Dr. William Matthews is a Senior Research Fellow for China and the World in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House. His expertise lies in China’s foreign relations, focusing on the geopolitical implications of China’s rise, including technological competition, China–US relations, and China–Global South relations.

Before joining Chatham House, he was Director of Geopolitical Research at UK AI company Adarga, and he previously taught China in comparative perspective at the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from University College London, where he studied Chinese popular religion and its relationship with worldviews and reasoning. He also studied advanced Mandarin and classical Chinese at Beijing Language and Culture University.

Dr. Matthews is the author of Cosmic Coherence (Berghahn, 2022), a book on Chinese belief systems and social theory, along with numerous research reports and scholarly articles on China.