Drawing on many years of experience reporting in China and other repressive regimes, The Community Library’s Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway House Kathleen Mclaughlin will discuss how socioeconomic inequality has given rise to authoritarianism around the world. She’ll talk about parallels between China and the U.S. in our current political moment and how Americans might protect their own democracy and democratic norms.

Kathleen Mclaughlin is a journalist and non-fiction author who worked as a foreign correspondent in China for sixteen years. Her work centers on socioeconomic class, labor rights and inequality around the world, and how those factors shape global, national and local politics. Her 2023 book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry, an investigation of the global plasma industry, shed light on the United States’ erosion of social safety nets that quietly led millions of Americans to sell their blood to get by.