Stephen Vines

Stephen Vines is an author, award winning journalist and public speaker.

His books include Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously – Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium and Market Panic and Food Gurus.

After working as a political policy researcher, he started his career as a freelance journalist specialising in Middle East affairs. He went on to focus on business and industrial matters, working primarily at The Observer where he became the Deputy Business Editor before moving to become the Labour Editor, covering the miner’s strike, the UK’s biggest political and industrial story of the 1980s.

In 1987 Vines moved to Hong Kong as South East Asia Correspondent for The Observer. Five years later he became The Guardian’s Hong Kong Correspondent and a regular contributor to papers such as the Asian Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and the Daily Telegraph. He also worked extensively in the broadcast media and became a regular contributor to the BBC, ABC (Australia) and Deutsche Welle and Radio Vaticana.

In 1993 he became the founding Chief Editor of Eastern Express, responsible for all editorial aspects of the paper’s launch, establishing a broadsheet newspaper in the record time of four months. The paper quickly established a reputation as Hong Kong’s most lively English language daily.

Books in order of publication:

Hong Kong: China’s New Colony – 1998

The Years Of Living Dangerously: Asia From Financial Crisis To The New Millennium = [Wei Chi] – 1999

The Story of St John’s Cathedral, 2001

Colonial Hong Kong, 2002

Market Panic: Wild Gyrations, Risks and Opportunities in Stock Markets – 2005

Food Gurus – 2012

Sai Kung for All Seasons, 2013

Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship – 2021