Now, in Gilbert & George and the Communists (Cheerio Publishing, 2025), Birch has written of his time promoting the controversial British artists Gilbert & George in, first Moscow, and then, breaking more new ground, Beijing and Shanghai in 1993. That artists whose work tackled such controversial themes and used such (back then) shocking language and materials should be pioneers in China was amazing and unexpected. How did Birch get the idea and the permissions and then actually manage to stage the shows? Ultimately, Birch would achieve major groundbreaking success with the exhibitions and crucially, Gilbert & George would inspire a generation of young Chinese contemporary artists who went on to totally turn the international art scene on its head and place China back on the global art map. Paul French met up with James Birch to remember those times….

Can you briefly explain how the idea of taking Gilbert & George to China in the early 1990s came about? Nobody as controversial had ever exhibited in China before.

After the success of Gilbert & George in the Soviet Union in 1990, I said to Gilbert & George: “Where would you like to go next?” They said, “China. If you can make this happen, we’ll be your best friends for life.”

I gulped as I had no connections in China, and post-Tiananmen Square, the Sino-British relationship was at an all-time low, but fuelled by the incredible response to the Francis Bacon retrospective and Gilbert & George’s more recent exhibition in Moscow, I took courage in both hands. I asked a friend who had worked in China if he knew anybody I could go and see – he told me to go to Dublin and look up Brendan Ward who had been the Irish cultural attaché in Beijing at the time of the uprising. Brendan recommended that I see Wang Xiaoning in the cultural section of the Chinese Embassy, where this story begins.

In 1993, the long shadow of state-mandated Socialist Realism still constrained Chinese art, and local artists who used any of the more controversial motifs in their work, similar to those of Gilbert & George, still faced fines, arrest and self-criticisms. How did you persuade Beijing to let Gilbert & George in?

It was an extraordinarily quick process. Given the incredible restraints on Chinese artists of the time, I felt I had a one in ten chance of getting this exhibition agreed upon. Gilbert & George had a punk attitude and were fearless in their use of images and cultural references, which were often seen as controversial, even by a so-called ‘enlightened’ 20th-century audience. However, the optimist in me hoped that the Cultural Ministry would recognise the influence of social realism on their work and respond in the affirmative. I took with me the catalogue of the Moscow exhibition, which I hoped would reassure them that G&G had valid “communist credentials’. We’ll never really know what made the difference, but a week after visiting Mr Wang, they had rubber-stamped the exhibition. In retrospect, I feel that they saw it as an opportunity to show the West that they were open to new ideas and wanted to build relationships with us quite simply to expand their economy.

Previously, you had taken Francis Bacon and Gilbert & George to Moscow in the days of the old USSR. Both attracted huge audiences. Was it the same in Beijing and Shanghai in 1993 and do you have a sense of who came – artists, students, regular people?

You are absolutely right! It was mainly artists, students, officials, Beijingers and Shanghaiers. The exhibition was a big deal and was constantly packed in both cities. Steven Spielberg came, too! To this day, I have no idea how or why.

Many Chinese artists of a certain generation – those born in the 1960s – have written about how inspired they were by the 1993 Gilbert & George exhibitions. While taking Gilbert & George to China was obviously going to attract a lot of media attention to them and their work, did you also anticipate how important the visit was to struggling Chinese artists in the years before the great boom in Chinese contemporary art?

I didn’t realise that there were so many young artists who wanted to have exhibitions in Beijing. What was generally on show was state-funded art. While I was there, a young artist decided to cut his hair in front of the exhibition to protest that Western artists were being shown as opposed to Chinese artists. I’m afraid to say that he was arrested, and we never knew his fate.

During the days of the exhibition, I didn’t fully comprehend its impact. It wasn’t until post-Shanghai and after a visit to Hong Kong, where I met David Tang, who impressed upon me how significant he felt this moment was. David was an amazing collector of Chinese social realist paintings but also Chinese underground art. His collection was exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1997-98. Charles Saatchi bought most of it, and that is when the West began to take a serious interest in the contemporary art of China.

Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, two major Chinese performance artists, have written about how, in 1993, they were struggling – being fined, hassled by the cops, unable to show their work. Zhang has said that Gilbert & George inspired him to double down and continue performing. Ma has said that meeting Gilbert & George in Beijing and seeing what two artists who started out as performance artists could achieve was the major turning point in his career. Did either you or Gilbert & George have any sense of the impact you were having on the local art scenes in Beijing and Shanghai back in 1993?

We visited China in the days of heavy censorship. There was no internet or social media. Unlike Moscow, which is only four hours away from the UK and shares Europe’s cultural heritage, China felt a world away. It was much harder to meet people, we were never invited to people’s houses, and a frank exchange of views was impossible. I know that Gilbert & George visited a number of artists in their studios which was a first. Even now, it’s thrilling to learn of their impact on artists such as Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming.

And finally, what do you think Gilbert & George got out of visiting China? And you yourself? What was the biggest contrast between Beijing and your previous experiences in Moscow?

My fascination with China began when I was ten years old. I wrote a letter to the Chinese Embassy, asking for a copy of the Little Red Book. Chairman Mao was something of a hero of mine. Twenty years later, the USSR was beginning to disintegrate – it had the feel of an empire falling. Beijing, in contrast, was at the start of an economic revolution, albeit with a communist edge. I was amazed to discover that McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut were already in situ – it was so different from the culture I was expecting.

I can’t really speak for Gilbert & George, but it’s clear even now that they remain constantly interested in the new and unusual and are passionately committed to taking art to the people. After all, one of their most famous slogans is ART FOR ALL.

The post The man who took Gilbert & George to China appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

While great strides have been made in recent years, it seems there’s still a long way to go, and China’s central government is not all that impressed with the sector. So argue Paul G. Clifford and Christopher Logan in their new book China Logistics: From Laggard to Innovator (Routledge). So Paul French sat down with Paul Clifford to chat logistics …

In 2022, the Chinese government criticised the nation’s logistics industry as ‘large but not strong’ (da er buqiang). But China’s logistics sector, from haulage to refrigeration, shipping and warehousing, has obviously made great strides since the 80s and 90s – so where are the main weaknesses still to be found?

Since the economic reforms began in the 1980s, China’s logistics have made enormous progress, but still struggle to meet the needs of industry and commerce. The key issues remain the fragmentation of the sector (logistics firms without scale), the slow pace of logistics outsourcing to 3PLs (third-party logistics), cut-throat competition resulting in poor service quality and low profitability, the high asset intensity of logistics firms, and weaknesses in key areas such as multi-modal (truck-to-train) and chilled-chain logistics.

You note that the government (national and local) plays a big role in the development and improvement of China’s logistics network, far bigger than we have seen in Europe or North America. Can you elaborate on how central and local governments work with the industry?

China’s central government has played a vital role in two respects. Firstly, in setting the bold planning goals for the sector, which in turn guides capital allocation. And secondly, through investing heavily in upgrading China’s transportation infrastructure, over which the logistics run. Meanwhile, local (mainly city-level) governments, in competing with each other for investors, jobs and fiscal revenues, have been instrumental in creating logistics hubs across the nation, whether through gateways for the railway land-bridge to Europe (as part of the Belt and Road initiative), highly automated ports, robotised e-commerce centres or cold-chain storage.   

You also talk of the ‘headwinds’ China’s logistics sector faces – international tension and massive disruptions. It looks likely we’re about to go into a significant ‘headwind’ with both a new administration in Washington DC and a raft of China-related policies from the EU. How do you think these will affect the sector?

You are correct. The critical uncertainties and headwinds are to be found internationally. But despite the geopolitical tensions and the new US administration, it will likely prove harder than many think to dismantle the global supply chain that has been built up so carefully over four decades. That said, China’s growing exports are bound to face increased pushback from nations with a large trade deficit with China. China may be expected to respond, for instance by investing in manufacturing in the countries to which it currently exports. The logistics industry will in turn inevitably need to adjust to these changes.

Do you think China has been a genuine innovator in logistics in any way, or simply thrown money and man power at the issue?

The Chinese government has invested heavily in its roads, ports and rail (and is now beginning in high speed freight rail). However, the big investment in China’s e-commerce logistics has come from private firms. This investment ranges from air cargo hubs to integrated IT platforms, AI for transportation management and robots for all kinds of package sorting and storage. In these respects, there is no doubt that China is truly innovating and leapfrogging the likes of UPS. The return on all this investment needs to be seen in relation to its social as well as economic and commercial impact and over the long term. History will be the ultimate judge of this. Did the Victorian UK rail system propel our industry and commerce (and society) forward?

In the book, you seem to suggest China’s logistics sector also has a role to play in China’s climate change and environmental initiatives – EV delivery vehicles etc. Is this happening or just hopeful rhetoric?

The logistics sector is a major producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Addressing this issue in China is certainly not rhetoric but a central part of China’s green transition. These efforts range from new propulsion systems for container liner shipping and shifting goods onto the railways from the roads and from air cargo, to the introduction of new autonomously-driven hydrogen truck corridors plus EVs for the last mile. It also includes the use of advanced technology to drive efficiency in goods delivery and to provide matching loads to avoid the dreaded “empty back haul”. This is highly transformative and, in some areas, a “low-hanging fruit”.

China’s logistics sector seemed to rise to the challenge of Covid-19 and the government’s zero-Covid policy successfully. Am I right in thinking this? And what are the longer-term lessons for the industry (in China and globally) from that sudden, unexpected headwind?

You are perfectly correct. While China’s overall response to Covid-19 may have fallen short in some respects, when it came to logistics, the Chinese government developed some smart workarounds with the result being that the delays at Chinese ports were nowhere near as severe as in the USA. I think a longer-term lesson is that logistics should not be an afterthought, but closely integrated into government emergency action so as to permit a coordinated and speedy response to unexpected events.

Taking this a step further, it is worth noting the degree to which China’s well-defined and well-delivered industrial policy towards logistics is yielding vital results, which are then passed on to the broader economy. 

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Paul French caught up with Amanda Sikarskie, one of the authors (along with Peng Liu and Lan Lan) of the new book Male Idols and Branding in Chinese Luxury (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

Can you briefly explain to us the male idol phenomenon in China – how is it different to traditional male celebrity icons?

The word ‘idol’ comes from the Japanese ‘aidoru,’ which is simply a borrowing of the English word idol to refer to a celebrity or star. We might trace idol culture back to 1960s Japan and Japanese artists like Kyu Sakamato (Kyu-chan) – gaining popularity in the Western market with hits like “Sukiyaki” – and notice that fans called him Kyu-chan, rather than Kyu-san, likening him to a child. So there’s this decades-old tradition of making idols less masculine, first by rendering them childlike and later through both infantilisation and feminisation. This idol culture really began to take hold in South Korea and China in the 1990s (and a bit earlier in Hong Kong). 

Over time, the look of a male idol has become somewhat standardised across East Asia, usually quite thin and about 180 centimetres tall (this is also the height of many Western female fashion models and makes male idols ideally suited for modelling women’s luxury fashion), and with a v-line, rather than square, jaw (which some are born with, but can also be achieved through jawline botox or “K-pop surgery”).

Can you explain why these male idols seem to be so effective at shifting products – huge amounts of products – in China?

We are seeing a phenomenon in which women consumers are more interested in wearing the goods advertised by their male idols than by female idols, even when it comes to traditionally feminine products such as handbags and cosmetics.

Who are the fans of these male idols? And can toxic behaviour and inappropriate online behaviour damage the male idol brand ambassadors?

I wouldn’t say that there’s one monolithic demographic of idol fans. Fans might be anywhere from elementary school age to in their 60s, although teens to people in their 30s seem to be the most common. What young fans want and expect from their idols is different than what middle-aged fans (who generally have their own partners and families) are looking for. 

I think it’s a big mistake to assume that these parasocial relationships between idols and their fans are naturally toxic. The vast majority of idol fandom is actually pretty well-adjusted. Where we do see this toxicity is when groups of fans with different agendas choose to butt heads, such as Wang Yibo solo fans versus Xiao Zhan solo fans or solo fans versus shipper fans (fans that imagine a relationship between two idols). Negative posts, generally in the form of fake news, made by one idol’s group of fans against another idol can potentially be damaging to both idols’ reputations, but this sort of online disinformation is so common within these little insular communities of fans that I think most people generally take what they post with a large grain of salt. 

What are some of the major pitfalls for brands working with male idols in China?

Besides online turf wars between groups of solo fans or solo fans and shipper fans, brands also need to keep in mind that idols can make mistakes. These could be small mistakes that nonetheless affect the idol-brand relationship, like an ambassador for Redmi using an iPhone or Samsung phone in public. Or, an idol could make a very large mistake leading to them being “cancelled” in the mediasphere, like committing a crime. This would also generally lead to the termination of the brand’s partnership with the ambassador, of course. Because of these potential pitfalls, brands may increasingly turn to virtual idols in the future. While not as compelling as human beings, a virtual idol obviously cannot make these sorts of blunders.

How do the Chinese versions of male idols differ (or mimic) those we may be more familiar with in Japan and South Korea?

Chinese idols initially were sort of modelled on Korean idols (commonly known in online culture as ‘little fresh meats’ or xiǎoxiānròu in Chinese) and some of the most famous male Chinese idols of the 2000s and 2010s, Han Geng (Super Junior), Lay (EXO), Jackson Wang (GOT7), and Wang Yibo (UNIQ), all trained in Korea and debuted in Korean idol groups before moving back to China later. Since about 2018, the idea of Korean idols perpetuating a “sissy” niang pao aesthetic has gained traction in China, though. And so now, compared to the 2010s, you won’t see an idol like Wang Yibo wearing nearly as much makeup, especially eye makeup, as he used to. He’s still a brand ambassador for Japanese cosmetics staple Shu Uemura, though, because, as I noted earlier, male idols are just really efficient in marketing products to female consumers.

The Beijing government has seemed a little concerned with the rise of the male idol. How has the clash between male idol style and government ideas about masculinity and gender played out?

The idea of “sissy men” or niang pao (or alternately ‘luxury pig men’ — jing zhu nan — in Chinese) has gained currency largely because of Beijing. So, on the one hand, we see the state decrying men who aren’t manly, but on the other hand, we still see these idols not only all over billboards and red carpets in China, but on shows like holiday specials on CCTV as well. So, despite the bluster, it seems more or less that the government is tolerating male idols, at least for now. They are effective economic engines, after all, as contemporary, financially independent women tend to gravitate towards them.  

The post The role of male idols in China’s luxury industry appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

New book From Click to Boom (Princeton University Press, 2024) asks that very question – how did the world’s largest e-commerce market highlight a digital path to development? Paul French caught up with its author, Lizhi Liu, an assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington DC, to discuss potential answers.

We’re all amazed at the size and rapid growth of China’s e-commerce market – can you tell us just how big and all-encompassing this market truly is?

It’s the world’s largest e-commerce market, with over 800 million users, a 40% share of global transactions, and retail e-commerce sales surpassing US$2 trillion. To put this into perspective, during China’s 2020 Singles’ Day shopping event (akin to Cyber Monday), an astonishing four billion parcels were generated – enough to circle the Earth at the equator roughly thirty times if placed end to end. (It is noted that caution is needed when interpreting these numbers, as some sellers inflate their sales figures to boost search rankings through fraudulent practices – a common issue globally. Despite these distortions, the scale and popularity of China’s e-commerce market remain unmatched.)

The market also offers far greater product variety compared to its Western counterparts. Chinese consumers often refer to it as an ‘omnipotent market,’ where ‘there’s nothing you can’t find, only what you haven’t imagined yet.’ Beyond everyday items like clothing and household necessities, shoppers can even purchase bad debt and court-seized assets. Some of the more unusual offerings mentioned in the book include a ‘Dog Translator’ (which claims to interpret dog sounds into human language) and a ‘Noisy-Neighbour Revenge Machine’ (a vibration motor designed to annoy an upstairs neighbour). Notably, there’s also a ceramic figurine of Donald Trump as Buddha, inscribed with the slogan ‘Make your company great again’ — a playful gift that may appeal to both Trump supporters and critics alike.

I think many think that the Beijing government fostered the development of e-commerce, but you argue that it is largely a result of just the opposite, weak government institutions – can you explain please?

We need to differentiate between government support and government institutions. While China provides strong, ad hoc support to favoured industries and firms, its government institutions – particularly legal frameworks in markets – were weak during the early stages of e-commerce. At that time, China lacked the norms and laws needed to regulate online behaviour and combat online fraud, leading to widespread distrust of e-commerce. Although the country eventually established relevant institutions (e.g., cyber courts and the E-commerce Law), these government institutions are largely the consequence of e-commerce development rather than its cause.

The weak government institutions, however, prompted e-commerce platforms to create effective private online institutions. Platforms had to innovate and build strong institutions to bridge the governance gap and build consumer trust. For example, Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce marketplace, introduced a payment-escrow system, return-freight insurance, a credit scoring system, a fraud detection program, and even a jury-like mechanism that allows users to vote on cases or change platform rules. My book examines these digital institutions and underscores their vital role in fuelling China’s e-commerce boom.

Once established, these digital institutions can also support the development of government institutions. The government has engaged with tech firms and adopted platform rules to create formal governance structures for the online market. Essentially, this is a private-public partnership in institutional building.

So many problems elsewhere with e-commerce, including here in the UK, have come down to contract enforcement, fraud detection and dispute resolution. We might imagine these would be major problems in China with the weaker institutions you suggest, yet they seem to have overcome these hurdles. How?

Yes, the issues of contract enforcement and fraud are indeed more pronounced in China than in the UK. However, backwardness can sometimes lead to leapfrog development, such as in e-commerce.

First, the UK’s well-established offline infrastructure in the 2000s – such as department stores and widespread credit card use – reduced the need for e-commerce shopping. In contrast, many less developed regions in China at the time had limited offline shopping options, leading consumers to rely more on e-commerce for greater product variety and quality.

Second, the weaker institutional framework in China has prompted Chinese platforms to create highly developed online institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. While platforms from the UK and US also incorporate these features, they tend to be less sophisticated. For example, eBay struggled in China in the early 2000s because it simply transplanted its US business model, failing to establish the trust necessary for Chinese consumers to engage in online trading.

Lastly, the Chinese government has played a crucial role in this evolution. As my book illustrates, the government initially acquiesced to and later partnered with platforms to build online institutions, which helped address problems of contract enforcement and fraud detection.

You do suggest it’s a fluid relationship between e-commerce entrepreneurs and the government – ‘from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support’. What do you think is the long-term trend?

In the long run, the Chinese government is likely to continue regulating the e-commerce sector, but it will not apply the same level of intensity to the tech sector as during the crackdown phase. Given the challenges facing the Chinese economy, there is a pressing need for e-commerce platforms and technology firms to drive economic growth, job creation and China’s global competitiveness. Excessive regulation can stifle autonomy, deter innovation among entrepreneurs and limit growth potential. Currently, the Chinese government appears more cautious about regulating the tech sector, mindful of the potential impact that overly stringent regulations could have on market confidence.

Another issue with e-commerce and its regulation in the UK, Europe and North America is privacy issues and data gathering, let alone surveillance. How have these not become issues in China – or are they, but there’s just not really a framework to contest such violations?

These are also issues – and the dark side – of China’s e-commerce development (see Chapter 6 of the book). However, before 2020, these issues did not prompt strict government regulations. Government then maintained a laissez-faire approach. I call this era “strategic non regulation”: the government recognised the market’s problems but avoided heavy regulations to encourage market growth. With minimal regulations, firms faced low compliance, allowing the sector to flourish and create jobs – exactly what the government aimed for.

In 2020, the government changed its policy toward tech companies (explained why in Chapter 6). Following the suspension of Ant Financial’s IPO, China entered a 2.5-year crackdown. The government quickly rolled out numerous regulations – arguably too many – to tackle issues including privacy concerns and data collection. While many of these regulations were well-intentioned and overdue, they often proved excessively strict, overly broad, and were implemented without warning. The heavy-handed enforcement approach resulted in regulatory overkill, shifting firms’ focus from “maximising revenue” to “minimising risk.” This harmed the internet industry, wiping out substantial market values.

How big is e-commerce going to get? Not just in revenue terms, but in terms of where else it could spread and to which new sectors. And what regulatory challenges to both entrepreneurs and the state might these developments bring?

China’s domestic e-commerce market is nearing saturation, particularly in urban areas where most consumers are already frequent users and have made substantial online purchases. While there is some growth potential in rural regions, lower disposable incomes present a significant challenge to driving further expansion. Domestically, China’s sluggish post-pandemic economic recovery and weakened consumer confidence have turned once avid online shoppers into more cautious spenders.

Cross-border e-commerce presents significant growth opportunities. With limited prospects in the domestic market, Chinese e-commerce sellers have increasingly turned to international markets. Chinese sellers have established a strong presence on Amazon, while Chinese-origin platforms like Shein and Temu have rapidly gained global popularity. Nevertheless, foreign regulatory risks are on the horizon. In September, the Biden administration proposed restricting the de minimis tax waiver, which allows packages under $800 to enter the US duty-free. This proposal specifically targets platforms like Shein and Temu, aiming to exclude products subject to US-China tariffs from this exemption. As cross-border e-commerce continues to grow, we can expect further regulations from foreign governments to address this rising trend.

The post How did China’s e-commerce model become the best in the world? appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

Ash now lives in New York, where he is the editor of the China Books Review, a digital magazine (and podcast) project of the Asia Society and The Wire China. Following the publishing of Alec’s memoir of his Dali life, The Mountains are High (Scribe, 2024), Paul French talked to him about life in Dali, the rather relaxed pandemic experience there, whether burnt out professionals are really forsaking city life for the mountains, what it takes to “drop out” in China, and who exactly is “lying flat”.

In 2020, you’re living in Beijing, and you decide to quit big city life and head to Dali. Of all the alternatives to the capital you could have chosen, what attracted you to Dali?

By the beginning of 2020, Dali felt like what I needed at that time in my life – rural seclusion, a new part of China to explore, and alternative communities that interested me, having lived in bigger cities all my life. I was burnt out in Beijing, and Chinese cities can be so smoggy and unlivable at times that they can exacerbate all the negative tendencies of city living, where you don’t talk to your neighbours and are caught up in the rat race. Dali looked like the opposite of that, with more close-knit communities of city escapees living in shared courtyards and pursuing their passions, given the lower cost of living for city transplants out there. Think of it like Londoners moving to a village in Tuscany or a New Yorker’s place upstate, only with escaping Chinese middle class instead. There are other places in China where city folk flee too, many of them in the west of the nation such as the outskirts of Chengdu in Sichuan province, but Dali became an especially popular destination for it.

We hear a lot about city folk from Beijing, Shanghai and other metropolises looking to get out of the rat race, escape the urban sprawl and drudge and find more satisfying lives in the countryside. You met some of these people – what motivated them to change gear, and how easy is it to do in China?

When I moved to Dali in mid-January 2020, I found that a lot of the other city transplants who were my neighbours in the valley had moved for the same reasons as me. Some were expats like myself, who had moved to China in their early 20s and spent a decade or so in a big city such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, then in their 30s wanted something different or closer to nature. Most were Chinese on the same trajectory, who had poured all their early energies into making it in the city, only to find that pursuing material and career goals didn’t make them happy. Instead of economic development, they sought personal development. This ties into a movement called “lying flat” or tangping, which is essentially opting out of the rat race. But that isn’t so easy to do, especially if you still have bills to pay.

Many of the people you met in Dali had started businesses to support their lifestyles. What sort of enterprises were they starting, and how successful are they?

Moving to the countryside is a privilege that only the relatively affluent can afford, and some of my neighbours from the city in Dali were living off their savings or family money or were retirees. But there were also a lot of them who didn’t have those kinds of resources and had to make do on their own. Some were hippies who busked and sold handmade jewellery on the streets. Another popular way to get by was to start a kezhan, an inn or BnB serving tourists who were visiting Dali for shorter stays. One character in the book, who went by the name Nutshell, quit his job and sold his flat and most of his possessions in a northern Chinese city, then drove to Dali and took out a bank loan, built a four-story BnB from nothing, and is still trying to fill enough rooms to pay back the loan, as the pandemic impacted his business.

Dali is a significant tourist destination, and you moved there just before Covid hit. What sort of impact has tourism had on Dali’s development, and how has it recovered from Covid?

Covid was a big part of this story, or at least the part that I witnessed, as I moved to Dali just two weeks before the epidemic in Wuhan broke out and became a pandemic. The trend of moving to countryside locations such as Dali had begun long before 2020, but Covid was a big accelerant for it. By 2021 and 2022, a lot of folks who had endured city lockdowns were ready to call it quits in the city and move to more rural climes. Dali didn’t have any lockdowns and was a pretty idyllic place during the pandemic. But as mentioned, a lot of the city transplants were making their living off the tourists who visited the valley. Tourism dipped during the first year of the pandemic, which was bad for them. But then the opposite happened: tourists could move internally in China but not go abroad. So, the number of visitors and transplants spiked.

You write a lot about younger people in China. Can you give us a snapshot of China’s urban youth now?

In my first book, I followed the stories of six (then) young Chinese born between 1985 and 1990 (that is, my age). That was a very particular generation I called the “wedge generation”, stuck between the old New China (a generation born in the 60s and 70s who witnessed China’s emergence from poverty and political chaos into growth and opportunity) and the New China (a generation born into a rising China, with no lived memory of what came before). One phrase I heard used a lot was “a generation gap every five years”. That meant those born after 1990 were a different generation altogether, and one I was less familiar with. At first, I found them more confident and nationalistic, but recently, the generation after them (born after 1995 or 2000) seems more despairing at China’s economic slowdown, the high unemployment rate for college graduates, and the tightening political mood of the nation. So this new youth seems more disgruntled than ever, and some have protested that by opting out of the system and moving to Dali.

Do you think that what you witnessed in Dali in the early 2000s – with people “dropping out” (or something akin to it) – will boom in these more economically uncertain times in China?

I believe the trend will continue, more people will seek a more affordable life outside of big cities, and in doing so the places they migrate to, such as Dali, will in turn become unaffordable themselves as gentrification pushes up prices. That’s what happened in upstate New York, and I could already see it happening in Dali; housing prices used to be an absolute steal, but they’ve increased dramatically in just the last few years. So this is the cycle of escape and gentrification in trendy rural areas which is perhaps the fate of every middle to high-income nation. But if the deeper economic trends and inequities that drove them out of the cities continue, I fear people will find it as hard to thrive out of the city as they did inside it.

The post Alec Ash on the young Chinese leaving the cities for the mountains appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

How is Xi different from previous leaders in China?

Xi is personally modest. ‘The Party’s Interests Come First’ is the Xi family slogan engraved on his father’s tomb. He rarely, if ever, talks about himself in the first person. Nonetheless, he’s presided over the most intense personification of authority in decades. Yet this has happened incrementally, accompanied by purges of the supposedly corrupt and helped by the absence of rivals. It’s hard to think of another figure in Chinese politics to match his stature.

How can we understand Xi’s motivations? What can British businesses do to thrive in China under Xi’s leadership?

Party training teaches cadres to exploit opportunities and to be active and dynamic when the chance arises to advance the revolution. Xi is a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who has doubled down on the party as an agent of change as well as an instrument of governance. It’s really important for businesses in China to have somebody on board who has studied Marxism-Leninism because it is their counterpart’s school of management. A good starting point is the vintage work by the Jesuit China-watcher László Ladány The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985: A Self-Portrait (1988), which tells the story through the party’s own documents. Since the late period includes the formative years of Xi as a cadre, it repays study. What does this mean for the West? It means that Xi’s new China will seize advantage where it can, and the party’s ability to concentrate resources at scale is already transforming industries like EVs. This is a formidable power.

What qualities have allowed Xi to rise so far?

Xi was forced to be a loner by his own childhood when he lost his family, his education and his home during the Cultural Revolution. He found himself living in a cave on a mountainside in an impoverished area of central China. It’s actually a tale of great personal resilience. It made him a decision-taker. For example, he decided to stick with the party and applied eight times for membership until he was accepted. When he got back to Beijing as a student, his peers found him friendly but reserved, a young man who ‘always had his eye on the prize’ and who told his discontented friends that they should not go abroad but should have faith in the party and stay in China to succeed. All this is well documented. As for risk-taking, the greatest risk of all was to run for the party leadership in 2012 when the outcome was far from certain. And this, remember, is someone who knows that the price of failure in that system can be very high.

What does Xi’s ongoing rule mean for us here in Britain and perhaps more widely in Europe? Do you think either the UK or the EU can forge something new and more mutually beneficial with Xi?

I have little patience with diplomats who persist in thinking that Britain’s skills and history enable it to play a special role with China. Time and again, ministers are persuaded that another trip to Beijing or more exchanges will somehow change the power calculus. They don’t. We have to adapt. The facts are that the UK is pretty good at doing business. We make good products and deliver modern services. Those are things which China wants. So let’s pursue trade, lobby hard for UK companies and get in there to compete. But you don’t help your cause by weakening your politics. The way to prosper is to stay strong and not to give a sense that this country can be split off from its friends. Engagement is necessary but realism matters. We should make it clear that the UK stands with its allies and that is the strongest framework for successful business and for UK firms and businesspeople to work safely in China.

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In The Great Reversal, Brown’s intention is to provide British readers with our own China story and an understanding of how and why the West, through Britain, impacted and shaped the east in the form of China. Paul French caught up with Kerry Brown to talk Anglo-Chinese relations, the issue of our collective China knowledge (or lack of it) and what we can do about it.

Why do you think China and Chinese history have been so historically absent from our school curriculums, and why should we try and boost the study of China at the secondary school level?

British imperial history is extremely contentious, but the one impact it did have that no one could dispute is that Britain became involved, directly or indirectly, in a vast number of other countries and territories. That means that China has largely been seen as a subset of this broader history and tended to get subsumed into it. Things are complicated by the fact that the Chinese story was not straightforward. Apart from Hong Kong, ceded in different stages from 1842, China was part of what some historians have called an ‘informal’ empire and never directly governed. So that makes British involvement a more complex story to tell. Those are two of the more obvious reasons why even the relatively well-defined area of Britain’s relations with China and Chinese history are not easy to teach today and, therefore, largely neglected. On top of that is the obvious unfamiliarity with Chinese dynastic history, which is vast and largely unknown by the British.

On the other hand, Anglo-Chinese relations are widely taught in China, invariably accentuating the negative aspects of the shared histories. Presumably, this doesn’t help either.

Many Chinese people certainly have an understanding of there being a shared history between Britain and China. A lot of this is covered during the patriotic education curriculum introduced since the 1990s, reinforcing the sense that China was victimised and mistreated by colonial powers during the modern era. Of course, Britain figures amongst the most prominent. Much of this history can be contested – if people at least know some of the detail. But the fact is that from the early 19^th century, Britain enjoyed huge economic, military and technological advantages over China (and elsewhere) and exploited those. It did so opportunistically rather than through any intrinsic desire to bully or destroy. But in the end, the collective memories these actions inspired took deep roots amongst the Chinese. British people need to have at least a counter narrative that, while acknowledging some of these issues, at least paints a more complex and better-informed picture. That was one of the reasons why I wrote this history book.

Looking at Anglo-Chinese relations, you talk of a “great reversal”. What do you mean by that?

Britain and China have links going back at least to 1600. Over that four and a quarter centuries, on the whole, in terms of key areas like economic strength, military ability, technological and cultural power, and geopolitical influence, Britain was often stronger than China – particularly in the 19^th century onwards. Britain was the leading industrialising nation in the early modern era, giving it massive capacity in terms of naval technology and the ability to impact and influence China. China certainly had some influence on Britain, it’s true, through its aesthetics and the production of things Britain needed, like tea and porcelain. But the British China story till recently was one where in most areas, Britain enjoyed relative advantages. Since the 1980s, that situation has now reversed. In 2005, China’s economy overtook Britain’s. It is now about three times larger. China now has the largest navy in the world, at least in terms of vessels. In the area of technology, from artificial intelligence to quantum mechanics, it is pulling ahead of Britain. This has happened recently and quickly. That is the great trend of reversal I am referring to.

Do you think that our lack of a collective national understanding of Chinese and Anglo-Chinese history means we tend to demonise the PRC when it comes to trade disagreements, quota battles and more personal enmities, such as with Huawei?

I think the main issue that really struck me as I wrote the book was not so much that Britain demonised China. There had always been strands of Sinophobia and antagonism towards China way back in history, from the era of our first encounter as nations. There was plenty of pretty clear dislike of the British among Chinese, too. What was more striking was how little Britain ever really invested in making its mind up about what sort of place China was, and what sort of people the Chinese were. There seemed to be this deep ambiguity in British attitudes, veering from fascination on the one hand to something approaching apprehensive fear on the other – with no real attempt to create a consensus between these. That China today has a political system that is alien to Britain is obviously an issue – but I wonder whether some of the reactions to China we see now have, lurking behind them, these longer-standing confusions amongst ourselves and, of course, the lack of a really clear understanding of what we think China actually stands for and what kind of common ground we have with the place.

Do you think that this lack of understanding that your book seeks to address also means that Britain’s voice on key issues is less than it should be, as so many of our key decision-makers lack a grasp of the issues?

I think British politicians in recent years (and, of course, there have been exceptions) who deal with these issues often have attitudes towards China but very seldom real knowledge. There are plenty of things that Britain could and should hold China to account for. But the default has become more about stating standard lines of where Britain feels China is not acting properly, and feeling that just stating this is sufficient. I don’t think China looks down on Britain. But these days, I also don’t think it automatically believes Britain occupies some morally superior position. I think if British people understood their history with China more clearly, then they would be in a better place to work out how they can talk to China and how they can select issues that matter and which they need to debate and discuss with China. We might not believe we can understand China, but we can certainly understand our own long history with the place. That at least gives us a place to start from.

And finally, how can we improve our national consciousness of China? More space for China on the national curriculum? More university departments? More exchange visits?

The British story with China is a rich and fascinating one. British people should not find China unfamiliar. When they drink tea from porcelain cups and wear clothing made from silk, usually in gardens with plants and design features once inspired by China, they are all touching the parts of British life today that testify to the deep impact China has had on the way we live and who we are.  Britain also deeply influenced China in its modern development, in ways which were critically important. Just a recognition of this deep joint connection would help. Like I said just now, it might be a big ask to get people to delve into Chinese history and culture per se. But surely understanding British history with China should be more straightforward. And at least there is one relatively accessible book they can find that in now!

The post Kerry Brown on the “Great Reversal” of Anglo-Chinese Relations appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

Ralph Jennings lived for seven years in Beijing and more than that in Taipei. He’s worked as a news editor with the state-owned China Daily, an advice columnist for the 21st Century weekly in Beijing and as a reporter for numerous international media outlets, including Reuters. He also taught writing courses in Beijing at the Communication University of China for several years. These jobs exposed Jennings to thousands of news interviewees, media colleagues, students and their friends. Then came the random people who shared seats on overnight train rides in China, approached the author in Beijing’s sprawling parks and, in one case, threw a glass bottle at him. They ranged from teenagers to retirees. All that is condensed into his helpful new book, 50 Useful Tips on China (Earnshaw Books). Jennings now covers the Chinese economy for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

Why don’t hands get raised at meetings?

The person to whom the hand belongs might get shot down. Leaders of meetings tend to rank high. A question might offend those leaders by implying that the meeting didn’t cover all points in adequate detail. We’re talking about company staff meetings and professional conferences where senior people go on stage. Leaders prefer to lead without any hint of a challenge, part of an old social order that many Chinese people intuitively understand. And what if the point of someone’s question was covered at the meeting? Asking would admit to not absorbing details of the event, effectively reflecting badly on the person’s brain capacity rather than marking the person as a careful double-checker of information. To avoid offending a leader or embarrassing oneself, those with questions may just ask one another. Shortly after many an event, chatter levels rise quickly in the audiences as trusted colleagues or cohorts ask one another what the speakers meant. Common questions include: What do we do next? Do our jobs change? What’s the background of this new person joining our team?

Why are co-worker relations so tricky in China?

Employers too often give vague job descriptions. Everyone in an office might have the title “associate”, for example. Without clearer ideas about who exactly does what, co-workers invest a lot of time psyching out the bosses for clues – and for dibs on the easiest (off by 5.30 pm) and most rewarding (work travel) duties. Company heads prefer vague job descriptions to keep a high level of authority. More defined roles, especially if backed up by employee handbooks that are full of detailed rules, limit leaders’ flexibility in business. Clearer definitions offer employees clarity on their exact rights and obligations, which is good for them but possibly inconvenient for senior leaders who are rule-bound to respect those boundaries. As a result, co-workers vie for the best roles by getting onto the good sides of supervisors. That process can take many forms, including favours unrelated to work, but it usually means grasping quickly what bosses really want day to day and giving them exactly that, especially in a crisis situation.

Why do employees work overtime even when the work is done?

This practice reflects a psychology of accumulation: more is better. The same psychology explains the crush to study 10-plus hours a day and find ways to make money even when super-rich already. Not too many decades ago, China was unstable across multiple metrics, and people weren’t sure how long they could keep resources or find more. An employee who stays at work for two extra hours, even if just to fiddle around on their PC, has the look/feel of giving the company two more hours of time that should theoretically translate to positive income. Office heads who believe in accumulation psychology feel comforted by the extra hours and remember who’s working longest, often without measuring tangible outcomes of the time spent. Friendlier bosses buy dinners for their long-hour employees. With this kind of oversight, plus the free meals, it’s hard to walk off at 5.30 pm after an eight-hour shift even if work is done (and done well) and the labour laws say it’s OK to leave. To leave on time would offend the boss and cast the departed employee as one who doesn’t care about the company.

Why is it acceptable to copy without permission?

Copying is traditionally seen as an expression of respect for someone’s work. That means students can block copy passages from other scholars without attributing every one of them. It means going ahead and playing a famous song at a public event without seeking permission from the song’s creator. Over roughly the past 25 years, China has faced pressure from copyright-conscious foreign governments to adopt a Western-style system of intellectual property rights protections. Along came a suite of laws and courts. But copying persists. Commercial copying, say of a book or software package, saves a pile of resources compared to creating one’s own work – an obvious advantage in China’s cutthroat competition among businesses. A national spirit of beating other countries, especially in technology, can also drive copying without permission.

In a country where trains nearly always run on time, why is “chabuduo” (almost) so often considered good enough?

A lack of specificity anchors dealmaking, public relations and workplace relations, among other relationship chains, so the parties involved can keep a valuable degree of flexibility. Flexibility later protects the human relationships involved. If something goes wrong, both parties can say no details were final, then walk back and redo things without getting into a dispute over specifics. Deals may start with commitments to action rather than lists of actual actions to be taken. Government offices tell the mass media that projects cost “about 100 billion yuan” instead of disclosing an exact figure. Bosses give approximate orders to workplace subordinates. Humans, in all cases, hope to hold onto the margin between approximate and exact so they can keep harmony while making changes, such as raising a project cost to 150 billion yuan. Deals cover specifics after two parties build trust. A reporter with good government relations can get the exact project figure on request. A supervisor will give a detailed work request once sure there’s no need to change it or worry that employees will use it irresponsibly, such as by telling competitors.

Why is the customer not always so right in China?

Customers are small individuals, and sellers are usually companies with considerable resources. That difference creates a power divide between the two sides, and Chinese society, from the way in the past, assigns status based on accumulation. Lots of proprietors do try to help distressed customers, on principle as well as to keep people coming back. But during larger disputes, a store, restaurant or utility provider won’t hesitate to say no. They can bring out legal-looking paperwork that a customer might not have. They can ignore online complaints. And they can blame a distraught customer for product defects. The status-conscious society at large assumes that the larger company will win based on its inherent clout, even if a customer actually has a case. It’s debatable how effective government-run customer complaint hotlines and websites are in resolving disputes. That uncertainty reduces any fear of reprisal on the company’s side if it goes against a customer’s wishes. Best practice for customers: ask friends to recommend sellers before doing business.

The post 50 Useful Tips on Chinese Work Culture appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

In The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future (Bloomsbury Asian Arguments, 2024), Jonathan Chatwin travels 3,000 miles in the footsteps of Deng’s legendary “southern tour”, pursuing the stories of his journey and examining its legacies in the country today. Jonathan Chatwin is an independent writer whose last book, Long Peace Street (Manchester University Press, 2019), retraced the history and development of Beijing’s central west-east access Chang’an Jie. Paul French caught up with Chatwin to talk Deng, legacy and how it’s all remembered in today’s China.

Can you give us a quick explainer on the southern tour and why Deng saw it as so essential?

In 1988, there was an inflation crisis which led to the so-called ‘conservatives’ within the Chinese Communist Party leadership – named after their desire to ‘conserve’ a Soviet-style planned economy – imposing stricter controls on economic growth, slowing the freewheeling of the economy over the previous few years. This ‘rectification’ process continued after the Tiananmen protests, which seemed to those conservatives to confirm that economic liberalisation had been too much, too fast. Deng retired officially in November of 1989 but was determined that China shouldn’t slow down its economic liberalisation – to him, the protests of June proved the need to continue making people’s lives better in order to secure the authority of the party. He tried to reignite the economy in 1990 and 1991 but didn’t manage to persuade the new leadership, so in January 1992, nine months before the all-important 14th Party Congress, he set off to two Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, as well as Shanghai, to make his case and try to pivot China back towards more ambitious reform and opening.

Southern tours also have a long history in China going back to earlier dynasties. Can you tell us a little more about that?

The Chinese term nanxun, which later came to be applied to Deng’s 1984 and 1992 journeys south, traditionally applied to the tours of inspection and pilgrimage that go all the way back to the emperors of Chinese legend. The most well-known of these today are the Qing dynasty tours of Kangxi and Qianlong – partly because both had magnificent scroll-paintings produced, recording and mythologising them. Perhaps surprisingly, Mao resurrected this tradition, particularly in his journeying before the Cultural Revolution, and in the Southern Tour that preceded Lin Biao’s death in the early 1970s, using his journeys away from the capital to rally support.

How instrumental was the southern tour in the opening up and development of Shanghai? People often forget Shanghai was really the last big Chinese city to be allowed to reform and grow.

The idea of opening Shanghai to foreign investment and liberalising the economy there was worrisome for the leadership in the 1980s, particularly the most powerful conservative (and one of the ‘eight elders’ of the party), Chen Yun, who came from that area. Shanghai, like a number of other coastal and river towns in China, had been a ‘treaty port’ in the 19th century and, therefore, a symbol of foreign exploitation. Shanghai was also something of a cash cow for the communists, so they didn’t want to risk that. Deng had been there in 1990 and 1991 and talked with Zhu Rongji, who was mayor and later would run China’s national economic policy, about more ambitiously developing the area of Pudong, to the east of the Huangpu River, which at that time was still relatively undeveloped – mainly warehouses, factories and small conurbations. He hadn’t succeeded. However, post-1992, Pudong would begin to develop more quickly, eventually becoming the iconic cluster of skyscrapers we know today. In many ways, Pudong is the most visible legacy of Deng’s southern tour.

How do you see Deng’s legacy in China today?

Those who lived through that era are often nostalgic – not just for the increase in living standards, but for the swirl of political debate that went on during the 1980s and to which Tiananmen put a stop. To understand Deng, you need to understand that everything he did was designed to keep the party in power. He was also profoundly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, during which he was purged twice, and avoiding returning to the ‘backwardness and poverty’ of that era was key in his ambitions. However, his relentless pursuit of growth at all costs, predicated on cheap labour, debt-fuelled housing and infrastructure, and a wilful ignorance of environmental impact, created a model of growth that was flawed and, as the current leadership has discovered, unsustainable.

Perhaps more importantly, how do you think the Party sees Deng’s legacy today – in particular, Xi Jinping?

When he came to power, Xi went to Shenzhen – and returned in 2018 and 2020 – in obvious and knowing homage to Deng. So a lot of people, both within and outside China, thought, here’s the guy to reinvigorate reform and opening after the lost decade of Hu Jintao. It obviously hasn’t worked out that way, and Deng is infrequently referenced by Xi.

Deng is problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, he deployed power as a party elder with no official role – not something Xi wants to endorse. Secondly, if the party is eternally right, why did Deng need to fix the economic mess Mao had created, and why did he lose not one but two General Secretaries in the late 1980s – Hu Yaobang in 1987 and Zhao Ziyang in 1989? Finally, he was popular, and Xi is fundamentally worried about anyone who might invite negative comparisons.

To my mind, there are very few, if any, public monuments or tributes to Deng on display across China. Do you think this is deliberate? Is his legacy downplayed at a time of reduced emphasis on reform?

There is that famous statue of him, which is on the cover of the book, at the top of Lotus Hill in Shenzhen, and the billboard which still stretches across a street corner there with his face superimposed on the skyline. The statue was warehoused for a number of years before its unveiling, so even in the 1990s his legacy was somewhat complicated. It seems amazing to me, in particular, that there is no memorial to him in Pudong.

He was always a relatively modest man, however, and disliked the cult of personality approach of Mao – which makes his adoption of Maoist techniques in 1992, and the subsequent mythologisation of the Southern Tour through the 1990s and early 2000s all the more interesting.

The post Author Jonathan Chatwin on Deng Xiaoping’s legendary Southern Tour appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

Yan Ge & Andrzej Tichý: The In-Between Places, 12 August, 11:00-12:00

Yan Ge writes in English, Mandarin and Sichuanese. She’ll be in discussion with Andrzej Tichý, a Swedish-Czech-Polish writer, about the art of the short story. Yan Ge’s 2023 short story collection, Elsewhere: Stories, was praised by The Guardian: “Yan Ge’s English debut is preoccupied with language, its failures, and its relationship to human emotions and the raw reality – the ‘food’ – of life. … These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut – the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life.”

Yuan Yang: How China is Changing, 12 August, 12:30-13:30

FT journalist and Beijing Bureau Chief Yuan Yang’s revelatory book Private Revolutions has been getting a lot of positive press this summer. It tells the story of four ordinary women in China’s new social order caught between capitalist ambition and authoritarian reality. Yuan Yang will present her book at the Courtyard Theatre.

Anton Hur, R F Kuang & Emily Wilson: Found in Translation, 13 August, 19:45-20:45

Those with a thing for translation and language will want to see RF Kuang in conversation with editor and translator Daniel Hahn talking about the complexities of translation, the Korean language and her speculative novel, Babel.

Robin Niblett & Yuan Yang: Shaping Our Century, 13 August 18:45-19:45

Yuan Yang is back, this time in conversation with Robin Niblett of Chatham House, talking about the geopolitical rivalry between China and the US and her new book Private Revolutions.

R F Kuang & Samantha Shannon: The Future of Fantasy, 14 august, 20:30-21:30

RF Kuang is back talking about fantasy writing and its future with fellow fantasy writer Samantha Shannon.

R F Kuang: Wicked Ambition, 15 August, 19:30-20:30

There’s one more go-round with RF Kuang, this time talking about her bestselling book (serialised by BBC Radio 4, too) Yellowface and about cultural appropriation, race and the misdeeds of the publishing industry.

Xiaolu Guo: Personal Geographies, 18 August, 19:15-20:15

UK based Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo has a new book, My Battle of Hastings, out this summer talking about what happens when a Chinese writer looking to escape the pressures of writing in London pitches up on England’s south coast and contemplates English history.

First Edition with Edward Wong, 19 August, 10:00-11:00

Former Beijing correspondent Edward Wong talks about how to maintain quality journalism and avoid fake news over morning coffee and croissants in the famed Edinburgh Spiegeltent.

Nick Bryant, Olesya Khromeychuk & Edward Wong: Democracy on the Brink, 19 August, 19:30-20:30

These three veteran journalists will discuss Ukraine, America’s internal dissent and China, among other globally-important topics.

Edward Wong: China Under the Lens, 21 August, 14:00-15:00

NYT journalist and former Beijing correspondent Edward Wong has a new book, The Edge of Empire, about his own heritage, China, and the last century of change in the country. In this talk, he’ll dissect China’s recent authoritarian turn.

William Dalrymple: When India Led the World, 24 August, 18:45-19:45

William Dalrymple’s new book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, reveals the nation’s position as the preeminent Eurasia intellectual and philosophical superpower for a millennium and a half until 1200 AD. The focus of Dalrymple’s book may be India, but you can expect some questions on India-China relations and India’s influence on China’s religions and belief systems as the moderator is FOCUS’ own Paul French.

Find out more about the above events and purchase tickets at www.edbookfest.co.uk

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