Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture: Yuan Yang MP

Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy presents the revived Rita Hinden memorial lecture, given this year by Yuan Yang MP.

Doors will open at 6:00 for a 6:30 start. We have booked a nearby pub for socialising and informal discussion afterards.

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Yuan Yang is the Member of Parliament for Earley and Woodley, and currently serves as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before standing for Parliament, she spent eight years working as a journalist at the Financial Times, where she was previously FT Europe-China correspondent, and before that their Beijing deputy bureau chief.

Yuan is an economist by training, and after her master's degree, founded Rethinking Economics, a charity that campaigns to make economics teaching more relevant to the real world. In 2024 she published her first book, Private Revolutions, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. The book describes China's economic transformation and the rise and fall of social mobility, told through the coming-of-age stories of four millennial Chinese women.

Dr. Rita Hinden (1909-1971) was a socialist and internationalist activist who played an important role in the intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century Labour Party - most notably as secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, and as editor of the influential journal Socialist Commentary. After her death, an earlier iteration of the Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture ran from 1972-1981, with speakers including David Marquand, Roy Jenkins, and Michael Young.

Renewal has chosen to revive this Lecture because we believe that Rita Hinden’s life and work embodied a commitment to the kind of holistic, internationalist, and intellectually engaged social democratic politics that we believe to be more necessary than ever today. With this revived lecture, we will each year invite a figure from within the labour movement who speaks to these values in the world today.

This event is generously supported by City St. George's University of London's Department of International Politics.