Agnes Smedley 1892-1950

Alice Roberts describes the fascinating life of a committed American friend of China : Agnes Smedley, the article first appeared in SACU’s China Now magazine 1972. It is difficult to convey in a few brief words how a working-class woman, born in northern Missouri ➚ of an itinerant miner and a boarding house cook and raised in the Rockefeller ‘mining camps’ where the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company owned ‘everything but the air,’ and who never even finished grade school came to write: ‘I have but one loyalty, one faith, and that was to the liberation of the poor and […]

China and Bertrand Russell

Tony Simpson is the editor of ‘The Spokesman’, the quarterly journal of The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. In September 2015, he visited The Commercial Press, Bertrand Russell’s publisher in China for almost a century. He also visited Beijing and the Western Lake at Hangzhou, which so impressed Russell on arrival in China in 1920. This article was arranged by Jenny Clegg with Tony Simpson. ‘I should love to go to China,’ Bertrand Russell wrote to Lucy Donnelly, an American friend, in July 1915. Five years later, in autumn 1920, Russell arrived in Shanghai with Dora Black, a young companion from […]

Senior British Born Chinese, who we are, where we came from

Walter Fung tells the story of Britain’s Chinese community. A version of this article (BBCs-Who we are, where we came from, where are we going?) first appeared in ‘Brushstrokes Magazine’ Issue No 19 in October 2001. An attempt has been made to update it because the Chinese population has changed quite significantly in the last 13 years or so when it was first written. Even in 2001, when it was first written, some parts were becoming dated – indicative of the speed with which the composition of the British Chinese community, like China itself, is changing. A more appropriate title […]

Victorian and Edwardian views of China

This article from SACU’s China Now magazine in 1988 surveys how the English viewed China one hundred years ago. ‘Solicitously avoiding reality’ Victorian and Edwardian images of China and the Chinese supply a rich storehouse for students of cultural relativism. Not many English knew the country or had encountered its people. There were few experts to guide, and some of those who did guide were not expert. G E (‘Chinese’) Morrison, The Times’ influential Peking correspondent, was an Australian adventurer without reading or spoken knowledge of Chinese. English scholarship in Chinese artefacts was so sketchy as to license frauds to […]

How to be half-Chinese

Sophie Taylor explores the ambiguity in being labelled – ‘half-Chinese’. This article was first published in SACU’s China in Focus magazine 2002. Imagine life as a human ink blot test. Whether physically, linguistically, or culturally, your existence usually confuses others in some way. Cursory glances deepen into befuddled inspection; kinship recognition provokes misplaced pride – and creative oddballs opt for making slanty-eyed, buck-toothed faces. Being part Chinese can be an open invitation to reactions pleasant and perverse. First, though: what does it mean to be partly Chinese? And why should anybody care? Growing up in Hong Kong, I never questioned […]

Cooperatives in China

Tim Zachernuk has been living in China since 1995 working on rural development and poverty alleviation projects. Starting in 2000 his projects started supporting farmers’ economic organizations and, since 2007, supporting farmer cooperatives. Since 2010 his work has solely been focused on training and support for cooperatives, working for international organizations, Chinese government organizations and Chinese NGO’s. These are two articles reprinted from China Eye magazine 52 and 53 (2016/7). China’s blisteringly rapid pace of development, which has lifted it from the ranks of the world’s poor countries to a global economic powerhouse, started with the economic reforms beginning in […]

Understanding China – an essay on SACU’s 50th Anniversary

Jenny Clegg is a Vice-president of SACU. She was a Senior Lecturer in International Studies, and a China Specialist at the University of Central Lancashire and is the author of ‘China’s Global Strategy ; Towards a Multipolar World’ published by Pluto Press. She talks here about SACU’s place in the increasing of understanding on China. SACU was launched in May 1965 with the basic aims to spread knowledge of China in Britain, dispel misconceptions and counter misrepresentations. In his inaugural speech, Joseph Needham, SACU’s founding chairperson, highlighted the problems of ‘whopping lies’ – racial stereotypes such as “All Chinese are […]

Early SACU Tours

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when travel to China by Westerners was very limited. At this pivotal stage of its modern development, SACU offered one of the only ways of going on a tour to China. Strange to say now, participants needed to pass an interview before being to considered to go on the tour, so it was a rare opportunity. Neil Taylor, a founder member of SACU and an expert on tourism, relates his experiences. It is hard to realise quite what a commitment joining a SACU tour involved in the early 1970s when it […]

SACU’s Foundation

To mark SACU’s golden anniversary this article by Rob Stallard looks back to the events leading up to its foundation using some previously unpublished documents. SACU’s formation on 15th May 1965 was a significant national event, receiving attention from the national press and the support of a veritable who’s who of eminent people. Bishops; MPs; professors; artists; writers; trade union leaders all lent their names to support the new society. It may come as a surprise to learn that early SACU meetings took place in a House of Commons committee room. Previous organisations SACU followed in the footsteps of a […]

Background to the formation of SACU in 1965

This article by Derek Bryan, SACU’s First Secretary, recounts the events leading up to the formation of SACU in 1965 and was written to mark its tenth anniversary in 1975. In the busy confusion of the new premises in Camden Town in 1975, it requires an effort of memory to think back to the days in the spring of 1965 when SACU was coming into being, and to the years at Warren Street that followed. When the society was founded, in May 1965, Britain was still in the first year of Harold Wilson’s premiership, but the People’s Republic of China was already […]