the Art Medical Healthcare.

His recent teaching and research interests are in international migration, international education, Chinese diaspora studies, Australia-Asia relations, and Asia-Pacific affairs.

Professor McCarthy holds a Personal Chair of Australian Politics at the University of Western Australia. His main research interests and extensive publications are on Australian politics and political culture. His research focuses on transitional change within and between nations, exploring how material, cultural and political forces create instability and how nations, institutions and people adapt to uncertainty. His seminal book Things Fall Apart: A History of the State Bank of South Australia, analysed the dynamic relations between global financial change and its dramatic effect on public banking in Australia. Recently, he has written on the internationalisation of Australian higher education effected by Chinese students studying in Australia, and the steady growth of Australian students studying in China. He has also explored the political implications of the conversion of Australian higher education from an elite to a mass education system. In addition, he has investigated the international relationship between Australia and China as read through the policies of contemporary Australia governments.

His professorship at the University of Western Australia compliments that university’s strong commitment to research and teaching in Australian studies and his appointment as the BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University coincides with the Harvard Chair in Australian Studies being held by the renowned University of Western Australia academic, Professor Philip Mead.

As a well-established professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University, Professor Walker AM has written extensively on Australian representations of Asia. His prize-winning book Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850 to 1939 (UQP, 1999) has been translated into Chinese and published by China Renmin University Press (2009). An English edition was published in India in the same year and a Hindi translation will be published in 2014. He is the co-editor with Agnieszka Sobocinska of Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (UWA Publishing, 2012).

A collection of his Asia-related essays has been published under the title Encountering Turbulence: Asia in the Australian Imaginary (Readworthy, 2013). His recently published personal history, Not Dark Yet, was translated into Chinese by Professor Li Yao and published by The People’s Literature Publishing House, Beijing, in 2014. Professor Walker AM is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.