27 Facts About Martin Jacques

Martin Jacques was born on 1945 and is a British journalist, editor, academic, political commentator and author.

Martin Jacques was educated at King Henry VIII School, a direct grant grammar school in Coventry, followed by the University of Manchester, where he graduated with a first-class Honours degree in economics in 1967 and stayed on to take an MA in 1968.

Between 1969 and 1971 Martin Jacques tutored undergraduates in economic history and economics at King's College, Cambridge.

Martin Jacques joined the Communist Party of Great Britain at eighteen, and at both Manchester and Cambridge universities was very active in student politics.

In 1977 Martin Jacques was chosen to succeed James Klugmann as editor of Marxism Today, the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party, to which he had contributed for a number of years.

The well-known right-wing columnist Peregrine Worsthorne commented in The Sunday Telegraph seven years later that Martin Jacques had 'transformed Marxism Today into a publication which has appeal outside the narrow, coffin-like, confines of the party': he increased the readership from 3,500 to 15,600, at the same time as the membership of the Communist Party declined from 26,000 to 7,500.

The transformation of Marxism Today under Martin Jacques's leadership did not please everyone in the Communist Party, and in September 1982 Mick Costello, the party's industrial organiser, attacked Marxism Today in the pages of the party's daily newspaper, The Morning Star, after Marxism Today had carried an article by Tony Lane which was critical of some shop stewards.

Kevin Halpin, another senior party figure, declared that 'The conclusion that I draw is that Martin Jacques is not a fit person to be the editor and I shall so move'.

Martin Jacques survived censure by the party's executive committee but many have seen this episode as triggering the process which led to the eventual split in the Communist Party between hardliners and reformists.

At around this time Tony Benn noted in his diary that Martin Jacques 'came to collect my corrected proofs.

In October 1988, through the pages of Marxism Today, Martin Jacques launched the 'New Times' project, which sought to understand a post-Fordist and increasingly globalised world.

Martin Jacques moved the authorship as well as the readership of Marxism Today way beyond the shrinking confines of the Communist Party, and among those who wrote for the magazine were Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair, and it even featured interviews with Conservative Party politicians Chris Patten, Michael Heseltine and Edwina Currie.

Martin Jacques decided to close the magazine at the end of 1991, when it was still riding high.

In November 1998 Marxism Today returned for a one-off special issue edited by Martin Jacques which extended this critique, with contributions by Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, Will Hutton, Richard Wilkinson, Suzie Orbach, Tom Nairn, Suzanne Moore, Anatole Kaletsky and others.

Martin Jacques was the first chair of its advisory council and a trustee.

From 1987 to 1994 Martin Jacques was a columnist for The Sunday Times, and from 1990 to 1992 he wrote a weekly column for The Times.

Martin Jacques scripted and presented the BBC Television programmes Italy on Trial, The Incredible Shrinking Politician, The End of the Western World, and Proud to be Chinese.

Martin Jacques became interested in East Asia after a 1993 holiday there.

Martin Jacques argued that far from China becoming like the West it would remain highly distinctive.

Martin Jacques asserted that China's economic transformation and political system would continue long into the future and similarly its political system.

Martin Jacques criticized Westerners who attempt to understand and evaluate China through a Western prism rather than on its own terms.

Martin Jacques met Harinder Kaur Veriah, a Malaysian lawyer of Indian descent, while on holiday on the island of Tioman in Malaysia in 1993.

Martin Jacques later credited her with teaching 'me to see the world from a non-Western perspective [and].

Martin Jacques died there on 2 January 2000, aged 33, after suffering respiratory failure and cardiac arrest.

Martin Jacques is chair and founder of the Harinder Veriah Trust, which supports girls from deprived backgrounds with their education at Assunta Primary School and Assunta Secondary School in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

From 2003 to 2008 Martin Jacques was a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre of the London School of Economics, and from 2008 to 2012 he was a visiting senior research fellow at IDEAS at the same institution.

Martin Jacques has held visiting fellowships or professorships at Aichi University, Nagoya, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Renmin University, Beijing, the National University of Singapore, the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC, Tsinghua University, Beijing and Fudan University, Shanghai.