May 18, 2021 Charles Parton is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank and a former British diplomat who served in or around China for 22 years. He also worked on Chinese diplomacy at a European level, as first counselor to the EU Delegation in Beijing. He now works for himself as a consultant on all things China and advises the UK parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Parton’s father served in the British Army, so as a young boy, he traveled widely with his family while on vacation from school in the UK. He was drawn to the Chinese language during his time in Taiping, Malaysia, a city with a large ethnic Chinese population, and chose to learn Chinese when he joined the Foreign Office in 1979