Richard McGregor, the FT’s Washington bureau chief, former Beijing bureau chief and author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, has been honoured by the Asia Society with the 2011 Bernard Schwartz Book Award, which recognises “nonfiction books that provide outstanding contributions to the understanding of contemporary Asia or U.S.-Asia relations.” McGregor will be presented with the $20,000 prize at Asia Society’s New York City headquarters on 1st December 2011.

Tommy T. B. Koh, Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large and co-chair of the selection committee, applauded The Party for “shedding new light on the role of the Chinese Communist Party in recruiting, training, promoting and deploying personnel in the public sector” while co-chair Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University, called it a “masterful study of the CCP.”

Previous winners include James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and Duncan MacCargo’s Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand.

Read more at the Asia Society website.