Author: SACU Admin

Beijing – A Simple Life

The author outside his Beijing suburb home In this blog I will talk about the sheer, simple ordinariness of my life in China. If you haven’t been to China you might have all sorts of ideas about what it is like to live here, as I have done for ten years. Maybe you have some slightly negative views of a limited or restricted life here. Maybe you have romantic or exotic illusions of life in an ‘oriental’ country. The outstanding feature of my life for the last ten years has been its wonderful stability and everyday ordinariness. In the UK […]

To travel a thousand miles beats reading a thousand books

行万里路胜读万卷书 (xíngwànlǐlùshèngdúwànjuǎnshū) For this week’s Chairs Blog let’s get our hiking boots on and head out of town to the remote mountains of the south-western province of Guizhou. It’s a good time to head south from Beijing where temperatures are dropping to freezing. Go, go, go Guizhou Guizhou for me is one of the most fascinating places in China, second only to its neighbour Yunnan. It is still a largely rural province but thanks to government investment it is also fast becoming a digital technology hub of China. Its terrain is folded into mountains and valleys where now high speed […]

双十一, Double Eleven, more than just a shopping festival?

Double Eleven! One of the most important events of the year for many Chinese people is taking place right now in November. It’s called Double Eleven and it’s the biggest shopping festival in the world. It’s a bit like Boxing Day and the January sales in the UK but on steroids. And curiously it takes place at almost the same time as the western shopping festival called ‘Black Friday’, which this year is on November 24th. In this article I’ll share information about the Double Eleven phenomenon and some thoughts about what it means for the Chinese people. What is […]

We Remember them All

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, Britain will respectfully remember and honour those who fought in and those who sacrificed their lives in the two world wars. This is personal to me, as it is to many of you. My maternal grandmother risked her life nightly with the artillery teams defending Southampton from bombing raids. My maternal grandfather was in the Royal Hampshire’s in North Africa and in Italy including the carnage of Monte Cassino. My paternal grandfather was a pilot in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Both 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 were […]

Halloween & Strange Tales

This week it has been Halloween in the UK. The origins of Halloween are seasonal. It is a festival that marks the end of summer and the coming of winter. It is also a liminal time, when the divide between the material world and the spiritual world grows thin and porous. It is a time when the ghosts, goblins and ghouls of our fearful imaginations come out of the darkness into shared stories around the protecting flames of a hearth fire. There is no direct equivalent to Halloween in China. However there is a popular folk imagination which is just […]

Send for Mother in Law

I talk all the time to the Chinese teachers in my school about the things that matter to them. They suggested that I should write this article to share something of real importance to their lives. The question of who takes care of the young is a key issue for every family. Having spent my life working in education I have met all of the joys of getting this critical relationship right and equally the damaging consequences of inadequate or inappropriate care in these formative years. In every school I worked in in the UK, we provided breakfast clubs for […]

Double Ninth Day

This Friday, 27th October, all of the students in my school in Beijing with all of their teachers and the company of some parents will make a 20 minute bus journey to the outskirts of Beijing and climb a mountain. For those of you who don’t know Beijing, it is a city in a bowl of mountains. One of the joys of my apartment is that I can see the mountains very clearly from the windows. But why are we climbing the mountain together on Friday? In the UK this might be an outdoors activity, designed to promote healthy lifestyles […]

A Journey Through Civilisations

SACU members Iris Yau, Richard Poxton, Ros Wong (membership secretary), Zoe Reed (former Chair) and Frances Wood at the ‘Journey through Civilisations’ event. SACU is very proud to have been one of the sponsors of a recent event in London hosted by the China Media Group. The event was held to mark the launch of a new on-line exhibition. Through immersive and digital technological innovations overseas audiences can immerse themselves in a digital scroll of time spanning ancient and modern times. This allows the audience a virtual experience of the early stages of Chinese civilisation and an appreciation of the […]

A Belt and Road Initiative White paper for Green Development

Belt and Road Railway track in Kenya, July 28, 2022. If in Britain we think about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) at all, we probably think of it as a policy China is using to increase trade and improve its economy. Well we certainly can’t fault that – it’s exactly what British politicians told us would happen with Brexit! However as a forthcoming White Paper called ‘A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions’ explains, China sees the BRI as much more than a set of trade routes. Just as the ancient Silk Roads carried ideas and […]

Which films can I watch to improve my understanding of China?

The Goddess – 神女 – 1934 This is considered by many to be the finest silent film ever made in China. The plot of the film concerns the struggles of a young single mother to escape from poverty and patriarchy. She is forced to work as a prostitute to feed her child. She also has to escape from the predatory attention of a vicious gambler. Her chances of finding happiness are threatened by social prejudice towards her as a woman. The main character is brilliantly portrayed by the actor Ruan Lingyu, who in a terrible irony, committed suicide herself as the […]