We will be discussing how the one child policy has come to shape the fabric of modern China, as well as the repercussions it has had. From the significant gender imbalance to the dramatically raging population, what can we learn from this social experiment and what does it mean for China’s future?

Chaired by Paul French, an author and widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international bestseller Midnight in Peking.

The panel:

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is chancellor’s professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He has edited a number of books on China and is the author of four including China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Mei Fong is a journalist with more than a decade of reporting in Asia, most recently as China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of One Child: The Past and Future of China’s Most Radical Experiment.

Isabel Hilton is a journalist, broadcaster and writer. She is the founder and editor of chinadialogue and has authored and co-authored several books and holds honorary doctorates from Bradford and Stirling Universities. She was appointed OBE in 2010 for her contribution to raising environmental awareness in China.

On Monday 16 February, the Frontline Club hosted a screening of Jocelyn Ford’s debut film Nowhere to Call Home, which documents the extraordinary journey of Tibetan farmer Zanta as she battles prejudice and sexism in order to provide her young son, Yang Quing, with an education.

Zanta is widowed at the age of twenty-eight, and is left at the mercy of her tyrannical in-laws, who do not want their grandson to go to school. She consequently escapes to Beijing in order to offer Yang Quing a better start in life than she herself was given, stating that “without education, he’s no different from a yak.” Nowhere to Call Home follows Zanta as she is victim to blatant racism in China and struggles to navigate the oppressively patriarchal Tibetan society from which she hails, in which women are systematically silenced and bullied.

Jocelyn Ford takes audience questions following the screening of Nowhere to Call Home at the Frontline Club

Following the screening, an audience member commented on the impressive access that Jocelyn Ford had gained in locations in both Tibet and China, and asked her to comment on the different obstacles that she faced in the process.

Ford responded:
“As you may have noticed, I had never made a film before and had no idea how to go about it. But what I was told was that there is one important thing: you must have trust from the person in your film. Zanta gave me that trust within twenty minutes of our conversation. With other people… well, Beijing is a lawless sort of place, so I would show up at the police station [to film] and they’d have to figure out what to do with me…”

Another member of the audience wondered whether the director still maintained regular contact with the protagonists of Nowhere to Call Home, Zanta and her son Yang Quing, as the project was filmed six years ago in 2009. Ford replied that she had recently been in touch with Zanta, who had provided an update on the progress of her now fourteen-year-old son:

“His English is excellent, his Maths….forget it! He’s had a lot of difficulties. The teacher has been very unwelcoming to Tibetans and told other children not to associate with him. It’s not been easy.”

The discussion then moved onto the reactions that the film had provoked, by both Tibetan and Chinese viewers. Ford commented that she had been pleasantly surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the film, on both sides:

“A lot of Han Chinese are totally shocked because the media and propaganda machine says that they treat Tibetans so well, and give them all this money… I consider this very media driven. So when they see the film they have to come to grips with the difference between what they thought before and what they see here, because Zanta is amazingly frank.”

Ford also mentioned the positive outcome of screening Nowhere to Call Home in school settings in China:

“A lot of times I’ve been really pleased with the Han Chinese high-school kids in Beijing. A lot have said, ‘Well gosh, we see there’s a problem and what do we do about it? Who should be responsible? Can I, as an individual, do anything?’ I’ve had an outpouring of people offering to help them, so I’m encouraged.”

Visit the Nowhere to Call Home Facebook page for more information and future screenings.

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/dissent-in-china

On 28 October in China’s iconic and politically sensitive Tiananmen Square, a car crashed through crowds and exploded, killing two tourists and three suspects. Just over a week later, on 6 November, one person died and eight were injured following a series of small blasts outside a Communist Party office in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province.

Whether these attacks where carried out by organised groups – such as the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement – or individuals, they show a chink in the armour of the ruling Communist Party, despite soaring expenditure on domestic security over the past decade.

In a year that marks the 25th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, we will be joined by a panel of experts to explore the significance of these two fatal incidents, looking at the levels of dissent in China and how it is being suppressed. We will also be asking who are those behind these attacks and what are their motivations.

Chaired by Rob Gifford, China editor of The Economist. He first went to China in 1987 as a language student, before working for the BBC and then spending seven years in Beijing and Shanghai as a correspondent for NPR.  He is the author of China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.

The panel:

Isabel Hilton is a journalist, broadcaster and writer. She is the founder and editor of chinadialogue and has authored and co-authored several books and holds honorary doctorates from Bradford and Stirling Universities. She was appointed OBE in 2010 for her contribution to raising environmental awareness in China.

Thomas König is China & Asia Programme Coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). He works on the increasing ECFR’s profile in this area, expanding the programme’s activities and contributes to ECFR’s China & Asia research. He played an integral part in the publication of ECFRs flagship report China 3.0, a unique essay collection that sheds light on the intellectual spectrum in Chinese contemporary society.

Yuwen Wu joined the BBC World Service in 1995 and has worked in the Chinese Service, English news and African Service. She was the news and current affairs editor for the Chinese Service from 2004 to 2012 and covered many major Chinese and international events. Since 2012, she has worked as the planning editor of the BBC East Asia Hub and appears regularly on BBC World TV and radio programmes as a China analyst.

Jonathan Fenby has written seven books on China, most recently Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today which was chosen as a book of the year by the Financial Times, The Independent and Bloomberg Business Week. He is a former editor of The Observer, Reuters World Service and the South China Morning Post, which he edited from 1995-9 through the handover of Hong Kong to China. He is currently China director of the international research service Trusted Sources.

Photograph: nui7711 / Shutterstock.com

His words have echoed around my head throughout my first five months here. The explosion of capitalism in China is like nothing any of us have seen before, and it’s changing our world. I live it: every week I see old buildings demolished and new high-rises erected. The air is thick with concrete dust; every day a thousand new cars come onto the streets of the capital. The climate-changing gases produced will affect all of us in the end – for now, I just breathe the pollution. I’ve been to the biggest open-cast coal mine in Asia. I’ve reported on the unfair trials of human rights lawyers, pensioners’ protests, endemic corruption and four years of double-digit economic growth. I covered the biggest summit of African leaders ever – an emblem of China’s new diplomatic reach and thirst for natural resources.

I return again and again to the environment and China’s role in global warming. But the only time we led Channel 4 News was when the North Koreans carried out a nuclear test. That was the news. The rest is just history. Here, I’ve learnt, you have to be a real journalist. No hanging about in the Frontline Club until something horrible happens in the Middle East, scrambling to get on the plane and filing as fast as you can. No walking onto the streets of Baghdad after the Americans arrived and reporting whatever happened in front of the camera, because – whatever it was – it was bound to be news.

Now I have to go and find out what’s really happening. And if I manage that, I have to persuade the Channel 4 Newsdesk that it’s news, and can’t sit on the shelf until there’s a hole in the programme.

My use of the word “I” is disingenuous. Three Chinese lessons a week for five months and I can just about direct a taxi driver and say “Two cold beers please.” I am entirely reliant on my bi-lingual producer, Bessie Du, and cameraman, Matt Jasper, an Australian who’s been here four years and is a dab hand at hiding the tape when the local Communist Party officials show up. Early on I realised that I was not only superfluous but in fact an impediment to reporting. Matt is essential to take the pictures, so he dons a black baseball cap (for some reason he refuses to dye his ginger hair) and tries to look inconspicuous. Bessie looks and speaks Chinese so she asks the questions and negotiates access. Me? “Why don’t you stay in the car?” suggests Bessie. “You’ll attract attention if you get out.”

To some extent, this is easing. On January 1st the Chinese government lifted the rule which said foreign correspondents must ask permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before travelling outside Beijing and Shanghai. We used to ignore this and just travel anyway, but now local officials are on shaky ground if they try to arrest us. This is good news in that obviously it’s easier to report – sadly, it means I may never share the experience of my colleagues who have been forced to write “self criticisms” when detained.

We already saw the difference, when we went to Xiditou, a village where the cancer rate is 30 times the national average – a fact which may, or may not, be related to the effluent discharged into the river by paint and chemical factories.In the new spirit of openness, we went to find the Village Chief, who happens to own one of the offending factories. He said he’d love to give us an interview but unfortunately he needed the approval of the Propaganda Secretary. Fine, we said. The room filled up with more baffled officials. The Propaganda Secretary arrived. “Have you called the police?” he asked. (All this in Chinese of course – Bessie was giving me a running commentary.)

The Propaganda Secretary disappeared and then reappeared looking worried.”I’ve just been told the rules have changed,” he said. “You can interview the Village Chief.” “WHAT???” The Village Chief looked as if he’d been hit by a hammer between the eyes. He was a well built, rather arrogant youngish man with a round face, but now he was very unhappy.

A long conversation ensued, during which he said he was far too modest to appear on television and Bessie apparently told him that the foreigners would think very badly of the Chinese if he backed out of the interview. So for the first time in his life he sat down in front of a camera.”You’re famous now,” said his colleague as we miked him up. “Saddam Hussein was famous,” he quipped.

Lacking the benefits of media training, he was not worried about internal consistency so his responses were, roughly: the official cancer figures are wrong; anyway people die of cancer everywhere; there’s nothing wrong with the water; look at me I’m healthy. So, despite the continued detention of several Chinese journalists, and the blocking of certain internet sites, there are signs that China is opening up just a little, as well as getting a lot richer – another change to report.

The Channel 4 News editors are right that the Middle East and Somalia and all the stories I used to cover have to lead the news. Iraq is the most important story of our journalistic lives, and the most cataclysmic disaster of the age – I read Patrick Cockburn’s piece in the last newsletter with a mixture of admiration for his bravery and guilt for no longer being there.

It’s not that I am missing out, but I feel I have somehow been unfaithful by moving on.I believe historians will see Iraq as the catastrophe which heralded the end of the American century. But it is China which will rise to become the new superpower, and I am chronicling its preparation for that role. Such thumb-sucking is worthy of a bar-room chat at Frontline. It may not be the news. But it is history, and, after five months, I still can’t quite believe that I’m getting to live it.