Author: SACU Admin

Laba Festival

Here in Beijing there are the earliest signs of Spring. The extreme cold weather of the last month seems to be leaving us at last. The frozen snow and ice which has lingered since the snowfalls are retreating to smaller and smaller corners of the streets. And if you look carefully enough the trembling first buds of regrowth are braving the chill air along the bare boughs. Human faces are becoming visible again as we start to peel away some of the layers of winter protection. We have come through! And here to greet us today, the 18th of January […]

Language learning and Friendship

In this Chair’s Blog I want to give a platform to our talented, possibly younger SACU members, so that we hear from a diversity of voices about our theme of Anglo-Chinese friendship. So in this blog I’m handing over to an article by Arron Van Rompaey. Arron is a SACU Council member who relocated to Nanjing, China, in August 2023 to take up a post as a teacher of Literature and Inter-cultural Studies in a Chinese middle school. Arron’s topic is learning Chinese. I think this is at the heart of friendship between two peoples. Arron’s article is delightfully honest […]

So much to learn from each other.

One of the key things that drives me in my work for SACU is the knowledge that there is so much the people of China and the people of Britain could benefit from if we had genuine opportunities to learn from each other. I was reminded of this recently. One of my former students now studying Urban Design in a UK university sent me her essay about Environmental Impact Assessments – which are legal mechanisms used in the UK to protect vulnerable environments. And there in one amazing paragraph she was paralleling and comparing an annual report into Teeside Incinerators […]

Opening up to the New Year

In this new year blog I want to look backwards and forwards, reflecting on one of the most important parts of our SACU mission, opening up greater friendship and understanding between the peoples of our two countries. In a way what I’m doing in these blogs is very simple. I’m trying to share with you accounts of the friendships I’ve experienced here in China, the people I work with and live amongst to grow our shared sense that, as a phrase from the Analects,《论语》of Confucius says, 四海之内皆兄弟, sìhǎizhīnèijiēxiōngdì, ‘around the four seas we are all one family’. What is ‘opening […]

What’s the connection between Stonehenge and Chinese dumplings?

Can you solve this Christmas conundrum? The answer is Winter Solstice. Britain and China share the same northern hemisphere location. On Friday 22nd December Britain and China shared the experience of Winter Solstice, the day when the northern half of the Earth tilts farthest away from the sun. Consequently Solstice Day has the shortest numbers of daylight hours and the longest hours of darkness. Let’s start at Stonehenge. Most of us know about the link between Stonehenge and the Summer solstice in June, when visitors flock to the monument to celebrate the sun rising between the stones. However archaeologists generally […]

Already Seen: A Deja Vu in History

Yi Xing Renmin University of China, Master of Journalism, Class of 2014 China Daily Reporter in London Find out more about SACU’s archive here: https://archive.sacu.org/ I learned about the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding from Dr Linxi Li before I came to the United Kingdom in the summer of 2022. I was in Beijing applying for my visa, and I called Linxi who had lived in the UK for six years to meet in order to find out some information about the country where I would be working for the next few years. We decided to stroll around Jingshan Park with […]

Keeping China Connections Live !

First of all let me send festive good wishes to us all. I thought I’d try to bring some seasonal joy to this particular blog by celebrating the fun and merriment of live performance. I think this is particularly poignant since this is the first festive period since the end of COVID. I hope that all of you will enjoy the opportunity to cheer yourselves up by joining the audience of a show or performance. At this time of year I always look back with a merry tear in my eye to the christmas shows in the school where I […]

The Unsung Heroes — Reflections on Participating in the 2023 Armistice Day Ceremony (中英双语)

Weien Zong Master of Global Media Industries, King’s College London Bachelor of Communications, South China University of Technology Freelance Media Person, Cultural Influencer, Chinese Cultural Event Planner On November 11th, I had the chance to participate in the Armistice Day Ceremony organized by the Western Front Association at Cenotaph London. Despite several days of continuous rain, the weather turned sunny on this particular day, gradually dispelling the chill of early winter. Coming out from Charing Cross station, I felt a surge of people heading towards the monument commemorating the end of World War I. Crowded streets were adorned with individuals […]

Changing faces of Chengdu

For the last week I have travelled with Grade 9 and Grade 10 students from my school in the city of Chengdu, which is the capital of the south-westerly province of Sichuan. You’ll be familiar with the name from countless restaurants in England claiming to serve ‘Szechuan’ dishes. It is not my job to act as an advertising agent for ‘Travel China’ so I’ll get the publicity out of the way immediately. If you have the chance to visit this fascinating location, please do so! In this blog we are in the business of building bridges of understanding between the […]

China catches a cold

My phrase of the week in my rather limited Chinese has been ‘ni leng bu leng? which translates as ‘are you feeling the cold?’. Chinese has this wonderful way of using paired, balanced phrases like this way of asking questions which are not only elegant but wonderfully convenient for struggling foreigners to remember. The answer to the question can be given in another classic Chinese phrase – ‘leng si le’ – ‘cold enough to die, but reduced to three terse, emphatic characters. After an incredibly idyllic, balmy autumn which lingered deceptively on into late November, temperatures have taken their inevitable […]