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China’s introduction to Europe was a bewildering experience. R.G. Tiedemann, a lecturer at “S.O.A.S. University of London” ➚ describes how it was not just the gunboats which shook Chinese civilisation. First published in China Now magazine 1992. First impressions The intellectual discovery of Europe was a traumatic event for imperial China. It shattered entrenched notions of a centrality and superiority which had intensified after China’s retreat into isolation in the fifteenth century, since the self-contained Chinese world order denied the existence of a civilisation other than their own there had been little inclination to find out about the outside world. […]

Martin Lynn recounts the experiences of Robert Hart employed by the Chinese in the dying phases of the Qing Dynasty. This article first appeared in SACU’s China Now magazine in 1988 Robert Hart was witness to many of the major events of late nineteenth century Chinese history, a period when the country was wrestling with the twin problems of foreign intervention and the need to modernise. He was to live through four foreign invasions of China, the Taiping Rebellion of 1852-64, the Boxer rising of 1900, the attempted partition of the country by the West and the eventual crumbling of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Before SACU was set up in 1965, there had been a series of organisations concerned to develop closer understanding between the British and Chinese peoples. Jenny Clegg surveys the history of the UK friendship societies with China. The UK-China friendship organisations established throughout this century have each had their own characteristics, yet a common thread can be discerned. These ‘people’s organisations’ opposed British government interventionism and hostile policies, and at critical moments were capable of rousing broad support. Operating as centres for information about the China issue, they worked closely with other organisations – trade unions, peace groups, women’s groups, co-operative […]