China Channel

The Dictator’s Smile

July 27, 2018July 25, 2018 Frank Beyer

Jiang Zemin’s intriguing appearance on American TV – Frank Beyer

On June 4th 1989, the day before he took the famous ‘Tank Man’ photo, American photographer Jeff Widener was in Tiananmen square. Soldiers were arriving to break up the pro-democracy protests that had been ongoing since April. Widener saw an armoured car hurtle into some steel barriers erected by the protesters and crash. He imagined himself getting the Pulitzer prize if he could take a photo of what happened next. He walked towards the chaos, but a brick smashed his camera and ripped his forehead open. A soldier appeared from out of the prone vehicle with his hands raised, surrendering, but protesters descended on him with bricks and pipes. Standing there with blood dripping into his eyes, Widener woke up to the fact that the mob could be about to beat the soldier to death, and balked at taking a photo. He got the hell out of there.

The next day, Jeff was on the roof of the Beijing Hotel when a line of tanks moved towards Tiananmen square below. He had to get a photo of this and it was a near thing – he was almost out of film. He felt like a NBA star with one shot to win the game: make it and you’re a hero, miss it and you’ll regret it forever. Then it happened. A man, a lone protester, walked in front of the line of tanks, and Jeff took the photo which would become famous.

Essays

Made in China

July 26, 2018July 25, 2018 Laszlo Montgomery

Laszlo Montgomery’s other life in Chinese manufacturing

In my China History Podcast series I have touched on China trade going all the way back to the times of the Han Dynasty adventurer Zhang Qian. Trade with China has always been exotic and unique. Silk, tea, lacquerware and other valuables ware sold along the fabled trade routes to all points between Rome and Asia. Zhang Qian, Marco Polo, the Silk Road, the Tea Horse Road, Zheng He, Macao, the Canton System, the Noble House. For an old China hand, what isn’t there to love about this world of China trade?

But when I first started out as a China watcher, back in the day, I didn’t realise that in my professional life I would become part of it myself.

Q&A

New Tricks, Old Dogs

July 24, 2018November 15, 2018 Lowell Cook

First of all, welcome and tashi delek.

Thank you very much. Tashi delek.

You started your career off as a fiction writer before moving to film. How do you see your art, your worldview, and your identity changing?

Both film and fiction were my main interests growing up. I read a lot of novels and watched a lot of movies as a kid. However, as far our hometown is concerned, there aren’t any opportunities to major in film or join a film school. So all I could study was Tibetan and Chinese. All throughout high school and university my focus was Tibetan literature. Nevertheless, I never let my love for film fade during my childhood or university days. In 2000, I went to the Northwestern University for Nationalities in Lanzhou, Gansu, for a masters in literary translation. It was then that I really felt a desire to study film.

Reviews

Heroism in Wartime Hong Kong

July 23, 2018July 22, 2018 Susan Blumberg-Kason

Susan Blumberg-Kason reviews **Our Time Will Come*, a film by Ann Hui***

Chan Sui-jeung was one of the first adults I got to know in Hong Kong, back in 1990 when I moved there for a junior year abroad. The university assigned me to a host family that would take me in for Chinese holidays and perhaps a weekend or two during the school year. Chan and his wife May lived an hour from my dorm, but it was always a pleasure to trek out to Hong Kong Island to visit them.

At the time, I knew SJ Chan was a career civil servant and had a special interest in the Kaifeng and Hong Kong Jewish communities. But it wasn’t until several years ago that I learned Chan was also instrumental in resurrecting the story of the East River Column from World War II. His book East River Column: Hong Kong Guerillas in the Second World War and After narrates the heroics of Hong Kong residents who successfully evacuated hundreds of intellectuals from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong into parts of southern China that were not under Japanese rule. I’ve read about Chinese citizens and foreigners fleeing the mainland during WWII for the safety of British-run Hong Kong before the Japanese occupied it in 1941. But in this case, it was the other way around. Intellectuals in Hong Kong worried about persecution under the brutal Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, so a heroic group of guerillas in Hong Kong and southern China worked clandestinely to bring these writers and scholars up to “Free China.”