Author: Ros Wong

Manchester Museum, part of The University of Manchester, has been undergoing its hello future development including a new Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery, and will reopen to visitors on 18 February 2023. It seems like a very long time ago that this exciting new project was first announced but we are pleased to report that the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery has entered the busiest stage of its development schedule leading up to its reopening.  The gallery will highlight personal stories of migration, friendships and collaboration to inspire empathy and build understanding. Developed in partnership with the University of Manchester’s Manchester China […]

SACU President Michael Wood OBE was interviewed for China Today by staff reporter ZHOU LIN. “Unless you understand China, you won’t understand what are truly common values in human society on Earth, or what are just Western idiosyncrasies.” – Michael Wood quoted Simon Leys in his interview with China today. Michael Wood is no stranger to Chinese TV audiences or readers. A famous British historian, broadcaster, and author, he has presented lots of well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. His China-themed works – The Story of China, The Story of China’s Reform and Opening-up, and Du Fu: China’s […]

There are differences between East and West as discussed below but we have a lot in common with the East as a basis for friendship and understanding as the photographs below show. I bought a copy of the book East Side Voices edited by Helena Lee. It presents a wide spectrum of experiences and views from a variety of East and Southeast Asian individuals living in Britain. I have only ‘dipped’ into it so far, but can see some parallels with my own experience, although as a senior British Born Chinese, I am at least a generation removed from most, […]

President Joe Biden has described the American evacuation from Kabul as, ‘one of the most difficult airlifts in history’. Since July 2021, 18,000 evacuees were flown out and since the military airlift began on 14 August a further 13,000. Presumably he is making comparison with airlifts of people, though the Berlin airlift and the American supply of Nationalist China over the Himalayas from Assam during WWII, both of cargoes not people, were in fact far more challenging. As for the unfortunately named Operation Frequent Wind when the US evacuated Saigon in 1973, 50,000 evacuees were flown out of the frequently […]

Living and teaching in Beijing in the 1970s  Michael Sheringham  Michael is a regular contributor to China Eye. He was an early member of SACU. This article was first published in China Eye, Issue (51) Autumn 2016. It is the second of Michael’s personal memories of the early days of SACU, (see China Eye, Issue 50), and of his time in the Peoples Republic of China.  I was excited and privileged to be invited to teach at Peking University (Beijing Daxue – Beida) in 1972 after years of anticipation while I continued with my Chinese studies in London. It all comes […]

This interview with Professor Michael Wood, SACU President, on Du Fu and China, was published in Chinese Social Sciences Today (a Chinese language newspaper) on 10 December 2020. Felicia Hong JIANG was the interviewer and the article was published in Chinese. We are grateful to Michael for sending us the text of Felicia’s questions with his replies.   1 How is your new book The Story of China related to and different from the documentary series of the same name in 2016? Films do very different things to books. Obviously in a 600-page book you can do a great deal more than in a […]

Dr. Li Yan, one of the 40,000 Chinese doctors who went to help during the lockdown in Wuhan gave an interview to former VRT (Belgian public radio and tv) journalist Ng Sauw Tjhoi, who has been studying and covering China for years. (13 May 2020) Introduction During the lockdown in Wuhan there was no applause at 8pm, but “people hung banners out of their windows, ‘Go Wuhan, go China!’, That’s the way we were encouraged and shown appreciation”, Dr. Li Yan tells me in a Zoom interview that she has granted me. I had thought her testimony very moving, earlier […]

Did China make up the numbers? Did it waste precious time before getting information out to the world? Belgian writers Ng Sauw Tjhoi and Dirk Nimmegeers answer these questions and opine that instead of knuckling down and fighting the pandemic together, everyone, from countries to regional blocs to international organisations, seems to have been shell-shocked into “safe-distancing” from each other. This means that the virus is not only attacking our health, economies and mental resilience, but the very international institutions that have been built up since the end of WWII. If a lot of that debilitation has to do with […]

Belgian writers Ng Sauw Tjhoi and Dirk Nimmegeers point out that the only thing much worse than possibly holding racist views, is to be aware of likely controversy yet politicise race issues anyway to deflect blame for the tardiness of the government. They believe that the Trump administration needs to stop playing the blame game and start on a sincere path of health cooperation with China, to tackle the pandemic today and any other global challenges tomorrow. This article was first published on thinkchina.sg  and sent to us by Belgian SACU member Dirk Nimmegeers, Editor, chinasquare.be Trump’s America needs to ditch […]