Category: Member News

Zoe Reed Speaks at Charity Auction

Our Chair, Zoë Reed, attended a charity auction organised by the Sino-British Cultural Exchange Society on Sunday 11th March 2018 in favour of the Ensuring We Remember Campaign to erect a memorial to the 96,000 Chinese Labour Corps involved in WW1. She was invited to speak at the opening and said she was delighted to bring greetings from SACU to such an important Campaign chaired by Steve Lau. The event was conducted in Chinese to a Chinese audience and so our Chair made a special mention of SACU’s aim now to particularly invite Chinese people into membership. She explained that SACU […]

Sightseeing, family and SACU Business – a trip to China 2017

Our Chair, Zoë Reed was on holiday and visiting family in China in October 2017. Zoë and her husband, Richard Poxton, spent a week in Yunnan before travelling to Lanzhou. In Lanzhou they visited Zoë’s sister Sun Kun, her husband Geng Xiaohu and their daughter Geng Chanjuan and her husband Qu Deye. After Lanzhou they travelled to Beijing. During the trip Zoë also carried out SACU business and this is reported here (Editor’s note) Lanzhou City University (LZCU) Opening Ceremony Rewi Alley Memorial Hall As part of the celebrations of 120 years since Rewi Alley’s birth, the LZCU had built […]

Bloomsbury in China – Julian Bell, a teacher in Wuhan University in 1935-37

Shortly after arriving in Wuhan in 1935 to teach English at the university there, Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf and son of Vanessa Bell, wrote to his mother about a Chinese literary and artistic coterie which reminded him of home: “ … the Chinese Bloomsbury in Peiping (Beijing) that’s very much like the London one indeed, so far as I can make out.” (Laurence, Julian Bell, p.20). Julian was actually reporting second-hand, as he was reflecting on the comment made by his literary confidante and lover, Ling Shuhua, the wife of the dean of the Faculty of Letters, Chen […]