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This book review by Paul Morris was first published in the Spring 2020 issue of US-China Review, the journal of the US China People’s Friendship Association (USCPFA) and we are grateful to Paul for his permission to reproduce it here. Paul is Production Co-ordinator of US-China Review; he is also a SACU member. A foreign father given up for dead, an unwed mother struggling to make ends meet, a reunion with a long-lost daughter from abroad. Add a handful of prominent China hands who show up at key junctures and you have the plot for an international, intergenerational family drama. This story […]

Covering up: Covid-19 and the face, by Elizabeth Gasson, 10th April 2020 Having spent seven years in China, our SACU member, Elizabeth left China with her soon-to-be fiancé, and headed to the UK to take a research degree and convert her career area into Psychology (so as to better support her students). She is now residing in Sydney where her now-husband is working towards the opening of a Chinese bank branch there and she is pursuing her PhD in Cognitive Science (focused on Chinese reading difficulties) while expanding her online Education Centre for Chinese individuals around the world. Here she […]

Tamara is a member of SACU who has already contributed a number of articles for China Eye on a variety of subjects. She has lived in Germany and the U.S. but is currently living in Beijing and working in the media industry there. Photographs accompanying this article are also by Tamara, taken recently in Beijing.  When news broke of a mysterious virus causing respiratory illness said to have originated in Wuhan, I was about to enjoy several days off due to the Spring Festival holiday at home in Beijing. I vaguely remember Beijing having only two cases at the time. I […]

Climate Change and China by Walter Fung This short article summarises the current policy of China on climate change and the environment and the steps being taken. It draws substantially on Barbara Finamore’s recent book, Will China Save the Planet? (Polity Press, 2018). In 1996, she founded the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China Program, the first clean energy programme to be launched in China by an international non-government organisation. I can recommend this book, packed with positive information together with extensive references and suggestions for further reading. Contrary to popular Western public belief, China has always had a policy to […]

A book review by Dirk Nimmegeers.  Dirk is a member the Belgium-China Friendship Association and also of SACU. He edits the website ChinaSquare.be a Dutch language website which covers news and comments on developments in China.  Peter Nolan realizes the danger of a lengthy and fierce battle between the West and China, which may cause enormous material and human damage. One way to avoid that disaster is to ensure that China and the West get to know and understand each other better. According to the authoritative Cambridge professor, many Chinese, and certainly the prominent persons among them, know more about […]

Tom Harper is a SACU member and joined SACU Council in September 2019. He is a doctoral researcher at Neijiang Normal University. He specialises in China’s foreign relations and has written on this subject for several publications. This is his first for China Eye, published in Issue 63, Autumn 2019.    Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, few nations have had as great a reversal in status as China has had, going from an isolated quasi-feudal empire seemingly frozen in time to one of the Great Powers of the modern day complete with cities that are as […]

Walter Fung gives a survey of the Chinese communities in the UK. The article first appeared in SACU’s China Eye magazine in 2008. Walter Fung was born in Liverpool of Chinese parents and grew up in his father’s laundry. He is now retired after working for 35 years in the textile industry and is a member of SACU council as magazine editor. This subject is more complex than its simple title would suggest. The Chinese community comprises a variety of people from different places who came to the UK at different times, for different reasons, from different backgrounds and with […]

This is a historical article from an early issue of China Now magazine. Jenny Clegg tells the story of Britain’s Chinese community and their hosts’ ambivalent reaction. The history of the Chinese in Britain has yet to be written. What exists is only a handful of surveys, dissertations, census figures, and newspaper reports. But put these together and the story begins to unfold – a story that is part of both Britain’s and China’s history, and one that only makes sense viewed in the context of the relations between the two countries. It is a story in which there is […]

Cyril Cannon worked in the printing industry before moving to academia, undertaking undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics. His final posts were in Hongkong, initially helping to set up what is now City University, and then as Academic Consultant to Lingnan. He is retired and lives in London. He has been a SACU member for well over 20 years, and was on the editorial board of China in Focus. This article is based on the author’s Public Success, Private Sorrow: the Life and Times of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor (1857-1938), China Customs Commissioner and Pioneer Translator. Foreword […]