EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

http://lueastmagazine.com 1

Auriole Potter

Hannah Dudley

Likes: Photography, life, music Dislikes: Rain, the cold, text speak Favourite Asian City: Beijing - My second home Best place you’ve visited in Asia: Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China You in three words: Traveller, foodie, idealist

Likes: Journalism, cooking with spices, travelling, autumn, oolong tea Dislikes: Prejudice, mediocrity, stinky tofu Favourite Asian Cuisine: Vietnamese or Thai Best place you’ve visited in Asia: Ninh Binh, Vietnam You in three words: Curious, passionate, determined

Editor

Editor

Victoria Leigh

Online Co-ordinator Likes: Current affairs, the arts, languages Dislikes: Xenophobia and eating pig’s feet Favourite film: Lost In Translation Best thing you’ve done in Asia: A tie between studying Beijing Opera at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and visiting the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo You in three words: Previously a redhead

The Editorial Team

Nicola Ince

Graphic Designer

Kieran Prendergast Finance Co-ordinator

Likes: Youtube, languages, rubbish TV Dislikes: 9 a.m. lectures, baked beans, chaos Favourite book: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Best memory in Asia: Visiting Chengdu Panda Reserve, China You in three words: Organised, firm, fair

Kezia Hardingham

Marketing and Administration Co-ordinator Likes: Travelling, musicals, chilli, current affairs Dislikes: Chocolate, cold weather Favourite Asian cuisine: Chinese street food Asian travel wish list: Nepal, Myanmar, Mongolia, Japan You in three words: Human pyramid expert

Cover photograph by Tom Baker. Tom graduated from the University of Leeds in 2012 with a degree in Cinema and Photography.

2 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

Lin Wen-Hsin Graphic Designer

Dear EAST Readers,

CONTENTS Business & Politics

I am delighted to welcome you to this bumper edi- China’s Silent Army Hannah Dudley tion of EAST Magazine, and congratulate the team on China’s ‘Gay Gala’ Adam Tyson Hannah Dudley their sterling efforts this year. The richness and diver- Media Censorship in China sity of content symbolises, to me, the ethos of East Science & Environment Asian Studies at Leeds and sums up the energy and Visiting Tohoku Eighteen Months On Phillida Purvis enthusiasm of our students in putting together this Volunteering in Ishinomaki Siobhán Grennan wonderful publication.

Medicine in Mongolia Jonathan Potter For those of you who don’t know, 2013 is a very special year for East Asian Studies at Leeds. It marks 50 years since the opening of the Chinese Studies department, under the leadership of our ‘founding father’ Owen Lattimore. Over the years, the department has expanded to include Mongolian Studies, Japanese Studies, Asia Pacific Studies, Thai Studies and South East Asian Studies. The wonderful contributions from our current students in this edition of EAST reflects the breadth of experience gained through study and life in East Asia – be it volunteering in Tohoku, pondering the political messages of KFC ads in China or visiting cave dwellings in Lijiashan, while the section on careers demonstrates the sort of success a degree in East Asian Studies can bring.

Society

The Extinction of Beijing’s Hutongs Victoria Leigh The Rebel Jane Wallace The Rise of Individuality in China Kezia Hardingham Beekeeping in Pre-modern China David Pattinson A Beijing Experience: 1986-2013 Chris Newman China’s Kidnapped Children Auriole Potter

Culture

Escape Trail of the One-Legged Admiral Tim Luard Bai Jove! Baijiu Jay Smith Lishi: From the Middle Kingdom to Leeds Billy Rogal Jazzing up Japan Kweku Ampiah

Travel

The Cave Dwellings of Lijiashan Ruairi Garvey A Taste of Tibet Alexandra Thompson Trans-Siberian Adventure Clare Whately Our birthday celebrations later in the year (starting China’s Hidden Gems Victoria Leigh in October) will include alumni reunions, careers Mystifying Yuanyang Eve Baker

events with former students, exhibitions about Owen Lattimore and the history of the department, art and photo exhibitions, and a major international conference. We do hope to see you at these events, and look forward to celebrating our successes with you.

We have a Facebook page - ‘50 Years of East Asian Studies at Leeds University’ - if you’d like to follow us, contribute a photo or a memory, or simply ‘like’ us!

In the meantime, enjoy reading EAST Magazine!

With best wishes, Caroline Rose Director of East Asian Studies

University Life & Careers

Eye on Asia Hannah Dudley Tales from Year Abroad Correspondents Eamon Barrett Catherine Jessup

Susannah Derrett Scott Major Tom Crooks Smith Women Writers and Translators Collective Agnes Khoo The Challenge of a Rising China Victoria Leigh Where Are They Now? Babette Radclyffe-Thomas Behind the Scenes of the China Open Stephen Duckitt

Keep up to date with our news: @lueastmagazine facebook.com/lueastmagazine

This publication is kindly sponsored by the Catalai China Programme, who provide business-focused China immersion programmes allowing students and graduates to gain a professional understanding of Chinese business, language and culture. Find out more here: http://www.catalai.com

http://lueastmagazine.com 3

4 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 27 28 30 32

36 37 38 39

Business & Politics

China’s Silent Army Derek Mitchell has asserted, ‘China’s interest in the deA sveloping world dates back to the Cold War, when Beijing

assumed ideological leadership over the revolutionary agenda of insurgents in Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia and elsewhere’. Whilst the ideological emphasis has now gone, today Beijing commands an increasingly prominent role in transforming the conditions of some of the world’s poorest nations, for better or for worse.

Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo are the co-authors of the recently published China’s Silent Army, which documents the epic journey the authors undertook to 25 different countries where Chinese presence is having a profound impact. The book documents the experience of Chinese migrants working in every sector; from those operating in the oil industry in Kazakhstan, to those mining minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; from the Chinese labourers engaged in building dams in Ecuador to market traders selling hijabs in Cairo. On 31st January 2013, the University of Leeds Business School and the newly opened Leeds Business Confucius Institute jointly hosted a talk and book signing with the authors, who provided guests with a fascinating insight into their experience of interviewing hundreds of people involved in these overseas projects. The people they met with ranged from workers at the very bottom of the chain to local union leaders and civil rights advocates voicing concerns over the blueprint of Chinese development increasingly being used in the developing world to secure the global giant the resources and trade links it needs.

As the authors explained, the title of the book itself addresses the fact that the Chinese pioneers, traders, fixers, arguably the backbone of economic and environmental transformation in the developing world, have rarely been given a voice. Quizzed on Radio 3 about whether the term ‘army’ was meant to convey a sense of China’s strategic offensive on the developing world, co-author Cardenal said that China is conquering the developing world and their ‘weapon’ of choice in this conquest is money. That said, the motivations and attitudes of decision-makers and bankrollers involved in supporting the vast array of projects currently being undertaken was not the main focus of this project. The work of the authors is in fact more focused on how these projects are being rolled out around the world and the experience of Chinese workers on the ground, as well as of local communities on the receiving end.

“China is conquering the developing world and their ‘weapon’ of choice in this conquest is money.”

Since the release of their book, the authors have been eager to emphasise that their approach towards their formidable project was from an unbiased standpoint, even whilst words such as ‘tentacle’ and ‘spider’s web’ are used in the book to metaphorically describe how the Chinese retrieve the gains they set out for. The authors spoke frankly about their strong reluctance to be influenced by either politically-motivated criticism of China’s role in international development as promulgated through the Western media or indeed Beijing rhetoric.

Instead, through their research, the writers hope to provide a

4 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

window in to the negative and positive effects of the increasing Chinese global presence, as well as the experience of the individuals and communities upon which these emerging patterns of involvement are, in some cases, inflicted.

Whilst being conscious of not approaching the project with the typically pessimistic Western perspective, the authors were of course not so naïve as to think that China’s role in the developing world is in any way a form of philanthropic enterprise. It is no secret that in practical terms, China needs to secure access to critical natural resources, as well as to overseas markets for its products. In Africa it has achieved considerable success in doing so by becoming the continent’s biggest trading partner.

Politically, China is motivated by its desire to create a more multipolar world, in which Chinese interests are promoted, whilst Western, and particularly U.S. global power, is constrained.

Such motivations have not gone unnoticed. For example, in January, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry effectively referred to the African continent as a ‘pawn’ in a power game between China and the U.S.. Far from being a resurgence of ideological Cold War politics, this is a game played for “business contracts, business opportunities, jobs for Americans, and opportunities to export”, asserted the Senator.

The likely reason Americans and others in the West are so stirred up by the issue is that China’s model of development is in some cases proving a success, both in terms of long term investment and benefit to the economies of developing countries on the receiving end. To set aside for a moment the obvious problems of systemic corruption, absence of transparency and the undeniably terrible working conditions for the labour forces engaged in China’s ever expanding range of international projects, some developing nations have achieved a degree of agency over development negotiations with China. Take the Zambian government, for example, who in 2011 managed to double state royalties on copper to 6%, effectively curbing gains made by Chinese mining firms in the country. Of course, the degree to which developing nations are able to obtain a better settlement serving their national interests depends on the political, economic and social situation of that particular country and there are a wealth of cases which justify a more cautious outlook.

China has the capital to buy its way into international development and is happy to spend this money on projects that have otherwise been refused funding by the World Bank and other organisations due to the potentially dangerous impact on the local people and environment. As Cardenal and Araújo pointed out in their talk, China’s seemingly unlimited financial resources influence to a high degree their ability to see through such projects. To give a sense of scale to the Chinese reserves, one could highlight that in 2009 and 2011, China overtook the World Bank as the world’s biggest lender. It is well known that China’s banks are buying up European and U.S. debt, but what impact is all this cash flow having on the world’s developing nations? Unfortunately, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is not as positive as one may hope. Some of the infrastructure projects

recently funded by Chinese money and built using a Chinese workforce have had a notoriously detrimental environmental as well as social and cultural impact. One such example is the proposed building of the Kajbar Dam in Northern Sudan, the contract for which has been awarded to the Chinese company Sinohydro, the world’s largest hydropower contractor. The project has faced fierce opposition, due to the fact that the dam’s construction threatens to displace 10,000 people and flood as many as 500 archaeological sites, delivering another blow to the ancient Nubian culture already suffering from the impact of earlier dams built by Chinese and European contractors.

Even where infrastructure projects funded by Chinese investment do have the potential to benefit the communities of developing countries by providing better services and expanding work opportunities, the often weak or heavily corrupted nature of governments accepting such deals means that little of the funding reaches the people who need it most.Take Angola, for example, where the government has negotiated $14.5 billion in credit from China’s three state-owned banks between 2002 and 2011. In return, over 100 crucial infrastructure projects have been commissioned to the Chinese, and yet the benefit to ordinary Angolans is diminished by what Co-Head of the Africa International Affairs programme at LSE Chris Alden has described as an ‘illiberal regime with weak democracy’. Moreover, where natives of the countries the Chinese are investing in are employed alongside Chinese workers, they are often subjected to the same poor labour standards that have been inflicted on the citizens of the People’s Republic since economic development was prioritised by the country’s leadership some thirty years ago. As Odd Arne Westad, Professor of International History at LSE, commented on a recent radio discussion on the book’s themes, China is essentially ‘exporting [...] its

Unsurprisingly, spectators of China’s growing presence in the developing world hold strongly conflicting views over the relative gains and losses for countries subject to Beijing strategy.

Some choose to see the hospitals and schools being built using cash filling the coffers of Africa’s oil and mineral rich nations where the Chinese have been digging, whilst others choose to focus on the exploitative and in some cases corrupting influence that Chinese presence has in politically and economically fragile states.

Sitting somewhere between these two oppositional stances, Cardenal and Araújo’s account provides a relatively balanced insight into how China’s global reach is dramatically changing the lives of people across the planet. Just last month, plans to launch a BRICS development bank were announced. Most analysts expect that China, whose economy is about 20 times the size of South Africa’s and four times as big as Russia’s or India’s, will contribute a larger proportion of the financial resources and as a result could dominate in negotiations over the bank’s agenda. This and other developments signifying the rise of the Middle Kingdom on the global stage, make the question of not if but how the world will be transformed in Beijing’s image, more pertinent than ever.

Words: Hannah Dudley Graphics: Lin Wen-Hsin Hannah is a third year student of Chinese and Editor of EAST. China’s Silent Army is now available to buy from all major book retailers. You can find out more about Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo’s research at their website here: http://www.chinasilentarmy.com

http://lueastmagazine.com 5

Business & Politics

“the often weak or heavily corrupted nature of governments accepting such deals means that little of the funding reaches the people who need it most.”

own rather exploitative form of capitalism’.

China’s ‘Gay Gala’: The 2013 Spring Festival in Business & Politics

observers often strive to deF oreign code Chinese politics and society.

Academics in particular hope to solve puzzles surrounding foreign relations, nationalistic tendencies and growing ecological concerns, among other things.

Bearing in mind linguistic and logistical barriers, where should one search for clues? The strategic manoeuvres and elite scandals surrounding the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held in November 2012 are sensible starting points. Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang and the new Central Politburo Standing Committee have signalled their general intentions, although only a select few are privy to the power politics and policy negotiations taking place within the heavily guarded Zhongnanhai compound or Beidaihe resort. Naval exercises and territorial claims in the contested South China Sea, moreover, present opportunities to comment on regional security and energy diplomacy, as well as to speculate about Chinese intentions. This raises a large number of plausible scenarios but often ends in unsubstantiated frustration.

It is the contention of this short essay that the annual Spring Festival Gala (chun jie lian huan wan hui) presents an additional, if rather nuanced, lens into Chinese political and social trends.

Running since 1983, China Central Television’s (CCTV) Spring Festival Gala is a rich celebration of Chinese culture and art. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is tasked with setting content guidelines and censoring ‘inappropriate’ material. A handful of studies question the extent to which the

CCP uses the gala to appropriate traditions and shape audience perceptions in order to enhance its political standing.

For China’s newly appointed leaders, this year’s gala was an opportunity to signal their intentions and drop subtle hints as to the issues that will be given priority throughout their tenure (2012–2022).

The current CCP leaders hope to continue along the path of gradual change and reform that served their predecessors (in the post-Mao era) relatively well, although they are aware that they must acknowledge some shortcomings.

Public appeals can be direct and deliberate, such as Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign (corruption, we are told, can ‘kill the party and ruin the country’).

Some messages are more discreet, however, and need to be teased out and separated from state propaganda. This year’s gala may have failed to offer vital clues as to the future of the Chinese leadership’s grand strategy, although it was instructive for three reasons. First, the gala reflected a growing generation gap and, to an extent, alienated China’s elderly (and most loyal) audience. There was a deliberate effort to appeal to a younger demographic, and event organisers worked disproportionately hard to incorporate popular themes and the latest ‘trash talk’ (tu cao) found in the Chinese blogosphere. Second, the prevalence of gender ambiguity, provocative comedy sketches, and rumours of gay celebrity

6 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

love triangles drew ridicule from micro-bloggers and netizens. Spring Festival organisers, under the watchful eye of CCP censors and propaganda officials, clearly misread their younger audience and were forced to remove a number of sketches from heavily edited televised reruns of the gala. Third, the gala enabled overseas Chinese student associations to organise events and stage their own interactive performances, leading to discussions with foreign audiences and even prompting a degree of introspection.

As in previous years, audiences from all corners of the globe turned their attention to the gala on 9 February 2013.

The uplifting, catch-all theme was ‘new spring, new happiness, new appearance, new start’ (xinchun, xinxi, xinyi, xinpian). Volunteers from the nearly 600 Chinese students registered at the University of Leeds hired a venue to watch the gala, and organised their own events, choreographies and performances. The images here give a sample of the student activities.

Students watching the gala were exposed to a mix of state-directed and market-driven content, with magicians performing alongside comedians and pop stars. Librettos were accompanied by social commentary and albeit selective ethnic minority representations. Student performances were equally wide-rang-

Strong Cries and Eager Retrospect Expectations – The 2013 Spring Festival generated significant controversy. Dubbed the ‘gay gala’ by some Chinese micro-bloggers, the inclusion of transgender and homosexual content ― most notably the triangular flirtations between magician Liu Qian, pianist Li Yundi, and singer Wong Leehom ― drew ridicule from some viewers. Sexually ‘deviant’ overtones were also evident in a number of edgy comedic dialogues and sketches known as xiangsheng and xiaoping. This arguably represents a departure from China’s recent past, where homosexuality was considered a threat to public order and security. As for corruption, while this may have entered the political mainstream (recall Xi Jinping’s statement above), one of China’s best known comedians, Guo Degang, certainly tested the limits of the permissible with his satirical gala sketch known as ‘Watch Uncle’. Whilst Chinese censors had worked tirelessly to limit the damage caused by video footage of a senior provincial politician accused of both sadism and kleptocracy, the ‘Watch Uncle’ sketch instantly reignited the issue. For a government under constant scrutiny, some of the ill-judged sketches at this year’s Spring Festival extravaganza may seem innocuous but should serve as a reminder that efforts to be trendy and indulgent toward micro-bloggers can easily backfire.

Words/Photography: Adam Tyson Dr Adam Tyson is a lecturer in Southeast Asian Politics at the University of Leeds.

Media Censorship in China new paramount leader Xi C hina’s Jinping is said to have instructed his

colleagues to ‘respond positively’ to the Chinese people’s ‘strong cries and eager expectations’ for institutional reform.

Whilst such remarks cast a hopeful note to the beginning of Xi’s ten-year reign, Chinese critics as well as international spectators remain sceptical that Xi will be an exception to the strong precedent of China’s top leadership pursuing continuity over change.

With regards to reform of restrictions over Chinese media, it seems their concerns are not unfounded. In January, controversy over continuing media censorship was sparked by local propaganda authorities in Guangzhou, ordering reformist paper Southern Weekend (南方周末) to water down its reform-championing editorial. The story was featured by major international news outlets when journalists decided to stage a week-long standoff with the government. Ordinary citizens joined the ranks outside the Nanfang Media Group, which owns Southern Weekend and answers to Guangdong’s party leadership.

Demonstrations are of course a daily occurrence in China, but what stood out about this instance were the unusually bold demands of the activists, who shouted through megaphones making demands for democracy and freedom.

As Rob Gifford, China Editor for The Economist suggested in his reporting of these events, the rhetoric of these protestors had echoes of the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the connotations of which are likely to provoke serious concerns amongst China’s ruling elite.

There are of course notable differences between these recent spouts of outcry and the infamous protests of 1989 that so tarnished the political legacy of the reform era. The protests were, for example, relatively small in terms of scale and participation. Moreover, there is arguably now more for people to lose from the resulting consequences of involvement. China’ s bourgeoning middle class has benefited enormously from the economic reforms of recent decades, and

thus they are unlikely to risk being labeled as challenging the legitimacy of the governing regime. Where the protestors may find sympathy, however, is in online forums, which increasingly facilitate the unburdening of discontent and even outright criticism of government policy.

According to an editorial in The Economist, foreseeing the likely outpouring of public support for the protestors and their cause, Beijing propaganda officials attempted to stem the tide by blocking searches for Southern Weekend on micro-blog sites.

Such practices can be seen to be a direct infringement of the rights enshrined in China’s constitution for freedom of press and speech. Yet the authorities navigate around these barriers through their exploitation of Chinese law, which includes vaguely worded media regulations based on prohibiting the release of state secrets and endangering state security. The ambiguous wording of these statutes allows the authorities to legitimise state intrusion into media operations and censorship of any information potentially sensitive to its political and economic interests.

After a tightening up of restrictions in 2010, which compelled Internet and telecommunications companies to cooperate with the authorities, the NGO advocacy group Human Rights in China commented that legislation ‘fails to comply with international human rights standards’. Later that year, the first White Paper to be issue by the government on the topic of the Internet emphasized the concept of ‘Internet sovereignty’, under which permanent citizens as well as foreigners in China are to abide with the country’s laws and regulations. Rebecca Mackinnon, frequent commentator on global internet policy and co-founder of Global Voices Online, has written that what China is pioneering through such legislation is a kind of ‘networked authoritarianism’, in which classical authoritarianism commanded by the Communist government is superseded by a model based on a more give-andtake approach between the state and its citizens, in accordance with the (continued on P.8)

http://lueastmagazine.com 7

Business & Politics

ing and colourful, while plenty of homemade dumplings (shui jiao) were served to guests along with fish, thought to bring good luck for the New Year.

Visiting Tohoku Eighteen Months On (Media Censorship in China continued) development of new information sharing systems. The government has something to gain from allowing people access to social media platforms, in that by tolerating sites where netizens feel they can speak and be heard, the regime can steer aggravated citizens away from supporting movements for radical change.

China’s sophisticated system of Internet censorship ensures that the Internet remains a tool for the government to extend its control, whilst also enhancing its legitimacy through allowing netizens greater access to information and freedom of expression than they would have had in pre-internet times.

Media freedom in China remains a topic for heated debate. The country’s media sector has been described by the International Federation of Journalists as being in a metaphorical ‘Ice Age’ and last year watchdog group Reporters without Borders ranked China 174 out of 179 countries in its 2012 worldwide index of press freedom. As protests in Guangzhou earlier this year demonstrate, Chinese citizens are growing increasingly reluctant to accept the strict control the government maintains over print and online media. How long the regime can maintain the uneasy balance required to both allow a degree of expression while maintaining control over a huge populace impatient for change, remains to be seen.

Words: Hannah Dudley Hannah Dudley is a third year student of Chinese and Editor of EAST.

world has moved on with our T heairwaves and screens ever afloat

in war, revolution and natural disasters occurring around the world. Few have the time or inclination to remember the devastation wreaked by the Great North East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami or to contemplate the impact of it on those who survived – although the 7.3-magnitude earthquake and mini tsunami in the same area in December 2012 will have been an uncomfortable reminder within the country. The tragedy in 2011 killed 15,550 and 5,344 more were never seen again. The victims have received compensation, from the government and from money donated to the Japan Red Cross within Japan, but the cash handouts to those in need have now dried up. Special Livelihood Protection payments and free medication have come to an end. Employment support, sadly often resulting in pointless occupation, has been extended but only until the spring. There is evidence everywhere of economic suffering with few surviving jobs in the farming and fishing rural communities and little hope of new employment in the future.

Physically, a massive effort has gone into the clearing-up operation and today the area is alive with the buzzing of thousands of earthmovers and the churning of massive rubble-recycling equipment. Meanwhile, other debris has floated, sometimes, like intact houses, in its original form, right across the Pacific and is beaching itself on the west coast of the USA. Nothing but a few strongly constructed concrete buildings has been left standing on the flat river plains of towns like Rikuzen Takata and Minami Sanriku-cho, where neither high rugged cliffs nor man-made harbours along the coastline provided protection. Everywhere there are unanswered questions about what will happen and who will take action. Many local level groups and organisations are active, some newly born, but their own experience is limited and they have no certainty of financial support to continue their work. There also remains a major difficulty in finding leaders who will initiate and coordinate any activities.

On a visit to the region last month, we found that much of the effort of NPOs

8 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer Spring/Summe 2013

in all the towns and villages along this devastated coast is focused on community building in temporary housing estates which are dotted along it.

Any programme that can lure people out of their depression and isolation in these uncompromising, unsympathetic surroundings to participate in some sort of community activity, is making a difference.

“Many suffer from depression and the suicide rate is unacceptably high” We had seen examples of this on a visit a year previously such as with a group in Kesennuma called Project K that gives counselling, practical advice and support to the people in such housing.

Now, a group of young ladies from Tokyo have come to Kesennuma and have established a group called RQW (rescue women) which shares space with Project K and in a very simple way gives these ladies a chance to do something – to concentrate on an activity and take their minds off their own situations. Without such activities, women have little opportunity, or money, to go out of their temporary housing units, leaving many too weak to stand and most dispirited and depressed. Another project takes men out on recreational fishing boats.

The temporary housing estates are far from town and people are physically distant from their abandoned homes, schools and places of work which makes the making of decisions about their own futures even harder. Although the housing units were built impressively quickly and they offer clean, free accommodation, so many of their residents simply are not getting out of their small rooms – they have nothing to do and nowhere to go. Many suffer from depression and the suicide rate is unacceptably high.

For those in Fukushima evacuated from the nuclear exclusion zone, the real problem is not the physical damage, it is the impact of the nuclear plant coupled with uncertainty, especially about food safety and the future. The main sources of self-employment were fishing and farming and the loss of subsidies from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, by far the area’s biggest employer, has made these refugees almost the only people in Japan

who still support nuclear power. Others talked of a growing number of suicides and an increase in domestic violence as families are cooped up and fustrations explode. “the beautiful seaside valley is almost unrecognisable from the photos we saw taken earlier last year”

The choice lies between 5 metres to deal with the tsunami which statistically occurs once in ever 50 years and 15 metres to deal with the one which only occurs once in every 1000 years – a decision that many communities along the coast must make. This participation by the

“Huge challenges remain” It was encouraging that many young people who had left the region to work in Tokyo, Sendai and other cities have returned, bringing business skills they may have learned elsewhere, and a passion to help their hometowns by participating in the reconstruction proc ess. We met a group in Koriyama who have set themselves the task of engendering hope and of establishing groups who are willing to take their future into their own hands. Another NPO there

is focusing on providing safe places for play for local children and those among the 16,000 evacuees who have come into the city, since they cannot play freely out of doors. Huge challenges remain, and we identified areas where the UK can contribute to meeting them, in cooperation with local entities.

Anyone interested in a holiday in North Eastern Japan sometime soon?

Words/Photography: Phillida Purvis Phillida works for Links Japan. Links Japan was established six years ago with the primary objective of promoting non-profit sector links between the United Kingdom and Japan. The organisation aims to encourage understanding of, and communication on, how ordinary people respond to the needs of their societies in the new millennium, and how they can best contribute to their communities in areas which are beyond the reach, or outside the interest, of the government, the corporate sector, or the family.

http://lueastmagazine.com 9

Science & Environment

We also visited a small community in a valley within the township of Minami Sanriku. With twenty seven of this village’s thirty houses totally destroyed, the beautiful seaside valley is almost unrecognisable from the photos we saw taken earlier last year. Here a professor in architecture at Miyagi University has gathered together some of his students and they are now working with the local people to develop a strategy for the rebuilding of the community. Discussions are being led as to how far up the hill, and removed from the sea, they should rebuild. There are also talks over whether the village shop as well as the workplaces should remain down at sea level and how high the seawall should be.

whole community in the planning process leads to full ownership of the future.

Income cutbacks, we learnt, have even taken a toll on people’s ability to buy food.

One NPO addressing this problem is an NPO called Foodbank Tohoku AGAIN – AGAIN meaning to eat in Tohoku dialect. Inefficiencies in the supply chain in Japan provide AGAIN with an opportunity to obtain free food that is still some way off its sell by date but which is unacceptable in the eyes of the final retailer. They have managed to raise enough funds to obtain a warehouse and some trucks. They collaborate with local community groups and NPOs to establish to whom the food boxes should be distributed. These are not the sole source of food for these people, but they provide an important weekly top-up to the poorest families.

Science & Environment

Volunteering in Ishinomaki get caught up in the numI t’sberseasyoftoJapan’s disaster in March

2011; 16,000 dead, 3,500 missing, 200,000 homes made uninhabitable and an estimated 10 trillion yen (£80 billion) worth of damage. As the world continues to largely focus on the ongoing nuclear crisis, the statistics that used to shock us have become just numbers.

However, one statistic rarely reported is 157,000. This is the number of survivors still living in one of the cities worst hit by the tsunami, Ishinomaki. They are facing the terrible consequences of this disaster to this day; the fishing industry ruined, houses completely destroyed, family and friends dead or still missing. A fellow Leeds student and I went to Ishinomaki in November 2011 to join the volunteer groups who have been working in the area since the disaster struck, to see what is being done for the survivors.

When we arrived outside Ishinomaki train station, we were struck by how normal everything seemed. No debris, no destruction. The high school kids joking around outside didn’t seem to be the victims of a terrible disaster. However, as we drove to the volunteer house, more and more tsunami-hit areas became startlingly noticeable. Shop fronts were completely smashed, furniture strewn about the floors inside. The ground floors of houses had been completely demolished, leaving just a wall and a few supports. As we travelled yet closer to the worst hit areas, to what had once been suburbs that were now empty, I realised that those houses were lucky to be still standing.

We arrived at the volunteer house, a house donated by a Japanese family after the volunteer campsite was shut down in September, to be met by ‘It’s Not Just

Mud’, a volunteer organisation that was formed in response to the March 11th tsunami. They assist anyone willing to volunteer in the Ishinomaki area by providing advice, work and equipment.

The Japanese government once provided a volunteer centre, but as time passed volunteer numbers dwindled, and the centre was closed down. It therefore became necessary for organisations such as INJM to be formed to continue to assist existing volunteers and encourage new ones. Most of the volunteers are students and young people, who work with more experienced volunteers and even professional builders, sharing each other’s skills and showing that everyone can be helpful in any situation. We even met an ex-Bodington Halls resident, putting the Leeds representatives up to 3! “harrowing tales were what made the work we were doing so much more important” The intensely personal nature of volunteering struck me immediately. The plot of land we were clearing of debris had once been a house that was completely swept away by the tsunami, with the family’s 20 year old daughter still inside. Luckily she survived, but harrowing tales such as these were what made the work we were doing so much more important. To be directly helping people who had faced such a terrible ordeal made the statistics much more than just numbers; they were a sharp reminder of how destructive this disaster has been. However, the spirit of the volunteers, and especially of the Japanese people, who often stopped for a chat and to encourage us in our work, made the trip to Ishinomaki an uplifting experience rather than an upsetting one. By focusing on the survivors,

10 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

and their strength and determination to rebuild their lives, amazing progress continues to be made in an area where everything once seemed hopeless.

Words/Photography: Siobhán Grennan Siobhán is a third year student of English and Japanese.

Siobhán volunteered with the project ‘It’s Not Just Mud’ in November 2011.

The charity is now engaged with helping small businesses, schools and local areas in the recovery process. To find out more about ‘It’s Not Just Mud’, go to: http://itsnotjustmud.com

Medicine in Mongolia is considered to be a vast M ongolia and distant land. It is indeed vast,

For centuries Mongolian medicine has been based on traditional methods including herbal medicine, acupuncture and moxibustion (the burning of the mugwort herb in association with acupuncture points). The practice of medicine was closely linked to religion. Part of the therapy was to release the individual’s ‘nature’ to overcome illness. Mongolian medics were renowned for their skills and were sought after in China and Tibet.

With the coming of Communism in the 1920s there was a purge of religious influences and traditional culture which included traditional medicine. Over the ensuing decades a more Western approach to medicine was introduced. By the 1980s, the general, if basic, provision of housing, food and heating in cities ensured improvements in public health. In 1980 however, the communist influence in Mongolia was withdrawn and the country became a democratic republic.

The ties to traditional culture, religion and medicine started to resurface and the government had to determine whether to build on its centuries-old reputation for traditional medicine, drive towards developing a Western healthcare structure or attempt a melding of the two.

In 1996 I travelled to Mongolia for a medical symposium organised by the Albert Schweitzer Institute of “Evidence Based Medicine”. After a stop-over in Moscow, I flew courtesy of Aeroflot through the Russian night to arrive in a cold and bleak Ulaanbaatar emerging from the blasts of winter. The city lies within a plain surrounded by barren hills covered by the grey green grass of the steppes.

The city was made up of sprawling apartment blocks with an inner core of wideopen, wind-blasted tarmac spaces and

The symposium I was attending was devised to present the methods used in Western health care systems to evaluate the research evidence that exists regarding medical treatments and interventions, to determine the quality of the research evidence and to derive from this evidence guidelines to direct best practice. The principles I was elaborating were very much the same as those that are used by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) in determining best practice in the UK at present.

The approach I was presenting was the very epitome of Western evidence-based medicine - a system based on a mechanistic belief that illness is purely a physical problem. Finding a cure is a question of find the fault and fix it – much as a garage fixes a car. This approach contrasts starkly with the experience-based and more spiritual traditional medicine in Mongolia, founded on the use of herbal therapy, acupuncture and moxibustion.

The participants at the meeting – some 100 Mongolian doctors – were almost entirely female. They came from the various provinces of Mongolia to be enthused by evidence-based medicine as directed by the Mongolian Ministry of Health. Despite the very remote and rural nature of their work, in many cases the internet was providing access to medical research, guidelines for best practice and networks for interchanging information. They were no longer isolated by the vastness of the country. While many of the healthcare problems within Mongolia – including chest disease and alcohol-related disease - did not require highly sophisticated interventions, the benefits of well-researched approaches to treatment were relevant to them.

housing the wards was simple but adequate. I also visited the traditional hospital which was struggling to re-establish itself having been run-down for many years. The conditions for the patients were very spartan and poor. The most memorable feature was the pharmacy, which included a spectacular array of jars of differing herbal remedies. The smell of the interacting herbal fragrances was powerful and far from appealing.

In conversations with the Mongolians I met, it was clear that their heads tended towards Western medicine whereas their hearts were with their traditional culture. While there was much polite attention within the symposium and suitably serious discussions, in part with the heavy hand of the Ministry overlooking the event, one sensed that, given half a chance, the practitioners and their patients would opt for traditional cures.

Perhaps the Mongolians will find the way to get the best from both their enviable medical heritage and their access to new ideas from the West. Perhaps we, in the West, could learn also that there is more to medicine than is embodied in our modern, mechanistic and managerial mantra.

Words: Jonathan Potter DM, FRCP Jonathan was formerly Clinical Director at the Royal College of Physicians, London and Physician and Stroke specialist at Kent and Canterbury Hospital.

I visited the university hospital, busy with its committed ranks of doctors and students. The four-storied building

http://lueastmagazine.com 11

Science & Environment

being six times the size of the UK. Landlocked by the mighty countries of Russia and China, it has been distant for centuries. More recently, however, air travel and the internet have made it more accessible. The country is currently examining the benefits of developing along traditional Eastern lines or adopting more Western practices. Medical treatment is a good example of this challenge.

vast rectangular government buildings.

Through the city serpentine pipes ran, feeding hot water heating to apartments blocks. Through the city wound the Mongolian limb of the Trans-Siberian railway en route from Irkutsk to Beijing.

There was little evidence of affluence or of cultural heritage. The temples of the old Mongolian culture had been largely pulled down.

Changing China: The Extinction of Beijing’s Hutongs the Northern Capital and the B eijing: indisputable cultural and historical

Society

jewel in China’s crown. A journey to the Middle Kingdom would not be complete without a visit to this mammoth metropolis where the locals are known for their no-nonsense manner and where authentic delicacies include tender Peking duck and hearty beef noodles. A place where the pirate-like Beijing accent and dialect reigns supreme and where it does not cost more than 4 pence to use the bus.

The sights and sounds to behold in old Beijing are abundant. From the labyrinthine Forbidden City to the peace and tranquillity of Beihai Park, one cannot help but relish the palpable nostalgia and pride China has in taking care of its ancient scenic spots and relics within. “wander for hours and savour the true unpretentious soul of Beijingers” Yet there is one significant historical part of Beijing that the government is aggressively swinging a wrecking ball through. The hutong, Beijing’s passport to all that is traditional and picturesque about the city since the dynastic period, where one can wander for hours and savour the true unpretentious soul of Beijingers through their rustic arts and crafts, their home-made red-bean cakes and sweet yoghurt. A place where one can authentically explore life in the capital as it used to be, with its oneroomed houses and rather un-private public latrines. The motive behind their destruction? The pursuit of modernity.

The hutongs do not serve simply as homes. For example, Li Shi Hutong offers cookery classes situated within a converted building, where for an extra fee, one can see a local hutong market in action and browse its fresh produce alongside the chef. If you want to go native and witness a true Chinese master chef at work in his natural environment, it does not get better than this. At £25 per class, this earns cash for the local economy and ensures that the trade and interest in these hutongs will continue to be nurtured. If they were destroyed, and these activities ceased to exist, the livelihoods of the locals would be in jeopardy.

Passing through Dongcheng District’s Dong Gao Fang Hutong, on a typical

12 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

Words: Victoria Leigh Photography: Hannah Dudley Victoria is a third year student of Chinese and EAST Online Co-ordinator

Dong Gao Fang Hutong resident Li Dan Yang said she is certain that, should this historic part of the city be demolished, she would sadly miss it, as it serves as the lifeline and heartbeat of Beijing. However, Li Dan Yang conceded that the hutongs are in fact government-owned and thus the authorities have the right to ‘drive the residents away’, as heartbreaking and horrifying a prospect as this may seem. She further acknowledged that it is almost imperative for the government to demolish these areas in order to make way for more East-meets-West trade and commerce. The corrosive force of globalisation is apparent in many areas of the city, which are filled with international chains and the ubiquitous Starbucks outlets, where many rich, middle-class Chinese queue for a latte shoulder to shoulder with their Western counterparts. For Li Dan Yang and other Beijing residents ‘the hutong culture is very important to China and should not be destroyed for business profit’. Astonishingly, there are some places in the city that one would never be able to tell were once part of the hutongs, for example the huge open space that is now Tiananmen Square, razed in the 1950s to make way for Mao’s ‘New China’.

China has been ushering itself towards a polished, shiny new era as an economic powerhouse for decades and has annihilated many aspects of traditional Chinese life in the process, swept away by the high-speed train of modernisation. According to a recent survey, only a third of the original hutongs are now in existence, the rest having ‘given way to modern buildings’. One can only wonder how long it will be until Beijing’s hutongs vanish completely.

The Rebel ‘I firmly believe my death will serve a valuable purpose … I am sacrificing myself for the cause.’ - Kanno Sugako

Sugako wrote this in 1911, she W hen was a 30-something Japanese woman, awaiting her execution by hanging for an attempted plot on the life of the Emperor of Japan. How does Sugako fit into the image of a mild-mannered and subservient Japanese woman commonly depicted in historical accounts of Meiji, Japan? What ‘cause’ is she referring to?

Sugako was born in 1881 in Osaka, and although she was fortunate to be born into a merchant family, she didn’t have a good start in life. Her father’s business failed when she was a child and her mother died shortly afterwards. Sugako was left with her father, who later remarried. Her teen years were particularly traumatic, with her being the victim of rape at the age of 15.

Given this unstable start in life, it is perhaps not surprising that Sugako developed a rebellious streak and began to write for socialist journals. At a time when women were expected to fulfil the role of ‘good wives, wise mothers’, Sugako’s ideas were intellectually explosive. Sugako was not alone; the anarchist movement was vibrant at the time, drawing on the experiences of Western Europe, yet developing a distinctly Japanese twist. New forms of literature were flourishing and women were beginning to discuss womanhood on their own terms in cafés and tearooms across Japan.

As time passed, her ideas became more radical, and she turned to anarchism.

The ideas expressed by anarchism, such as the primacy of the individual over and above paternalistic hierarchies, were dangerous to the state. The press

laws reflected this fear within the government, and as a result Sugako’s activities led to her arrest on at least two occasions. Despite such reprimands from the authorities, Sugako forged ahead with her ideas, committed to the cause of anarchism.

It is not clear from the archives what Sugako’s involvement in the 1910 plot to kill the Emperor really was. Documents describing how to build a bomb were recovered, but Sugako’s exact involvement is obscured by the government’s firm control of documentary evidence at the time. Regardless of her involvement, she boldly faced her fate, writing in her diary and ensuring that she had allowed for the maintenance of the family grave sites until the day she was executed.

Sugako clearly associated with the anarchist cause and saw her death as a necessary sacrifice. She had realised that, as a Japanese woman, she was more than the paternalistic construction of women in society at the time. She forged her own path through life, regardless of the consequences. Although she spent her last hours caged and awaiting her execution, she had discovered that being a Japanese woman was about more than servitude - she was the master of her own destiny.

Words: Jane Wallace Jane is an MA student of Japanese Studies.

http://lueastmagazine.com http://lueastmagazine.com 13 13

Society

day one can peruse locally made curios, snack on some scrumptious pancakes from a street-seller, wander through the local Confucian shrine and even unintentionally end up at the famed Yonghegong Lama Temple. However, China’s rush to modernise, and even Westernise, the capital has resulted in conspicuous damage being done to these traditional life-systems, all in the name of a metropolitan makeover for which Beijing locals are paying the price.

Society

Lady Gaga and the Rise of Individuality in China Gaga has been regarded as a culLady tural phenomenon since she

emerged onto the mainstream music scene in 2008. Known as much for her unpredictable and eccentric fashion choices as her music, embracing one’s individuality has been a running theme in her interviews, lyrics and performances. She inspires almost frightening levels of fandom among her ‘little monsters’ across the world, not least in China, where “Oh my Lady Gaga” is now commonly used in place of “Oh my God”. She is also one of the few Western celebrities whose name appears more often in English than in Chinese.

If you speak to young Chinese people or read internet forums, you soon realise that it is her image and personality as well as her music which have led her to reach such heights of popularity. Among the reasons I have heard for admiring her, are that she is ‘crazy’, ‘special’, ‘uninhibited’, ‘unique’ and that she has a ‘maverick attitude’. When you think that it was only as recent as the mid-1980s that young people started to wear jeans and listen to pop music, the admiration for someone as flamboyant as Lady Gaga seems to reflect a major societal change in China - that of the rise of the individual.

During the past hundred years, China has undergone radical changes to the extent that it is almost unrecognisable from what it was at the fall of the Qing Dynasty. It appears, however, that the simplistic assumptions made about Chinese society remain stuck in past.

A common generalisation made is that China is a purely collectivistic society, favouring interdependence and solidarity. In reality, the contemporary situation is much more complex.

In recent years, there has been a change

as to how identity is constructed in China. Several scholars have described how there was no individual identity in traditional Chinese society, but rather a ‘relational identity’, whereby an individual existed primarily to continue and support the group. The individual lived their entire lives in the shadow of their ancestors and their primary purpose in life was to continue the family lineage.

The centrality of human relationships within Chinese society meant that individuals defined themselves in terms of their connections to others and there was a less distinct sense of self. One of the key social norms in traditional China was that the needs of the individual were deemed subservient to the needs of the wider group. Therefore dominant social values included the individual being selfless and obedient to their primary group identity structure, be it the family or, later on in the Communist era, the state.

China as people began to switch jobs or even set up their own businesses. This idea of putting one’s own happiness first and taking the initiative to look after oneself became increasingly evident among various sectors of society. Thus the social transformation, dubbed the ‘rise of the individual’, began.

Under the rule of the Communist Party, the primary identity giving group changed from the family to the state, with individuals expected to be loyal to the party-state and be selfless in order to achieve the party’s revolutionary goals.

Ideological, political and economic projects during the Maoist period, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, led to the individual losing their freedom to choose where to work or live, as well as with whom to associate. The hukou (household registration system), danwei (work units), political dossiers and class label system imposed a standard biography upon people. However, in the post-Mao period, the re-emergence of the private sector led inevitably to the weakening of state power, as the party-state no longer controlled people’s access to resources and thus life choices and opportunities, allowing greater individual freedoms. A similar concept to the ‘American Dream’ began to take hold in

Increasingly, Chinese people use possession of material goods to shape individual identities and express their personality. Furthermore, young Chinese are embracing niche brands which they believe will help them to stand out from the crowd. According to a survey carried out by McKinsey and Company, the percentage of consumers who stated ‘showing my status’ or ‘this is a brand for people like me’ as important factors in buying items such as chocolate and mobile phones jumped from 8 percent in 2009 to 19 percent in 2012. This emphasis on emotional considerations is definitely something that marketers will have to increasingly take into account as incomes rise further.

14 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

As a result of the erosion of the primary group identity structure, there have been more opportunities for self-expression and individual initiative.

Whereas previously dominant social rules enforced conformity, these obligations are increasingly weakening, particularly amongst the younger generations. This began with minor changes such as wearing jeans or listening to new types of music. Some young people choose to express their individuality and challenge social norms by engaging in fringe youth cultures, priding themselves on being ‘alternative’.

As well as consumer goods, many Chinese people are utilising social media platforms as a way to express themselves and connect with people with shared hobbies and interests. In November 2011, the number of Weibo

(the Chinese version of Twitter) users hit 300 million; in November 2012 the number hit a staggering 400 million.

Words: Kezia Hardingham Illustration: Nicola Hardingham Kezia is a fourth year student of Chinese and Asia Pacific Studies. She is also the Marketing and Administration Co-ordinator for EAST.

is now the world’s largest proC hina ducer of honey, though this hon-

ey is often poor quality and much of what is sold in shops is not pure. At the same time, bees in China seem to have avoided some of the diseases ravaging colonies in other parts of the world, but the indiscriminate use of pesticides has meant that bees mostly only survive in areas away from cropland.

The earliest evidence we have for consumption of honey in China is traces found absorbed into pottery jars from the Jiahu culture, which flourished in southern Henan over 8,000 years ago; honey seems to have been an ingredient in a rice and fruit-based fermented alcoholic beverage.

We don’t know exactly when people in China first learnt how to keep bees; even at the end of the Ming dynasty the scholar Song Yingxing wrote that 80% of honey was collected from the wild. The first reference we have to someone keeping bees is in the third-century book Biographies of Men of Noble Character 高 士传 by Huangfu Mi 皇甫谧 (214-282 C.E.). Huangfu tells of one Jiang Qi 姜 歧 (fl. 158-166), a renowned scholar of the Classics who, having successfully resisted being drafted into the service of the local Governor, gave his land to his brother and ‘went to live in seclusion, where he kept bees and pigs.’

This account does not say anything about how Jiang kept his bees, but most likely he used similar techniques to those described in a book dating from only slightly later. The Record of Myriad Things 博物志 by Zhang Hua 张华 (232-300) records how people would make wooden boxes with little holes bored in them just big enough for bees to go in and out, then rub them inside and out with beeswax as a bait. They would catch two or three bees in the box, then let them out again, at which point those bees would return to their colonies and bring many more bees with them. The swarms would settle in these boxes, and come summer the people could harvest honey and beeswax. This basic method continued to be used throughout Chinese history.

Keeping bees in this way presented three

major problems: how to collect the honey and beeswax without being stung, how to stop or control swarming (when one queen leaves the colony taking about half the colony with her), and how to ensure the colony survived over winter. In pre-modern Europe, beekeepers killed most of the bees so they could collect the honey, but the Chinese found they could do it by smoking the bees to pacify them and move them to a corner of the hive.

(One Song dynasty source suggested rubbing one’s arms with chewed mint, but I suggest you don’t try this at home!)

Society

When I was living in Beijing, I saw many young people who had dyed their hair and customised their clothes in order to express their personalities. Although the streets were not lined with Lady Gaga look-a-likes, the admiration among the younger Chinese generation for her originality, creativity and often absurdity, reflects the greater opportunities for individual freedom within China today and the extent to which the opportunities for expressing one’s individuality have increased over the past few decades.

Beekeeping in Pre-modern China

By at least the Yuan dynasty, Chinese agricultural manuals were instructing beekeepers to remove any new ‘kings’ from a hive (as in pre-modern Europe, the Chinese assumed the large bee in the colony was a king, not a queen), leaving just two, one of which was removed with half the bees to form a new colony, if possible. If a colony was weak, then all the kings might be killed except the original one. Other sources recommended various ways of trying to lure or direct a swarm so that the beekeeper could benefit from the new colony rather than lose those bees to the wild – sources suggest that honey and beeswax could bring a good income for those who knew how to keep bees, so it was worth trying to keep as many colonies as possible.

Winter is a difficult time for bees because of the cold and lack of food; although bees have ingenious ways of surviving the winter, significant losses are always a possibility. Covering the hive with cotton or straw for insulation was one method, and at least from the early Ming period beekeepers left flowers or various foodstuffs, as well as water, outside the hives to feed the bees. A couple of manuals bizarrely suggest hanging a defeathered chicken in the hive for the same purpose. This would have been of no use to the bees, but perhaps people thought that what was good for humans was also good for bees – one thinks of Chinese students taking Brand’s Chicken Essence while studying for exams.

The cultural representation of bees reflected both the bees’ ability to cause pain and the order and industry of a bee colony. In some texts treacherous officials are compared to bees (or wasps, the char(continued on P.16)

http://lueastmagazine.com 15

Society

(Beekeeping in Pre-modern China continued)

acter 蜂 feng alone could mean bee, wasp or hornet), while in others bees are imagined as an orderly empire in a microcosm, with a king being served by his ministers (the drones) and subjects. In some later texts, what was in fact the queen’s mating flight was thought to be an imperial tour in which the drones acted as imperial bodyguards. Bees who lost their sting and died were thought to have been killed by other bees for the crime of losing their weapon. During the upheavals and disorder that accompanied the Manchu conquest of China, the scholar Chen Hongxu 陈弘绪 (1597-1668) observed how there was so much more order in his beehives than there was in the empire at large.

Overall, considerably more textual and pictorial representations of bees have come down to us in Europe than in China, which reflects the greater relative importance of bees in European culture. Nevertheless, honey and beeswax were still important products in pre-modern China, and recent books in English which attempt to survey both beekeeping practices around the world and representations of bees in culture say very little about China because of the paucity of sources – there is not even very much in Chinese.

Words: David Pattinson Dr David Pattinson is a lecturer in Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Leeds

came to China in May of 1986 as a I first member of a three-man team of Eng-

lish-Australians lecturing on the storage and preservation of grain stocks – an arcane subject in the UK, but one of huge importance in China, then and now. The tour began in Beijing and ended in Shanghai, taking in the provincial capitals of Zhengzhou, Wuhan and Chengdu. I arrived full of misgivings and experienced severe culture shock during my first week in the country, yet mysteriously, by the end of the third week, I had joined the ranks of the Sinophiles and no longer wanted to leave.

Four years passed before I was given the opportunity to return - to conduct a project evaluation in northeast China. This led to long-term work in 1991 and residency in 1996. I sometimes wonder how the experiences of today’s newcomers to China differ from mine. Twenty, or even fifteen years ago, it was possible to suffer the sort of culture shock as I had – an ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ experience of finding oneself immersed in an alien and surreal world. It’s hard to imagine Beijing causing such cultural discomfort to today’s new arrivals.

By most measures, Beijing has become the antithesis of what it once was. Now a wealthy and modern city, the once-unhurried pace of life has disappeared, along with most of the bicycles, hutongs and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The innocence and charm that once seemed to characterize the city is still detectable, but has largely evaporated. To experience the ‘old world’, I must now travel back to Australia or to my roots in the UK, where little seems to have changed in the decades since I left.

It is perhaps easier to think of what hasn’t changed in Beijing since I first saw it. Back in 1986, my first experience was a midnight arrival in Beijing’s tiny and dingy airport terminal, waiting, seemingly forever,

16 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

for our luggage to appear on the dilapidated baggage conveyor. After collecting our bags and our interpreter, a government car carried us the 25 kilometres into the city along an unlit, narrow concrete road, punctuated by intermittent stretches of fog through which lightless cyclists and mule-drawn wagons would emerge with terrifying suddenness. Astonishingly, this road is still extant and almost unchanged, running parallel to the new, overcrowded, six-lane Airport Expressway. City lights began to appear when we reached what is now known as the 2nd Ring Road, built over the foundations of the old city wall that Mao demolished early in his reign of destruction.

Morning brought daylight in the form of a milky white haze through which the early rushhour traffic hastened slowly. The vast expanse of Changan Street, where our hotel was situated, carried mostly bicycles and articulated buses, with occasional trucks and government cars. There were no private cars in those days, and the few taxis could only be found at the larger hotels. There were only two metro lines under the city, both rather run-down with a track length of no more than 50km.

Now there are 14 new lines incorporating 400km of track, making it the third longest subway system in the world. Yet the single fare of 2 Yuan (20p) has remained unchanged regardless of distance travelled.

It wasn’t until around 2000 that destruction and reconstruction of the city began in earnest and now I almost feel like a stranger in parts of the city that were once familiar to me. Gone are most of the old streets. Gone too are most of the hutongs the network of tiny lanes that surrounded the Forbidden City and provided access to the jungle of courtyard houses that were once homes to princes and palace officials.

The tiny family-owned restaurants that combined wonderful food with old-world ambience, low prices and personal service

A Beijing Experience: 1986 – 2013 Society

are vanishing, replaced by large, luxurious and soulless restaurant chains.

Small shops that used to be within walking distance of most people’s homes are no longer. In their place are centralized supermarkets and glitzy brand name stores selling luxury goods that are too expensive for most people and needed by none. Gone, almost, are the bicycles, replaced by cars and swarms of taxis. And gone too is the milky white haze that used to envelope the city in the early mornings, replaced by a fog of a more sinister hue that lingers for days until wind or rain drives it away.

Happily, many of Beijing’s inhabitants are largely content with the city’s development. They enjoy better housing and living conditions than they once did, while those with cars enjoy a freedom of movement that their parents never dreamed of. Even the often-exploited migrant workers, who provide the labour that drives the development, are better off than they were before they came to the city. Home ownership is more widespread than ever before, resulting in a large and expanding middle class whose needs and expectations will soon have to be met by reforms to the legal and political systems. While demands for change are seldom heard, being quickly suppressed if they are, freedom of speech has increased dramatically through the emergence of social media and SMS communications, to the extent that satirical jokes about government leaders, unimaginable in times past, are routinely circulated around China’s Twitter equivalent, Weibo.

locals lacked. The Chinese still exhibit remarkable, and often unjustified, respect towards foreigners, but otherwise the tables have turned. Development of skills and wealth within the often highly educated Chinese population has been phenomenal. Today it is the Chinese who can afford the biggest houses, the most expensive cars and the trendiest overseas shopping holidays.

I have no problem with any of that, indeed I celebrate the emancipation that Chinese people are now enjoying. I also appreciate that life in Beijing has become incomparably easier and more convenient for expats than it used to be. Altogether, life in Beijing is not very different to life in any other modern capital city.

But that, perversely, is the rub. I rather miss that ‘Alice’ experience - that topsy-turvy world in which everything was

different and even the simplest tasks involved challenges and difficulties that one could enjoy laughing about once they had been overcome. I especially miss the sense of the exotic that the old city once preserved. No doubt I would quickly change my mind were I to be transported back to face the realities of those days, but at least I can enjoy my rose-tinted memories of the way in which ‘Old China’ captivated my affection. Could the same sort of experience still captivate today’s first-time visitor, I wonder?

Words/Photography: Chris Newman Chris Newman emigrated from the UK to Australia in 1970, first arriving in China in 1986 where he eventually became a resident ten years later. He established a company specialising in the design and installation of grain fumigation systems.

Life for expats like myself has changed too. Gone are the ‘good old days’ in which we enjoyed the privileges of high salaries, especially compared to our Chinese counterparts, and low living costs.

We gained respect simply for being foreigners, and even more respect if we brought skills and knowledge that the

http://lueastmagazine.com 17

Living with Dead Hearts -

The search for China’s kidnapped children Society

Every year in China, thousands of children are kidnapped and sold. Most will never make it home… Auriole Potter talks to Charlie Custer about the making of his new film and this horrific phenomenon which still occurs throughout China.

‘Living with Dead Hearts’ - a film directed by writer and journalist Charlie Custer – follows several sets of parents in their quest to track down and bring home their kidnapped children and discover the stories behind what happened. It also provides a glimpse into the experience of the kidnapped children themselves; growing up within an unknown family from the child’s perspective. Custer presents a raw and intimate picture of the lives of the victims’ families, following these tragic events. could you buy with £4,000? It’s W hat roughly the same amount as the

average student maintenance loan. Yet this is the price on the head of a male child within a worryingly prevalent human trafficking network in China.

Whilst in the UK, child abductions are comparatively rare with 532 reported cases between 2011 and 2012, in China this figure rockets to 20,000, although outside of the state media, it’s more like 70,000. That’s 190 every day.

Depending on their age, the fate of kidnapped children is varied. Many are sold into slave labour, marriage and prostitution, often abused and forced to lead lives on the street as part of organized begging gangs. However, this is not the most common route. Neither are they held for ransom. In fact, the demand for these children is high enough that this option isn’t necessary. The usual outcome for those kidnapped is to be sold into another family and raised as an adopted child.

China’s population control programme, implemented in 1978, combined with the obsession with obtaining a male child, has had unintended consequences. Although gradually fading, the preference for a boy is still dominant and if the firstborn child is female, many parents consider having another, risking having to pay heavy penalty fines. Others adopt (in these cases illegally) in order to procure the longed-for male heir.

Paradoxically, forfeits on the heads of second children are often what lead to parents selling their children in the first place. Although aborting unwanted girls is now illegal, the ubiquitous preference for a boy often leads to firstborn daughters being sold to avoid paying a hefty fine. According to Custer, many orphanages and international adoption agencies are full of these cases.

The poverty still existing across much of China means that many older children are lured away from their families with the promise of jobs. Kidnappers assure their victims that their family has made this decision so that the money they make begging or otherwise will be returned to their homes. This, of course, never happens.

Custer admits that on a national level, anti-kidnapping forces are fairly successful. Over 8,000 children were rescued in 2011, although this figure is less reassuring when considering the annual totals of children who go missing. In April 2009, the government launched a widely publicised nationwide campaign with a goal of cracking down on human trafficking, prompted by the widespread discontent of citizens who felt that little was being done to resolve these issues. On a local level however, Custer says that police are more apathetic. The scale of these crimes and the tracking difficulties means that many simply feel their efforts are futile.

In some cases, government corruption is almost certain. “It seems that local police are often aware of what is going on in the area and have an agreement with those in charge, perhaps even receiving a cut themselves”. Therefore, the large majority of parents in these situations are on their own.

What can they do? When we consider child kidnapping in the UK, the huge media cases, such as that of Madeleine McCann, come to mind. Thousands spent on ensuring her face is not forgotten and that the search still continues six years later. However, as Custer points out, what do you do in a country where Madeleine McCanns are being kidnapped dozens of times a day? “It’s simply impossible to make a single case stand out. That said, of course parents do all they can; posting photos online, talking to any media that will listen, asking

18 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

for help from the government, putting up posters and travelling to towns where they hear of gangs being seized in order to hunt for their children”.

The search is made harder by the pattern usually taken by kidnappers. Children are generally taken across great distances on different forms of transportation, passing between different handlers.

Tracing their origins or arresting those responsible becomes a near impossible task. Finding surveillance footage of a child on a train, for example, doesn’t tell you where the child was taken. Neither does discovering the handler uncover who the original kidnapper was.

The percentage of children who are found again is impossibly low. Since he began filming in 2010, Custer spoke to numerous families with both old and new child kidnapping cases. Not a single one has been reunited with their child.

Perhaps it is China’s culture of silence that is to blame. “Many Chinese believe that getting involved in other peoples’ business is asking for trouble”. Custer gives the example of a boy sold to a family in Jiangsu province. Despite the fact that he spoke in a foreign dialect and told neighbours his original name, nothing was reported until a decade later.

Even when children are rescued, they are often ultimately returned to their buyers as police are unable to determine their origins. Although success stories should increase as DNA testing becomes more common, happy endings are currently few and far between.

Words: Auriole Potter Auriole is a third year student of Chinese and Spanish and Editor of EAST. Visit the film’s website at http://livingwithdeadhearts.com/

dramatic escape under fire of an T heunlikely group of British and Chi-

nese defenders of Hong Kong just hours after the colony’s surrender to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941 is one of the most remarkable untold stories of the Second World War. The escape party included a tiny but indomitable one-legged admiral called Chan Chak (Chen Ce 陳策), China’s senior agent in the British colony. He had played a heroic role in the desperate 17-day battle to defend Hong Kong against overwhelmingly superior enemy forces. The British had promised to help him escape, rather than face torture in a Japanese prison camp.

As the surrender was announced, the admiral and a small group of senior British staff officers set off in a small launch but were soon halted by a barrage of gunfire and had to abandon ship. Despite being shot in the arm and losing his wooden leg, Chan Chak managed to swim with the other survivors to a nearby island.

They climbed a steep hill under continuing fire and spotted five small torpedo boats, all that remained of the colony’s navy. Taken on board, they sped through the night, dodging enemy destroyers on the way, finally landing on the Chinese mainland at the village of Nan’ao, where the boats were scuttled.

The escape party, now reinforced by fifty Royal Navy sailors from the torpedo boats, teamed up with a band of Chinese guerrillas. Then, with the wounded admiral directing operations from a makeshift bamboo sedan chair, they made their way on foot across 80 miles of wild no-man’s-land, loosely controlled by Japanese patrols and bandits.

They rested briefly in temples and orchards, forded rivers and staggered up steep hillsides with their heavy packs, before reaching the relative safety of Huizhou, the nearest major town held by

the Nationalist Chinese government.

They then travelled along the East River for five days hidden in rice barges, as Japanese helicopters passed overhead searching for them. After crossing another range of mountains packed inside ancient, charcoal-fuelled lorries, the bedraggled group finally marched into Shaoguan, the wartime capital of Guangdong province, where they were welcomed as heroes and gave the world its first real news of the fall of Hong Kong.

The daring breakout through enemy lines, just as everyone else in the British colony was grimly settling down to almost four years of Japanese occupation and internment, laid the foundations of an escape trail jointly used by the British Army Aid Group and the communist East River Column for the rest of the war.

It was a rare example of Sino-British cooperation. Seldom, if ever, had the two countries fought shoulder to shoulder, and certainly not under Chinese leadership. Admiral Chan, who went on to become Mayor of Canton, received a British military knighthood for his services to the Allied cause. His comrade on the escape, David MacDougall, who later headed Hong Kong’s post-war civil administration, was awarded one of China’s highest medals, the Order of the Brilliant Star.

But until recently details of the escape itself have been shrouded in secrecy.

When, after a 3,000-mile overland trip across China, the Royal Navy party landed back in Britain five months later, they were ordered not to speak of their epic journey, for fear of recriminations against those who had helped them.

It was only after the death of my fatherin-law, one of the leaders of the escape group, that my wife and I read his war diary and determined to find out more.

Having graduated in Chinese and later traveled through much of the country as a BBC Beijing correspondent, I felt well enough equipped to cover this latest assignment.

I tracked down other memoirs, old maps and official reports, and we finally set out from Hong Kong to retrace the four-day journey to Huizhou on foot.

Many of the old paths and paddy fields had vanished beneath six-lane highways and factories. But some of the same villages were still there, along with a temple where the sailors had slept on the floor and the fortress base of their guerrilla escorts. There were even one or two people who still remembered the escape party passing through. Though we cheated with the odd bus ride through a tunnel, we ended up walking almost the entire way, the highlight being a wonderful smugglers’ path over the mountains.

There is now a plan to set up an official ‘escape trail’. Meanwhile, the various mementoes we collected were on display at a Hong Kong museum until the end of March. My history of the escape was published in hardback last year and is expected in paperback soon. There’s even a film in the offing - though who they’ll get to play the one-legged admiral isn’t yet clear.

Words/Photography: Tim Luard Tim Luard graduated in Chinese from Edinburgh University and worked as a freelance journalist in Hong Kong before joining BBC Radio News in 1981. As Beijing Correspondent in the late 1980s he covered the protests in Tiananmen Square. He spent a further 15 years as an East Asia specialist with the BBC World Service, before taking early retirement and writing his book, Escape from Hong Kong: Admiral Chan Chak’s Christmas Day Dash, published by Hong Kong University Press and available on Amazon.

http://lueastmagazine.com 19

Culture

Escape Trail of the One-Legged Admiral

Bai Jove! Baijiu – an introduction

Culture

to the drink we all love to hate have vodka, the JapaT heneseRussians sake and the Irish whiskey. For

China, baijiu is the accepted vice, the clear spirit that will undoubtedly leave you without one the morning after, and woe betide the man who ventures to the Middle Kingdom without harnessing a sound knowledge of what they are most likely to be ganbei-ing (downing) on a regular occasion.

Usually wielding an alcoholic strength of between 55 to 65 per cent, baijiu (literally meaning ‘white alcohol’) has played a key role in the development of one of the world’s oldest civilisations, which is something that even those already familiar with the suicidal nature of the baijiu hangover are often unaware of. Alcohol is widely referred to as ‘the water of history’ within China due to its presence throughout all periods of the country’s development. Baijiu itself has over 4000 years of brewing history; a statistic that many may argue disproves the theory that only good things last the test of time.

The legend goes that the creation of baijiu was, like all great discoveries, down to pure chance. During the Xia Dynasty a Chinese gentleman by the name of Du Kang is said to have stored some cooked sorghum beans in a tree trunk on a particularly cold winter’s day, returning in the spring to find the seeds emitted an ‘alluring’ fragrance. For better or for worse, this inspired the birth of baijiu.

Originally solely used for sacrificial ceremonies, baijiu’s popularity meant it quickly became popular upon military triumphs and later, Chinese holidays.

One ancient tradition entailed preparing and burying bottles of baijiu upon the birth of a daughter, only uncovering them immediately before the girl’s wedding ceremony. By the time the Zhou dynasty came around, alcohol had become one of the Nine Rites, with an emphasis placed on alcohol production and administration.

Its seemingly ubiquitous presence is relatively well documented in all spheres of society, with entire armies experiencing

its effects. During the Warring States period one general is said to have poured baijiu into the Yellow River to encourage his soldiers to swim and drink with him as a means of raising morale. The historical classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms depicts one character pretending to be drunk in order to capture his enemies’ fortress. Alcohol was also said to have inspired many famous poets such as Li Bai and Du Fu. Chinese calligrapher Wang Xizhi created his lifelong masterpiece Lantingxu (Orchid Pavillion Prologue) when drunk, later failing to recreate its mastery when sober. More recently, baijiu has helped to clean the wounds and settle the nerves of Mao Zedong and his comrades during the Long March and facilitate ping-pong diplomacy between Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai. The hazards of Westerners drinking baijiu during business meetings is illustrated in Tim Clissold’s Mr China.

Today, baijiu can be made from ingredients varying from wheat, sorghum or rice to other less common types distilled from beans, oak and peas. There have been recent safety concerns over the content of some brands, with a 2012 investigation finding that certain ingredients may damage the human immune and reproductive systems. Manufacturing standards within China are infamously slack, with government leaders of one town taking it upon themselves to brew their own baijiu (or “head-splitting firewater,” as one Wall Street Journal reporter described it) following the announcement that central funding for alcohol would be cut. More due to the persistence of tradition than health issues, its consumption by women is still frowned upon within China.

The influence of such contentions on its popularity is seemingly minimal, as despite a slowdown in the Chinese economy, the baijiu business is booming. It was named by Credit Suisse as the largest category in the global spirits market in 2010. Moutai, a luxury brand of baijiu that one report claims carries more prestige in China that Apple and Armani, is having to invest $1 billion in expanding

20 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

its production capacity. Similarly, sales of another brand, Xi Jiu, are set to skyrocket this year due to the fact its name shares one character with the surname of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Today, baijiu is no longer restricted to the Chinese market, with British businessman Kenneth Macpherson recently helping multinational drinks producer Diageo invest $376 million in bringing baijiu to the rest of the world. “Discovering baijiu is the same as discovering brands that you already love. You just didn’t realize it’s the same journey,” he claims. Baijiu cocktails may be closer than you think, although at £115 for a 50cl bottle of certain brands, its price tag may put you off more than its odour.

Regardless of its reputation, a taste of baijiu is a must for all those visiting China. Henry Kissinger is quoted as telling Deng Xiaoping in 1974 that “if we drink enough Moutai we can solve anything.”

Seemingly even the creation of world peace may be within its abilities. Besides, anything that has lasted for over four thousand years can’t be so bad, can it?

Words: Jay Smith Illustration: Ellie Hinton Jay is a fourth year student of Chinese and Spanish.

Lishi: The Journey from the Middle Kingdom to Leeds under serene hills and lapping up the waves of the Yellow Sea, this beautiful place enjoyed the most exquisite fengshui and a perfectly temperate climate. Between 1898 and 1930, the seaport was a British colony and garrison town. Today, older residents of Weihai still greet foreign visitors in English as they wander amongst Victorian-terrace style houses that blend in surprisingly well with the curved eaves of the surrounding traditional Chinese architecture.

The Li Family had been based in Weihai since ancient times.

Due to the sequence of political upheavals in China beginning in the 1930s, and a serendipity that traversed the globe, the last remaining member of the Li family with knowledge of its ancient system of physical arts, known in full as Weihai Lishi Quanfa (Lishi) settled in London. This is how Chan Kam Li, who was an international jewel merchant, became one of the first ever people to teach a family system of Chinese physical arts in the West. This course of events has direct consequences for the residents of Leeds today.

At that time a Chinese man in London would have been quite a novelty, let alone one teaching physical culture - movements, exercises and breathing sequences we know today as Taiji, Qigong and Gongfu. 1930s Londoners were among the first outside of China to learn Lishi’s soft, dance-like self-defence sets practised in pairs or groups, its forms performed with swords or long pieces of silk as graceful and flowing as any dancer, and the gymnastics, balancing and even massage techniques that are all taught within the vast array of Lishi arts.

If it was strange enough for Chan Kam Li to have settled in London at that time, it must have been fate indeed that a young Chinese boy in Hyde Park one day accidentally kicked his football so that it hit this master of ancient arts in the head! But this is exactly how the journey that brought Lishi to Leeds began!

The boy was Chee Soo and he devoted his life to making these esoteric arts accessible to Westerners, vastly improving participant’s energy levels, alleviating stress and revealing latent talents.

Since then, Lishi has spread internationally with classes in the UK, Europe and the USA. Today, the world centre of Lishi is right here in Leeds. In 1991, a Lishi class was first taught at Leeds University. Due to the depth of these arts and the active commitment of previous students and teachers, the Lishi Society at the University has run continuously since then, bringing Lishi to hundreds of students, many of whom have later gone on to become teachers, settled far and wide and continue to promote this ancient and wonderful practice right across the globe.

Words/Photography: Billy Rogal Billy is a fourth year student of Chinese.

Lishi Teachers include Leeds University graduates in Modern Chinese Studies, Postgraduate Certificate in Education and in Chinese Language. The current Lishi University teacher is a Modern Chinese Studies graduate. Find out more information at www.lishi.org/classes/leedsuni

http://lueastmagazine.com 21

Culture

began life as a small but exquisitely formed fishing W eihai village on the coastal tip of Shandong Province. Nestling

Culture

Jazzing up Japan in nineteenth-century M odernisation Japan was essentially about west-

ernisation.

Intermittently, however, there was a minority of finger-wagging conservative moralists who warned against the country’s seemingly wholesale emulation of Western civilization and patterns of behaviour. Indeed, in its first of wave of modernization up until 1919, Japan desperately embraced European and American cultures while attempting to disinherit Asia. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan saw Asia as culturally worthless but fit for exploitation in the imperialist sense. In other words, there was a lot to be gained from the neighbours politically and economically, but as it stood, they had nothing that Japan could possibly learn from.

‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation’, Adrian pontificates in Julian Barnes’s novella, The Sense of an Ending.

But history also has a tendency to consciously select and de-select. Incidentally, jazz in its live form first arrived in Japan from the Philippines. Philippine Jazz bands toured Kobe and Osaka in the 1920s (the period roughly coinciding with the Jazz Age), bringing with them and sharing what they had learnt from the American forces based in their country. But while 1920s Japan enjoyed the performances of these travelling jazz bands, it failed to acknowledge and record their contribution to the evolution and development of Jazz in the country.

Consequently, the otherwise well versed ‘Jazz maniacs’ of Japan – who have every conceivable thing worth knowing about the genre hard-wired into their genes – are genuinely ignorant of the fact that early Jazz in Japan was built around the performances of Filipino bands. Like most Japanese they believe the music was ‘sent’ to Japan directly, and therefore ‘unvitiated’ from the US. According to Count Basie, the Ameri-

can Jazz legend, ‘the Japanese are really something. They are right on the ball …

They’re constantly learning new things’.

That’s because he was overwhelmed by the attention and respect given to Jazz in Japan. Basie gives an interesting account of an experience he had there in the early 1960s: ‘We were playing somewhere and we were programmed to come on after the house band, and I happened to arrive a little late, not late for my set, but a few minutes before the first band was supposed to hit. So I was pretty sure I had enough time to come in through the main entrance and catch part of their set from the audience. But when I stepped inside the lobby and heard the music, I said “Damn, the band is on. Am I that late?” Apparently, “it was those Japanese cats playing one of our tunes as a tribute to us, and for a couple of bars they had me fooled. I said, “Jesus Christ”’. The Count believed ‘the bands in Japan could play anything they hear … they’re such exact musicians that sometimes when they work from recordings or live performances, they write in the mistakes without realizing it. That’s just how precise they are.’

“The Jazz geeks sat in the smoke-filled dens listening intensely to music and bopping their heads like meditating monks responding to a spiritual summons.”

Incidentally, I acquired most of my anthropological and academic understanding of Jazz in Japan from the ‘Jazz maniacs’ I hung out with during my student days. These were people who were technically informed about the genre and would split hairs about the most obscure jazz musical notes and anecdotes. And the details of the popular recordings, including the place and date, not to mention the line-up of the band, were always ready to hand, if you asked.

These geeks didn’t buy loudspeakers to listen to Jazz, they built their own because they wanted to listen, say, to a particular note Miles Davis played, or the bass by Ron Carter, on a certain track.

22 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

Which reminds me; back in those days one of my friends phoned me up one morning and asked me to come over to his house to ‘enjoy’ the crisp sound from his new speakers. He’d assembled these specifically because he wanted to listen to Jaco Pastorius’s new release; he was interested in how Pastorius handled the bass guitar, and the speakers were apparently designed to make the sound of the instrument pulsate and breathe better.

The speakers were massive, and occupied about half of his bedroom where he lived in his father’s house. The bass was precise and heavy, and on full blast the sound of the loudspeakers might have lifted the roof of the house off the building.

Sometime back when Jazz Cafés were common in Japanese cities and towns, devotees of the genre were treated to beautiful and the most pristine of sounds because these joints boasted some of the best loudspeakers and up-to-date record players. And although the music was not live, in the specialized cafés one was forbidden to speak. The Jazz geeks sat in the smoke-filled dens listening intensely to music and bopping their heads like meditating monks responding to a spiritual summons.

In any event, early twentieth-century Japanese historians consciously (perhaps) ignored the fact that an Asian country had contributed to the advancement of Japan’s modern culture. Japanese connoisseurs of Jazz are therefore baffled when alerted to the role Filipino Jazz musicians played in the advancement of the music in Japan; they seem bewildered more by the fact that they didn’t know this.

Words: Kweku Ampiah Graphics: Nicola Ince Dr Kweku Ampiah is a White Rose East Asia Centre (WREAC) Academic Fellow in Japanese Studies.

crystal blue sky is piercing and T hecloudless.

The landscape is dry and

dusty. Rain does not often visit this part of Shanxi during the spring as shown by the cracked, baked earth underfoot. The mighty Yellow River can just be seen in the distance, snaking away towards the south, the only source of water in this barren land. An elderly lady sits outside her dwelling, a white turban around her head to protect her from the early afternoon sun. Her dark skin is leathery, heavily lined and tough, her hands calloused and strong. She has almost no teeth left and her wrinkles describe a long, arduous life, which shows no signs of easing with the coming of old age. Her family are long gone; her husband passed away over a decade ago and her children have all moved to the larger towns in search of work. She sits outside the mouth of her cave and waits. She has been waiting all morning, passing the time by weaving a basket to replace the old one at her feet. It shouldn’t be long now.

“As always she hears them long before she sees them; the excited shouts, the exclamations of wonderment.”

sidering the slow start to the day. With effort which gives away her years, she walks slowly back to her cave house to make her evening meal. The city people have gone. Silence once again reigns over the village, her basket of dates lies next to the wall, covered by a thin cloth of cotton, ready for tomorrow and the people it may bring.

“Silence once again reigns over the village” In Shanxi province alone there are still as many as 3 million people living in cave dwellings. These settlements have existed for thousands of years and many remain largely unchanged with little to no irrigation or running water. Some are also without electricity. As China embraces her development and modernisation, these communities are threatened with extinction. All across Shanxi there are graveyard cave communities; empty shells of whole villages no longer home to anyone.

This piece is written about a lady from Lijiashan, a tiny mountain village in western Shanxi, on the border with Shaanxi. At one point there were dozens of families living in Lijiashan. There were shops, a temple and even a school.

Now, nearly all the cave houses have been abandoned and forgotten and the school stands empty, though you can still see the pictures of the final class and their assignments hanging on the wall.

Most of Lijiashan’s former residents have left, gone to larger towns in search of work and a more comfortable life. There are no more than 50 residents now, most of whom are elderly and alone, and when they are gone, Lijiashan will fall completely silent, nothing more than a glimpse into China’s past which couldn’t keep up with her present.

Words/Photography: Ruairi Garvey Ruairi is a final year student of Chinese and Portuguese.

As always she hears them long before she sees them; the excited shouts, the exclamations of wonderment. The sounds of “ohs” and “ahs” carry over the mountain terrain. She never truly expects the tourists’ amazement and it is somehow disconcerting when it comes. Yet it keeps her alive. She stands as the tour group approaches her cave dwelling. In as good Mandarin as she can she addresses them, “Chinese dates! Local Chinese dates! Delicious, please buy, delicious Chinese dates!” The tourists laugh and squeal with delight at the spectacle of this adorable old nainai selling her dates from a basket. They simply must get a picture and buy a bag. It’s only a few kuai after all. This carries on until the group loses interest and moves on to the next settlement. The old lady, alone again, sits back on the wall and counts her takings, enough cash for when she next goes to town to buy supplies. Not bad at all con-

http://lueastmagazine.com 23

Travel

The Cave Dwellings of Lijiashan

Travel

A Taste of Tibet predominantly Tibetan areas of Thenorthern Sichuan and southern Gan-

su province are home to one of China’s most colourful ethnic groups and some of the country’s most striking scenery.

While bus-hopping from Chengdu to Lanzhou, stopping off at remote towns and villages along the way, I discovered places where the scenery was unspoilt and the people unaffected by the modern world. Temples soon took the place of high-rises, and ‘Dico’s’ hamburgers were swapped for tsampa (roasted barley flour) and momo (boiled dumplings).

After an eight-hour bus journey north from Sichuan’s capital, our first stop was the walled town of Songpan. Even on horseback, trotting through horizontal sleet, the town’s surrounding mountain forests seemed luscious, and the bluegreen lakes enticing. The ‘hot’ springs we had been promised at Erdaohai after a long day in the saddle were more like just above freezing. Our guides were eager to please though, offering us endless bowels of yak butter tea to warm us up, and keeping us entertained despite a somewhat limited English vocabulary, mainly consisting of “hello!”, “smoke?” and “f*** you”.

The scruffy town of Ruo’ergai was next on our route, situated in the middle of sweeping, high-plateau grasslands dotted with nomads’ tents and yak herds.

Although the town itself did not have much to offer except, of course, an astoundingly large temple complex, this stopover allowed us to venture away from the security of the Lonely Planet guide to explore the first bend of the Yellow River near Tangke. That night we stayed with a Tibetan family who relied on their son to communicate with us in Mandarin as they only spoke Tibetan.

Nevertheless they were incredibly warm and friendly, and really did help us out, as we hadn’t anticipated that this ‘tourist attraction’ would have no accommodation for visitors! We sat around the open fire in their kitchen and watched the Olympics on a grainy television screen.

24 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

The father, prayer beads in hand, muttered sutras to himself as the mother busied herself preparing the yak stew we had for dinner. We then retreated to the beds in their garden shed and were asleep by 8pm. It all felt very remote.

“We sat around the open fire in their kitchen and watched the Olympics on a grainy television screen.”

Langmusi, on the Sichuan-Gansu border, boasts not one but two enchanting eighteenth-century lamaseries, Serti Gompa and Kerti Gompa. The views from the hills on the edge of the village over the endless maze of gold-roofed monastery buildings and monks’ dormitories are spectacular. Our second day here was spent watching some horse racing in the grasslands nearby. We hadn’t anticipated quite how off the beaten path this event was, but luckily some Tibetans picked us up some way along our four-kilometre walk. Until then I never thought it was possible to fit four people on one motorbike! The horses were showered in little pieces of paper before the riders rode bareback around a course marked out by flapping prayer flags. It was a relief to find a place where the invasion of fast-food restaurants - all too evident elsewhere in China - was nowhere to be seen. The nearest thing to a Big Mac here were the aptly named ‘Big McYak Attack’ burgers sold at Leisha’s café, which are well worth the ¥25 (around £2.50).

After a brief stop in Hezuo to visit the incredible Milarepa Palace, a nine-storey high temple, we arrived at our penultimate stop, Xiahe. The town’s vast Labrang Monastery is one of the six great monasteries belonging to the Gelugpa (yellow hat) sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

It attracts pilgrims who, in order to reach the complex, circle the three-kilometre kora (pilgrim path) around the monastery in a clockwise direction. It is possible to join an English-speaking monk for a tour around the complex, which I would highly recommend. Exploring the monastery was enchanting. Monks

Travel

shuffled around the temple complex, chanting morning prayers in halls filled with the smell of yak butter. This butter fuels the lamps that illuminate the brightly coloured wall paintings in a dim yellow glow. We stayed in a guesthouse beside the holy monastery and instead of drifting asleep to construction noise as we did in other parts of China, we were lulled to sleep in the evenings by the sound of squeaking prayer wheels.

“Monks shuffled around the temple complex, chanting morning prayers in halls filled with the smell of yak butter.�

Altitudes are high in these areas, bus journeys slow, routes unpredictable, and English language skills sometimes non-existent, but this is all part of the fun. I would also add that the type of toilet featured on this trip is strictly longdrop only, and these can get a bit fragrant to say the least. However, a wonderful insight into the thriving Tibetan culture more than makes up for these shortfalls.

The more I travel in China and learn about the country, the more fascinating it becomes.

Words/Photography: Alexandra Thompson Alexandra is a third year student of Chinese.

http://lueastmagazine.com 25

Travel

Trans-Siberian Adventure Trans-Siberian Express stretchT hees over a third of the world. It sets

trees of the Siberian forests were light, fine silver birches through which we could see the hills and fields beyond.

We spent three days at Listvyanka, a tiny village on the shores of Lake Baikal, marveling at the clearest water imaginable. An incredible one fifth of the world’s fresh water is contained there.

Our route included around 85 stops, amongst which were several key destinations such as Lake Baikal and Ulaanbaator. Before setting off on this journey, we attempted to master some Russian and later, Mandarin. Getting my head round the Cyrillic alphabet took a weekend, however it enabled me to take in the names of the towns we passed through, as well as some of the more simple signposts. Every few hours, the train would discharge its hordes of passengers whilst the train’s engine was checked. They would mill around on the platform, inspecting everything from fresh fruit and vegetables, to gigantic soft toys, to yoghurt on sale at kiosks manned by pedlars. Occasionally, when there was a longer stop, we would venture out into bleak town squares, more often than not punctuated by huge statues venerating local leaders, well out of proportion to their surroundings.

“For two nights we stayed and experienced the pace and rhythm of their lives, so very different from our own.”

off from Moscow, snakes across vast swathes of the Gobi desert and crosses the grassy steppes of Mongolia before finally, 9001km and several times zones later, reaching its destination – the Asian metropolis of Beijing.

The Trans-Siberian Express is the means of travel across Russia for the local people too and we met many of them in the dining car for lengthy debates. The view from the windows changed as we sped eastwards. The landscape became steadily more rural on leaving Moscow and the surrounding towns, becoming mountainous as we crossed the Urals and swampy as we neared Siberia. The

Whilst west of Lake Baikal the people are Russian, white Caucasian, to the east the faces become Asian. In Ulan Ude, they were mainly from the Buryat tribe.

There we stayed with a Mongolian family. Our hosts were Genobic, Almagul and their 11 year old son, Hamat. They provided our food and canopied beds, and allowed us to join them as they herded their goats, diminished in number by two hard winters, along with their sheep and cattle. We also milked their cows and collected water from a nearby stream. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Hamat did not go to school in Ulumbatoor but stayed all year round with his parents, helping with their livestock.

I gave him a pack of cards and taught him pelmanism. His spatial memory was incredible; he swept the board each time. The family was very poor. They were taking in guests to help make ends meet but apparently most turned away when they saw the sparsely furnished ger and the multitude of flies. Bathroom facilities were out on the steppe, a couple of hundred yards from the ger in a specified direction. For two nights we stayed and experienced the pace and rhythm of their lives, so very different from

26 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

our own. It was immensely humbling.

Afterwards, we travelled onwards to Beijing. As we crossed the Gobi desert we saw caravans of camels and also passed the many mining operations: oil, coal and other mineral resources. We were expecting to see the Great Wall and to our delight it suddenly appeared – only a few miles away and clearly visible – rather surprisingly at the foot of the mountains. As we drew in to Beijing Station we spotted the famous bullet trains but didn’t envy them their speed. Our more sedate journey had been fascinating.

Words: Clare Whately Photography: Lara Owen Since graduating from the University of Bristol with a degree in Economics and Statistics, Clare has worked in housing and community work with Shelter Housing Aid, Child Poverty Action Group and the Legal Advice Centre in Bethnal Green. In addition, she has set up and sold four small businesses.

Clare used www.memrise.com to help her pick up basic Russian and Mandarin.

Memrise is an alternative way to learn vocabulary, using a combination of images and science. It is an online learning tool that uses flashcards supplemented with mnemonics and the spacing effect to boost the speed and ease of learning.

China’s Hidden Gems all know about the Great Wall in Beijing and the Bund in Shanghai, but did you know that there is much more to China Wethan ancient restored bricks and flagrant capitalism (with Chinese characteristics, of course)? There are many things to do

and see in the Middle Kingdom that are way off the beaten path. Some are virtually unchartered lands to waiguoren – that’s ‘foreigners’ to you and I – but some are just truly well kept secrets.

Datong is a tiny city by Chinese standards, lying six hours by slow train from Beijing and home to only a mere 3.5 million inhabitants. Within the city boundaries is the Datong City Wall, which is a lot like the Great Wall except grander, infinitely better maintained and a lot quieter. Venture an hour or two out of the city by taxi and you have three fantastic attractions that not even Chinese people have heard of (they all seem to think Datong only has a coalmine for some strange reason).

The Hanging Temple, at a vertigo-inducing 250ft from the ground, will have you gasping in awe at how such a multi-layered temple could have been built on such a dangerous rock face! Meanwhile, the seemingly neverending Yunguang Grottos house more than 51,000 awe-inspiring Buddha statues.

These, along with the famed ‘Pisa of China’, the Wooden Pagoda, can all be seen in a day. Be sure to haggle the taxi fare!

1. Zhujiajiao – Shanghai Zhujiajiao lies roughly an hour and a half by bus out of Shanghai city proper and is a truly scenic experience. One of China’s many southern water villages, you can wander for hours marvelling at the never-ending bridges and the picturesque river flowing through it. They even have a community stage where they hold Beijing Opera performances, always a bonus for those who enjoy sanctioned public wailing. Also, in the indoor market, you can purchase yourself a pair of beautifully embroidered shoes for a mere £4.50.

3. Tianzifang – Shanghai Another Shanghai gem, this time in the city itself, is the Tianzifang arts and crafts enclave.

Hidden away on Taikang Road in the French Concession, Tianzifang is now taking over many other streets in the neighbourhood as its popularity grows. It has a hutong atmosphere, despite being of the Western-influenced shikumen style, and here you can buy all sorts of kitsch bric-a-brac. Personally, I’d recommend the authentic Indian restaurant there, where you can reportedly find the best onion bhajis in the whole of China.

4. Phoenix Hill – Beijing Out in rural Beijing – if you can believe such a thing exists – yet still in Haidian District, lies a fantastic little commune that has the slogan ‘Biodynamic Farm. Vegetarian’. Well I never, vegetarians in China! If you can hack the idea of hiking up a practically vertical stone staircase with only a chain banister for safety then you will be well suited to discover Phoenix Hill, which boasts astonishing views from the grasstopped mountain peaks of its hiking trails, as well as various temples to enjoy.

Words/Photography: Victoria Leigh Victoria is a third year stiudent of Chinese and EAST Online Co-ordinator

http://lueastmagazine.com 27

Society Travel

2. Datong – Shanxi Province

Mystifying Yuanyang Travel

woken by a woman shaking me, I was her head a silhouette in the wash of

lights on board the bus. We had arrived in the dead of night but now, although still dark outside, the bus shook with life.

6.00am and passengers shuffled to their feet, baggage was yanked from the stow and blankets rained down from the top bunks. I watched groggily as the driver shouted orders down the bus, a cigarette wedged between his teeth. He sucked his last lungful and tossed the butt to the ground. I watched it tumble, as if in slow-motion, then spark as it hit the floor and was instantly crushed by a hurrying foot, followed by a geyser of dirty spit. “the fog was so thick now it was like driving through Chinese porridge” The woman was still there, waving a flyer in my face, foreign words clattering from her mouth. I stumbled off the bus and into Yuanyang to discover that the warehouse walls were not brick, but fog. A minibus took me out of town, the fog so thick now it was like driving through Chinese porridge, the road so bumpy it felt as though we were run-

ning over cattle, and we probably were.

The road came to a dusty end. I was dropped at the top of Yuanyang’s famous rice terraces, still shrouded by that glutinous, hanging fog. The warm glow of the morning sun slowly burned its way through and soon I could make out roof tops below. As I contemplated my next move, a crease-faced, haggard old woman carrying a whip emerged from the haze. She gave me the once over, her deep-set eyes scanning my rucksack and the crinkled map clenched in my hand, all the while muttering in Sino-Tibetan language. She seemed to know exactly where I was heading and I had no idea, so I followed her beckoning hand down into the village.

En route I had the chance to admire her traditional Hani outfit - an elaborate coiled headdress and a navy blue shawl with indigo diamonds of fabric hanginglike handkerchiefs from her waist. The colours were as striking as the plumage of a parrot, but I mainly kept an eye on the whip. We passed similarly-dressed locals setting up for market; women bent double with baskets of cabbages hoisted onto their backs, men with machetes,

28 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

hard-working water buffalo and Kellogg’s cockerels. I glanced behind and noticed a gaggle of giggly children accumulating, curious to see more.

With the rising sun had come the lifting of the mist, like a curtain being drawn – the show was about to begin. Finally the rice terraces revealed themselves. Immense shelves of water, infinity edge pool after infinity edge pool, caught the sunlight and threw it back at an angle. It was breathtaking and when it caused me to stray carelessly off course, the lady with the whip simply urged me along with hand gestures and a friendly toothless smile.

Words/Photography: Eve Baker Eve is a fourth year student of Chinese.

Travel http://lueastmagazine.com 29

Eye on Asia University Life & Careers

in March, students of East Asian E arlier Studies celebrated another successful

prize-winners were announced. Each was presented with an A2 print of their work year of Eye on Asia, a charity photogra- and for the top two winners, cash prizphy competition that has been run annu- es were also given. At the event, judges EYE ON ASIA ally by the department for over 20 years.

Jim Brogden, Lecturer in Cinema and Photography at Leeds, and Chris Turner, PHOTOGRAPHY This year’s committee were overwhelmed President of LUU PhotoSoc, gave a short COMPETITION by the enormous number of beautiful sub- speech about their admiration for this missions, and found it a challenging task year’s entries and how they selected their technical skill and patience in waiting to choose a shortlist from the near 150 chosen winners. several hours to capture the perfect imentries. Those selected by the committee were shown in an exhibition in Parkinson Both praised Alasdair Glen’s winning age of this ancient cultural tradition in Court for two weeks in March. Taken in photograph ‘Sulphur Miners’ for its Xingping, China. Third prize was awardlocations such as North Korea, Burma, portrayal of some of the grittier human ed to Carlijn Popelier for her photograph Vietnam, Japan and China, the images rights-related issues in the region and the ‘Moonlight’, taken in Kep, Cambodia. featured in the exhibition showcased the perceptive way the work highlighted the This work was admired by the judges talent of Leeds students in capturing their dangerous and tiring work of these min- for its balance of light and clever use of unique perspectives of Asia. ers, captured descending into Ijen Volca- perspective, drawing the viewer’s eye out no crater in Java, Indonesia. Jacob James, to sea where a group of people were sat An evening reception was held on Thurs- whose work ‘Cormorant Fisherman’ was perched on the end of a jetty. day 14th March, where this year’s three a close second, was applauded for his Every year the competition is stage-managed by Senior Lecturer in Chinese Dr 1st PRIZE Alasdair Glen - 'Sulphur Miners' Li Ruru, who works tirelessly to create fantastic learning opportunities for the students of the department and inspire others on campus to take interest in Asia. Asked what she thought of the works on display at this year’s exhibition, Dr Li commented: “I liked this year’s exhibition very much, because there were more portraits. Photographing scenery is important, but what our students see in the society and culture, captured through the lens, is more fascinating to me.”

Over the years the competition has been generously supported by the Education Section at the Manchester Consulate General of the PRC and more recently, the Leeds International Business Confucius Institute (LIBCI), both of which donate funds so that Eye on Asia and other projects can be run by students of the university.

This year’s committee chose to donate all the proceeds from the competition to Blue Sky Healing Home in Beijing, China. The charity’s mission is to enable orphans to receive the necessary medical treatment and nurturing environment they need to improve their quality of life. You can read more about their work here: http://www.blueskyhealinghome. org Words: Hannah Dudley Hannah is a third year student of Chinese and Editor of EAST. She was also one of the organisers of the Eye on Asia 2013 photography competition and exhibition.

30 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

Follow @Eye_on_Asia on Twitter. You can also view all the shortlisted photographs here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyeonasia2013/

Society

2nd PRIZE Jacob James - 'Cormorant Fisherman' 3rd PRIZE Carlijn Popelier - 'Moonlight'

http://lueastmagazine.com 31

From Asia With Love:

University Life & Careers

Tales from our year abroad correspondents Students of East Asian Studies at Leeds are lucky to have the opportunity to spend a year abroad in the region. This is a valuable opportunity to improve their language skills and experience life in the society about which they have been studying. This year, we asked several students currently on their year abroad in East Asia to report back on their experiences.

Nobody Does Chicken Like KFC

I’ve been ill all weekend I ’mandhungry. most of what I’ve eaten in the last

two days has promptly found its way back out, by one means or another. Chinese food does not lend itself to the ill; oily, pungent, desiccated, generally looking like it’s already been eaten backwards, only you never noticed it before.

After two days on nothing more than a bowl of rice, a slightly more soupy bowl of rice and a handful of bananas, I’m desperate for some home comforts. So I head to KFC. Now, I’ve already seen China do some strange things to people’s eating habits. I’ve seen my roommate go to town on bowl after bowl of Cheerios – chain eating – after being deprived of cereal for a mere two weeks, only to remark, somewhere between mouthfuls and mumblings of delight, that he “didn’t even eat Cheerios back in England”. Absence, it would seem, makes the heart grow desperate. I don’t really eat KFC at home, but nevertheless I knew it well and felt like it would provide me with some sense of normality. Imagine my disappointment when the first thing I see, greeting my entrance to KFC, is a clear advertisement for what is essentially a curry on rice. I’m not even too sure it was a chicken curry.

There’s some talk out there about how the expansion of large Western companies - such as McDonald’s and KFC - to far corners of the globe, marks the downfall of independent national cul-

tures and heralds the arrival of a new, shared, global culture, apparently in the image of the West. But all I had to do was step into this singular link in a global chain and the difference was apparent.

The fact that a distinctly Asian dish was more prominently advertised than the namesake of Kentucky Fried Chicken spoke tomes to me. These Western giants aren’t wrecking balls, crashing in to smash aside any remnants of cultural identity; they’re something much more complex. Here seems to be a meeting point for cultures to mingle, relate and interbreed. Although what exactly the West has brought to this cultural exchange is unclear. Fast food? One walk around the street stalls at lunch reveals that Beijing is a city run on the saturated fats of fast food, with a plethora of dishes designed to be cooked in a few minutes, in one pan, in a kitchen mounted on the back of a bicycle, which can be pedalled away as fast as the food itself.

Fried chicken? Not only does Beijing fry chicken, it fries just about every part of a chicken available. Although who’s to say that KFC didn’t do this first?

So I had the option of curry and rice in KFC - not exactly what I was expecting.

Clearly these global corporations need to be adaptable in order to survive in local markets. I was willing to forgive them as I was still able to get a chicken burger. I ordered it, and was thrown the question of whether I wanted it spicy or not. No biggie, I’m not new to the concept of a Zinger Burger. But I told them

32 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

I didn’t want any spice. This was apparently not an option. It appears a much more subtle difference of the Chinese KFC to the regular – more subtle than the flagrant advertisement of something other than chicken at the counter - that all of their fried chicken is first coated in spice, and then rolled in the ‘so secret’ breadcrumbs. This is as devastating as it is discreet. If offering a rival dish (again, that’s anything other than fried chicken) as the paramount product of any KFC wasn’t sacrilegious enough, discovering that the Kentucky Fried Chicken they do serve isn’t even made using the normal recipe, is pure blasphemy.

“I don’t have a clue what’s authentic, but I used to at least think I did.”

The KFC served in China is unavoidably spicy, and to me that’s just not normal.

But I’ve never been to Kentucky. I don’t know how the Colonel fries his chicken there. Hell, I’ve never eaten KFC anywhere outside of England before. I don’t have a clue what’s authentic, but I used to at least think I did. Before, I could look at a picture of Colonel Sanders’ beaming smile and know exactly what it stood for, but now I feel that it stands for nothing.

This is what really unsettled me about my experience. It seems that far from wishing to impose its own philosophies and beliefs upon the good folk of Beijing, KFC just wants to stamp the culture that already exists here with its own brand name.

“KFC just wants to stamp the culture that already exists here with its own brand name.”

This was already turning out to be a very educational trip. But what I saw next truly boggled me. It showed that KFC China was in fact keeping one of its Western brothers’ ideals: the happy family.

What made the presence of this ideal in China strange was the picture on the left.

Why KFC would decide to promote the ideal of a healthy, happy, two-parentstwo-children family in a country which is infamous for its One-Child Policy is beyond me. This slip-up peeled back the curtain, and revealed the fraud behind the giant, floating head. I left, disappointed.

My burger was good though.

Words/Photography: Eamon Barrett Eamon is a second year student of Chinese and International Relations and is currently studying on his year abroad in Beijing.

Tianjin and the Lonely Hearts Club felt the need to buy a gramophone? A mobile phone from the 80s? A E ver life-size bust of Mao, a pearl necklace or an ‘authentic’ ermine stole?

If so, you’d probably find it in Tianjin. China’s third-largest city, it’s also popular with ‘magpie’ Beijingers, who come for the weekend looking for a bargain.

Five of us set off one Saturday morning to catch the 30 minute high-speed train to Tianjin from the impressively large and shiny commuter station of Beijing South. We were attracted by guidebook promises of colonial architecture and streets lined with mad antiques.

After seeing the antiques market we came across the part of town which is home to Tianjin’s former concessions, where a handful of original French, Italian, Belgian, British and Russian colonial-style buildings still stand.

We were wandering around a pretty, circular park in the slightly shabby-looking, but still elegant, former French concession, when a crowd of people clustered around its edge caught our eye.

Swathes of handwritten posters hung off pieces of string, washing-line style.

More were sellotaped onto pinboards. A few were secured to the handlebars of stationary bicycles, their riders, most of whom were elderly women, chatting or simply waiting placidly on a low wall. Several hundred people were milling about, and we speculated about what they were doing there. Was it a protest? The chances seemed unlikely as it was calm with no police in sight.

The written content of the A4 flyers differed very little from one to the next.

“Sex: Female. Age: 44. Height: 1.65m. Muslim. Bachelor Degree. Unmarried.

Works in an advertising agency.” Some had zodiac signs and horoscopes. A few finished with physical descriptions such as ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful.’ Few had information beyond that of the first side of a CV, and none had photographs attached.

Given the turnover and speed of China’s labour market, it would be easy to mistake them for job-seeking classified ads. But a middle-aged man standing by one of the boards marked ‘male’ told us otherwise. “It’s for matchmaking!” he pronounced excitedly. He held up his left index finger, “Boy,” and then holding up his right, “girl,” , finally knocking the knuckles together and smiling at his own charade. “We hold this every couple of weeks. It’s easy for people to meet suitable matches this way.”

Words: Catherine Jessup Photography: Izzie Curnock Catherine is a second year student of Chinese and Spanish and is currently studying on her year abroad in Beijing.

http://lueastmagazine.com 33

University Life & Careers

In my hometown, the KFC has a Kids Korner, so spelt because alliteration is more important than literacy, especially for kids. Painted on the wall is a mural of children playing outside, engaged in an array of sports, tirelessly running, jumping and swimming, fuelled by the nutritional value of Popcorn Chicken.

Suspended above this vision of utopia is the Colonel’s warm, beaming smile. It’s beautiful. And it’s not an uncommon ideal among fast food joints either. I’ve seen McDonald’s adverts that profess the power of a meal deal to salvage a waning marriage, and Coca-Cola adverts where Coke is the hero product that reconnects estranged families.

Society

Daybreak on Yellow Mountain I fought to ignore the growing sounds of excited chatter and rustling tents to get back into my dream and forget that it was only a matter of time before my alarm would brutally force me to give up the shelter of my sleeping bag. I was becoming increasingly aware of where I was: Anhui province, thousands of metres high up on Yellow Mountain. The concrete floor beneath the groundsheet was painful on my hip. The air was like ice, torturing my exposed neck and ear.

Every movement and whisper pierced through the silence, jerking me awake.

Outside, the bitter darkness engulfed my sight. Shuffling forwards in a daze, my insides sank when I saw the queue of Chinese tourists, prattling away in what was now gibberish to me, eagerly crowding around the sink to brush their teeth.

Why were they so keen? I ignored their curious stares.

By the time I returned to the tent, the alarms were buzzing simultaneously, accompanied by muffled moans and groans. It was 5am. Before long, we were all up and ready, peaking through puffy eyes and wondering why the hell we had decided to do this. Where before other tents had crammed around ours, there was now just empty space. Most of the other tourists had packed up and were off searching for the best view of the sunrise.

our effort to drive our legs up the steep steps, on a never-ending trail through the shadowy trees, leading us up towards the sky. We frantically overtook tourists, leaping side to side to beat the crowds.

My breaths became short and heavy, my lungs struggling to draw in as much oxygen as possible at such high altitude.

At last, we reached the flat. To our dismay, hundreds of people were already rammed in, pushing to get as close to the railings, and as close to the firsts signs of the sun, as possible. There was an atmosphere of anticipation, like impatient fans about to watch a band in concert. People were fighting tooth and nail to get to the front, cameras at the ready. As the sky grew brighter, and the hazy clouds became bathed in a subdued orange glow, I just managed to catch a glimpse of the immense mountainous landscape over the hordes of jet black heads. Frustration overcame us. We started trying to weave our way closer to the view, but

The race was on. A surge of adrenalin charged through me as I saw, behind the black shadow of a hill way in the distance, a faint source of light, tuning up the colours of the surroundings, turning part of the vast sky a soft cerulean blue.

It was only a matter of time before the sun would rise, marking the start of a new day.

Hurriedly, we gathered our group together and made our way towards the swarms of Chinese tourists climbing the nearby hill – Lotus Peak. It took all of

34 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

people stood their ground, unwilling to part and let latecomers through. It was every man for himself. I had not come this far to get a view of the back of someone’s head. Ducking down, I sneakily fought through the forest of legs. Finally, an opportunity, I could see clearly! Then all of a sudden there was a cheer from the crowd behind me. Far away, in the centre of the glow behind the mountains, a spot of shining yellow light burst over the horizon. Piercing the landscape, it was like an opening to another world.

At that moment we knew it had all been worth it.

Words/Photography: Susannah Derrett Susannah is a second year student of Chinese and Linguistics and is currently studying on her year abroad in Shanghai.

‘Boring Pie’ and Other Adventures is truly an assault on the senses, T aipei in every sense of the word. The taste

Feeding yourself, like anything worth doing in Taipei, is fraught with difficulties. This is in no small part due to the language barrier. Ordering food in McDonald’s is simple enough; you need only grunt, caveman-like, and point at what you want, taking comfort in the fact that “Big Mac” sounds the same in every language. If you want something a little more exotic, however, the linguistics of the matter get a little more interesting. Several times I have been sitting with a menu which I cannot read, trying to communicate to a cook who cannot understand me, that I am hungry and desperately want something, anything, to eat. This has led to many surprises, both the pleasant, delicious variety and the horrible, terrifying variety. Pleasant surprises have included such things as a delightfully thick, perfectly seasoned

Even when you can read the menu, and ‘read’ is a word I use lightly here, there’s always the opportunity to be a little adventurous. Since coming to Taiwan my palate, which is somewhat limited I’m ashamed to admit, has been widened extensively, and I have been introduced to the many delights of Taiwanese cuisine.

“You can’t really put a price on a little slice of home-away-from-home, can you?”

‘Boring Pie’ and Bubble Tea are all well and good but when you’re craving home comforts - roast potatoes, Tetley’s or a good bar of Cadbury’s - what’s to be done? The solution is delightfully simple; pop along to the nearest import supermarket (of which there are a great many), have a browse down the aisles and simply pluck things off the shelf. Of course, imported British goods are going to be a little more expensive than their Taiwanese equivalents, but you can’t really put a price on a little slice of homeaway-from-home, can you?

Words/Photography: Scott Major Scott is a second year student of Chinese and is currently studying on his year abroad in Taipei.

East Meets West the feeling…after 11 hours I magine on a plane, you feel Shanghai under-

neath your feet, and you’re aware that you’ve landed in a crazy, new world. Almost immediately the sheer vastness of this city makes itself clear, with hundreds of apartment blocks packed together, each over thirty floors high. More people live in a square mile in this city than in an entire medium-sized British town.

Then there’s the Bund, where one can stand on the purpose-built boulevard, looking over the black expanse of the Huangpu River at a skyline to rival New York’s, lit up with more lights than you can imagine.

The people here, and their lifestyles, vary greatly, from the manic, conspicuous consumption of the increasing number of multi-millionaire Chinese to the working lives of the labouring classes. Shanghai is home to both West-

ern-obsessed party-goers and disciplined hard-workers for whom alcohol is a rarity saved for only the most special occasions.

Diversity is everywhere, with unprecedented development over such a short space of time, this city has come to appear as a fractured collection of lifestyles, opinions and values, packed together in the fast-transforming metropolis. You will inevitably bear witness to incredible sights and unexpected contrasts. One day you might feel you could be back in Leeds and on another, home feels like worlds away. One day you might find yourself ambling through electronics markets, haggling over fakes or a gadget or two. The next you might be doing your food shopping in a market full of exotic looking delicacies with live fish being gutted at your request. You can spend an evening in 100 Century Ave-

nue, drink a cocktail or two among the clouds in the world’s highest bar, or visit Barbarossa and soak up the calm ambience of People’s Park, surrounded by a muted city. Then take a walk around an older district where laobaixing (Chinese locals) prepare food together in the streets or practice tai-chi, while women sit and sew cross-stitch and men gather around tables playing cards.

This is East meets West. This is one of the most amazing cities in the world.

This is Shanghai.

Words/Photography: Thomas Crooks Smith Thomas is a second year student of Chinese and Politics and is currently studying on his year abroad in Shanghai.

http://lueastmagazine.com 35

University Life & Careers

buds are no exception. You can, if you are prepared to look, find anything your heart desires in the streets of Taipei.

Every taste is catered for, and every nation is represented; from small plates of stinky tofu sold to you by a beaming, elderly Taiwanese woman, to such novelties as ‘Boring Pie’ and DIY Korean barbeque, all the way to the last refuge of the bewildered Westerner, McDonald’s.

meaty soup with rice, whilst less appetising surprises have included balls of ground-up chicken skin and bones, accompanied by flabby, tasteless noodles the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

The Women Writers and Translators Collective

– Championing cross-cultural solidarity between Africa and Asia Society University Life & Careers

this year, a unique collective comprising of volunteer E arlier writers and translators who work in the English and Chinese

languages was established. Its members come from the UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China and many are graduates or current students of the University of Leeds. They have all either written or published their own work or translated the writing of others. The objective of this recently founded group is to provide an intercultural bridge for those who cannot communicate with one another due to political, socio-cultural and linguistic barriers. They hope to enhance international and intercultural understanding through their writing and translation work in both languages. Additionally, they aspire to introduce the excellent works of known and unknown writers, particularly women, to readers of these languages.

Their current project involves translating a selection of short stories by African women writers from English into Chinese. In view of the growing influence and involvement of China in Africa, particularly in economic terms, they feel that a lack of deep understanding and appreciation of the history, politics, cultures and peoples of Africa by the Chinese worldwide could become a major problem in the future. Therefore they would like to use their ‘pen’ to establish international friendships between China, as well as the wider Chinese communities around the world, with Africa, through mutual appreciation of creative work and cultures.

Such translation exercises provide women with the opportunity to write, translate and publish for female writers and translators in other parts of the world. They will not only inspire young women to write and translate world literature, but their worldview and horizons will also be broadened as a result. They are the ‘cultural ambassadors’ for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the African continent. This is a seed of intercultural understanding and global solidarity between Asia and Africa.

The target audience for these translations are the general members of the public and students and teachers of Literature, African Studies and Translation Studies. It is also hoped that the availability of these books in the Chinese language will attract a following among overseas Chinese in Africa too.

This journey has not been easy and it continues to be challenging, mainly because these kinds of books are not regarded as commercially lucrative in the publishing industry today. There remains prejudice and under-valuation of the work of female writers and African writers, who may or may not be internationally renowned.

Throughout the translation process, a critical approach to the current mainstream understanding of Africa, African cultures and peoples is adopted because these volunteer translators believe in international solidarity and internationalism. This solidarity between Asia and Africa can be traced back to the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement at the height of the Cold War. Developing countries in Asia and Africa, which had emerged as newly independent nations after long periods of colonial rule, joined this movement to reflect their unwillingness to take sides in the Cold War. Some of the movements’ prominent figures were political leaders, such as Zhou Enlai of China and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The

36 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

twenty-nine Asian and African countries, which attended the conference were, Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, the Vietnam Democratic Republic, South Vietnam (later reunified with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and Yemen (Republic of Yemen).

By engaging with the writings of African women, these writers and translators are in fact critiquing and challenging the existing racist and sexist structures, norms and values, attitudes and worldviews of our times. Using their knowledge and skills as writers and translators, they aim to forge deeper and better understanding among people and between nations. By introducing creative works of African women to the Chinese-speaking world, territorial borders, ethnic, religious, socio-cultural and political differences may be transcended. A more equal and just world has to begin from the breaking down of national borders, prejudices and exploitative structures.

“Cultural creative work can help redefine relations among the ordinary people of the world” Inequality between men and women, between races and ethnic groups and between nation-states is predominantly based on conventionally-assumed differences that produce perceptions of superiority, desirability and acceptability or otherwise. Cultural creative work can help redefine relations among the ordinary people of the world so that these relations are based on universalism and humanism. By appreciating the cultures, worldviews, beliefs and lifestyles of people different from what we are familiar with, for instance through literature, we are more likely to find the commonalities that bind us together as a human race. The stories and the emotions these creative writings evoke in readers cannot but be universal.

The group’s focus is on African women’s writings for several reasons. Firstly, the majority of these writers’ works are not commonly known in Asia and in the Chinese-speaking world. Secondly, the intention is to forge solidarity with these women and their communities through our appreciation of their work. Thirdly, most of their stories are about the ordinary people of Africa; the working men and women who are not privileged with wealth or power. These short stories are, in fact, a literary interpretation of Africa’s social history; they are about the daily lives and struggles of the ‘ordinary people’ that are so often absent in national or world histories.

One example of an African writer whose works are being translated by the group is Bessie Head, who left apartheid South Africa on an exit visa for Botswana in March 1964 . Plagued by racial and gender discrimination, poverty and mental illness all her life, it is because of who she was that her stories come across as human, truthful and universal. Her descriptions about the people and cultures of Africa seem so simple at first glance, and yet in their simplicity and unpretentiousness, there is wisdom, profundity and a deep sensitivity to humanity and human suffering.

In translating these works, the translators imbibe the spirit, worldview and lives of these writers. Therefore, the process of translation between cultures and languages can lead to mutual understanding, appreciation and recognition. This is not only about translating words and languages. Through the sharing of ideas and experiences of worlds that are usually apart, we hope to bring them closer together.

Words/Photography: Agnes Khoo

The Challenge of a Rising China University’s East Asian Research Society (EARS) reLeeds cently welcomed esteemed journalist and Sinologist Rob

today stands remarkably changed from what it was twenty or even ten years ago. In the West there needs to be an acknowledgement that a country developing at such breakneck speed must be approached with care.

From studying Chinese at Durham University to a Masters at Harvard in East Asian Regional Studies, from working at the BBC World Service to serving as the China correspondent for The Economist, he has enjoyed a varied and fruitful career centred on the Middle Kingdom and its rapid development on the world stage.

Words: Victoria Leigh

Gifford, inviting him to share his knowledge and experiences in China during this oft-heralded ‘Transformational Era’.

Employing hard-won Chinese language skills in humorous anecdotes, he led the audience effortlessly through his journey on China’s ‘Route 66’, National Highway 312, also known as ‘The Mother Road’, which stretches from Shanghai in the East to the Gobi Desert along the Silk Road. It was this journey that served as the basis for his memoir China Road published in 2007. Along the way, he introduced to us various fascinating characters, from a cave-dwelling Daoist monk who incongruously uses a mobile phone, to a man from a Mongolian frontier-town, who was not afraid to proclaim that his ‘office’ was a bag containing his livelihood – the cleaning products he was selling. Gifford contrasted these characters with new middle class Chinese tourists who he met in Tibet enjoying a camel ride, adeptly pinpointing the vast gulf between the citizens of China.

Victoria is a third year student of Chinese and EAST Online Co-ordinator.

Rob Gifford is China Correspondent at The Economist. You can follow him on Twitter @Rob_Gifford.

EARS is a student-run departmental and cultural society which organises a diverse range of activities from talks, conferences and educational trips to social events such as cooking lessons, karaoke and film nights.

Gifford also broached the contentious issue of a ‘respectable’ rise for China, discussing how the demand for natural resources has the potential to compromise any such veil of legitimacy.

China’s hold over the arguably sovereign territories of Xinjiang and Tibet are a case in point, as control over both is not only a matter of nationalistic concern but also a necessity due to the emerging power’s need for supplies of gas, timber, manganese and other resources.

Since 1989, EARS has represented not just the members of the Department of East Asian Studies but all students with an interest in East Asia. Our aim is to raise awareness of and stimulate debate about current issues in East Asia and also to create a forum that fosters discussion, long lasting friendships between like-minded people and a mutual understanding between students of East Asian Studies and students originally from the region.

His lively presentation made him an engaging and entertaining speaker. Raising political issues such as whether an alternative form of government could ever work in China, he emphasised ‘plonking Westminster democracy down on China’ would not be the solution, and that some form of decentralised system of government would be best, should China ever choose to go down a democratic path.

Throughout the year, besides big events such as the legendary Halloween party and the East Asian Ball, we hold weekly pub socials, various nights out, afternoon tea and a wide variety of sport sessions.

He professed that ultimately China’s peaceful rise is dependent upon domestic conditions rather than global activities. China

Don’t miss out on a jam-packed year of varied social and educational events. We’re planning something for everyone. It’s your society, so come along and get involved!

The EARS Committee

http://lueastmagazine.com http://lueastmagazine.com 37 37

University Life & Careers

Dr Agnes Khoo is a Teaching Fellow in East Asian Studies. She is one of the founding members and editors of the women writers and translators collective.

University Life & Careers

Where Are They Now? Babette Radclyffe-Thomas, a recent graduate of Leeds, interviews two alumni who talk about their experiences studying in the department of East Asian Studies and the careers they have carved out since.

Rachel Guan (née Grove), BA English and Chinese, 1998 of the ‘98 class at the UniA graduate versity of Leeds, Rachel Guan is cur-

rently based in Hong Kong as a Senior Associate at the leading international law firm Hogan Lovells.

Initially enrolling at Leeds to read English, Rachel was unaware of the compulsory arts elective for all first year students or even of the Chinese department’s existence! Eager to study Chinese but hesitant of her own suitability, Rachel decided to seek her personal tutor’s advice. After receiving an encouraging “You'll always be able to enjoy reading, but opportunities to learn Chinese don't come about every day”, Rachel signed up for the Chinese language elective and later changed her degree programme.

During her year abroad Rachel chose to study in Tianjin as she believed meeting the local people would be easier there than other places. She was proved right during her first week when she and a friend, Rachel White, struck up a conversation with a family sitting on stools on the pavement, earning some extra cash by pumping up bicycle tyres.

Rachel still knows and visits them. Rachel also made friends with a Chinese student named Frances, and used to sneak into her dorm for overnight stays at the weekends when others had gone home. Rachel remains friends with Frances and commented that these sorts of friends stay with you for life.

Highlights of Rachel’s time at Leeds include living with Li Ruru as her lodger during her fourth year. Rachel reminisces about the delicious smell of Ruru’s freshly cooked bread on Saturday mornings, occasionally swimming together and sometimes, unfortunately, oversleeping and missing Ruru’s 9am lecture!

It was only after Rachel became part of a Chinese family that she realised that she had overlooked much of the basic eti-

Words: Babette Radclyffe-Thomas Photography: Rachel Guan

quette that governs relationships in China. Calling someone older ‘Nin’ rather than ‘Ni’ is a must and giving someone older than you food with your chopsticks is another.

On her first visit to Beijing to meet her now husband’s family, the importance of these customs was highlighted as, despite Rachel’s in-laws being extremely easygoing, Rachel became so tense that she spilt hot water all over her grandmother-in-law!

Rachel’s advice to students is to give equal attention to understanding behavioural and social customs as to learning the language itself.

Tim Schwarz, BA Chinese and Russian, 1982 Since studying Chinese at the University of Leeds, Tim has been a TV news reporter and worked for CNN for the last twenty years. His work takes him all over the Asia Pacific region from New Zealand to Afghanistan.

Tim believes it’s vital when learning languages to visit a country and communicate directly with its people, achieving a direct connection with different cultures. After spending his gap year working as a dishwasher in a French ski resort he initially enrolled onto French and Russian joint honours at Leeds. Despite an interest in studying Chinese, at that time China was a completely closed country and Tim was keen to utilise his language skills. However, during his first term the exciting news emerged that from the following year all BA Chinese students would spend their second year in Beijing - Tim changed his degree to Chinese and Russian the very next day!

Studying Chinese at Leeds in the early 80s was an extremely different experience from today; the Chinese department was in a detached house at the far end of the campus. Chinese was considered an eccentric choice and Tim’s year group was extremely small comprising of approximately twenty undergraduates. The lecturers were either trained in Chinese during the Korean War or were, in one way or another, refugees from China. The Russian department still had

38 EAST Magazine Spring/Summer 2013

Babette graduated in 2012 with a degree in Chinese.

a few White Russians - including a princess!

The initial few weeks of his year abroad in Beijing proved challenging; when he attempted to communicate, Chinese people didn't even realise he was trying to speak Chinese! Due to the rarity of foreigners in China, crowds gathered around Tim, especially when he travelled outside of Beijing. However, the conspicuous presence of Leeds students gave them a strange kind of freedom; they were so unusual and alien that nothing they could do would make them appear stranger.

After graduating Tim spent a year in Ulaanbaatar on a British Council scholarship studying Mongolian, but he owes his start in TV to his Chinese language skills. Based in Hong Kong working as an interpreter and translator, another Leeds Chinese graduate working for the BBC introduced Tim to ITN who needed someone to cover the Queen's state visit to China in 1985. After several years freelancing with ITN on their China coverage and after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, the first big story Tim worked on, ITN hired him full time and he commenced assignments in other Asian countries. In 1992, CNN offered Tim a job in Beijing because of his experience and language skills and he worked here for four years before returning to Hong Kong.

So what advice does Tim have for current Chinese students? Don't believe it is too difficult, don't give up on characters and don't stop learning once you graduate. Don't slip into the bad habit of relying on Chinese people speaking excellent English and definitely go to China!

Working Behind the Scenes at the China Open This interview with Stephen Duckitt, Senior Consultant for the China Open tennis tournament, was conducted by the Catalai China Internship Programme on behalf of EAST Magazine.

The most significant challenge for me at the China Open is about effecting change, and doing it without speaking the language and also being a foreigner. Generally speaking, Chinese culture dictates that employees don’t challenge the authority of those in a position more senior than themselves, which results in staff being reactive rather than proactive, such as waiting for direction rather than making suggestions, due to fear of causing offence. Over the past 12 months, I have spent a lot of time working with the management and the staff to help transition them from Chinese thought processes about tournament management to one that incorporates a more international perspective. It is a delicate process that involves a lot of patience, respect and negotiation, all of which is complicated by my limited Chinese language skills.

What would your advice be for any university graduate looking to gain work experience in China?

I think the opportunity to work in a different country is a must-do for all graduates and is something that I wish I had done when I left university, so to use a famous sporting brand’s slogan, my main piece of advice is ‘Just Do it’! China is driving the global economy and working within their business process, within their systems and thought processes and with their people will provide you with a greater understanding of how business is done in China. It really is a must-have for any university graduate whose career could see them working in China or with Chinese companies in their own countries. Everyday here I learn something new about the Chinese business relationship - some good, some bad - but each experience allows me to learn and grow and handle situations differently when they arise again or helps me to prevent the same issues from re-occurring. For a university student or graduate I would suggest applying to an organisation such as Catalai and doing an in-

What are the benefits of being able to speak Chinese for a foreigner working in China?

Prior to moving to Beijing in 2012, I had visited the country more than 15 times over a seven-year period but had never learnt more than hello, goodbye and thank you, because I had always been in an environment where there was a reasonable level of English spoken. I thought that this would apply to the general community but I was very wrong. You become very dependant on others to get the smallest things completed both from a work and personal/social perspective, so if you have the opportunity to learn some of the basics of the language before coming to China your experience is going to be much more enjoyable.

Words: Stephen Duckitt Photography: Provided by Catalai China Internship Programme Stephen is a Senior Consultant for the China Open, a combined WTA / ATP World Tour international tennis tournament, based in Beijing.

http://lueastmagazine.com 39

University Life & Careers

your role at the China Open in Beijing, what are the I nmost challenging aspects to the job?

ternship to get a taste of working in China. We hosted a Catalai Intern last summer and it worked really well.

www.catalai.com

Much more than just a China Internship...