Category: Hidden History

Jeremiah Jenne unearths the history lying beneath a Beijing park

Qingnianhu is a typical Beijing park. Older women dance in ragged unison. The husbands chase after their grandchildren. A few folks are playing chess or cards. An artificial lake – covered in white fuzz every spring, the detritus of the city’s annual explosion of poplar and willow spores – is surrounded by a fitness path. A water park, complete with slides and wading pools, awaits warmer summer months.

“A bucket of balls is 150,” intones the bored looking teenager at the front desk of the Qingnianhu Park Golf and Fitness Club. I scan the payment QR code on my phone and trudge out to the driving range, which is enmeshed by steel pylons holding up a net. Somewhere out there, buried under golf balls and landfill, are bodies.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s holiday in China – by Paul French

With the release of the film of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel The Bookshop this year, hopefully she’ll win many new fans and readers. The Bookshop was Fitzgerald’s second novel and is thought by many to be her best. The film version, by the Spanish director Isabel Coixet, stars Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson and Bill Nighy. The story revolves around Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in a small town, finding some support and some opposition. Though the book was famously set in Suffolk (Hardborough, a satirical version of the real town of Aldeburgh) the movie version was filmed in Northern Ireland and Barcelona.

Jeremiah Jenne looks back on historical reactions to political change in China

Last month, China chose its leaders. As we all knew would happen anyway, Xi Jinping remained in the top job for another five years (and possibly will even longer, according to a few pundits), while the Politburo Standing Committee, the Chinese Communist Party’s “board of directors”, saw new faces as former members retired or were sent into political exile. Each new seat at the table represents the head of interlocking patronage networks with roots and tendrils spreading out from the center and down from the top, throughout the apparatus of Party and state.

Now is also the time for Zhongnanhai-ologists: The China watchers and journalists whose job it is to keep one eye fixed on the gates of the CCP leadership compound, a converted imperial park just to the west of the Forbidden City. Who’s in? Who’s out? What will this mean for the future?