Wednesday, September 29th, 7 pm (talk starts at 7:30)
China has gone from famine to gluttony in two generations – a massive achievement. But there is a downside. Up to 120 million Chinese are obese – a fourfold increase in less than two decades – and about half are kids. The costs of obesity will be massive. China’s healthcare system faces a time bomb of 100 million adults with diabetes within a couple years. Matthew Crabbe will talk about impact of rising incomes, changing lifestyles and fast-food culture on the world’s most populous nation and the challenges ahead.
Venue details: The House of Roosevelt (Teddy or FD??), Bund No. 27, 27 Zhongshan Dong Yi Road (Between the Peace Hotel and the Peninsula) Tel: 2333 0800
Apologies in advance for what will probably be the erratic nature of my postings over the next three weeks or so. I’m on tour in Europe and America and the schedule is frantic to the point of silly, to say the least. Still in most cities I have managed to persuade the organisers to put me in historic or more interesting hotels than generic and dreary Hiltons and Hyatts so hopefully some posts on a few interesting lodging houses will appear and anything interesting that crosses my path. I’ve also got a few of the usual China bits and pieces lined up in advance so as you don’t forget the site completely.
Fear not loyal readers, time will pass all too swiftly – and talking of time…watches of distinction in Shanghai in 1940…
I am in no way knowledgeable on Africa – I’ve never been there, never really thought about the continent much or ever studied it at all. However, I am, as previous posts have noted, a massive Graham Greene fan and, of course, love his great Africa book Journey Without Maps. So when I heard of Tim Butcher’s book Chasing the Devil that follows the trail Greene took in 1935 through Sierra Leone and Liberia, commenting on him, Africa then and Africa now I thought it worth a read. It was. Blurb below as ever.
For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through, bedevilled by a uniquely brutal form of violence from which sprang many of Africa’s cruellest contemporary icons – child soldiers, prisoner mutilation, blood diamonds. With their wars officially over, Tim Butcher sets out on a journey across both countries, trekking for 350 miles through remote rainforest and malarial swamps. Just as he followed H M Stanley through the Congo – a journey described in his bestseller “Blood River” – this time he pursues a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935 and immortalised in the travel classic “Journey Without Maps”. Greene took 26 bearers, a case of scotch, and hammocks in which he and his cousin Barbara were carried. Tim walks every blistering inch to gain an extraordinary ground-level view of a troubled and overlooked region. As a journalist in Africa, Tim came to know both countries well although the wars made trips to the jungle hinterland far too risky. This is where he now heads, exploring how rebel groups thrived in the bush for so long and whether the devil of war has truly been chased away. He encounters other ‘devils’, masked figures guarding the spiritual secrets of jungle communities. Some are no more threatening than schoolmasters but others are much more sinister, relying on ritual cannibalism as a source of their magical power. Tim encounters these devils on an epic journey that demands courage, doggedness and good fortune. “Chasing the Devil” is a dramatic travel book touching on one of the most fraught parts of the globe at a unique moment in its history. Weaving history and anthropology with personal narrative – as well as new discoveries about Greene – it is as exciting as it is enlightening.
Out of sight, out of mind – the uncomfortable reality. That’s the general public’s reaction to the movement of oil around the world’s oceans. Or at least it was until the Deepwater Horizon incident. This vital supply chain is constantly under enormous, largely unreported pressure. The uninterrupted flow of oil is essential to globalisation and increasingly so, as business move eastwards to Asia. However, it is threatened by conflicts, pirates and global warming.
Sam Chambers shows how China has moved to secure its own uninterrupted oil supplies, and how diversified both its oil sources and its oil routes have become. He shares his views on the changing times of energy security, one of the main focuses of his new book, Oil on Water.
Sam has been living in Greater China for the past decade, first in Hong Kong and now in Dalian. He started out as the East Asia Editor for Lloyd’s List newspaper before pursuing a freelance career as a travel and transport writer five years ago. Oil on Water is his third co-authored book.
I took ages to get around to reading these two books and these two writers but now I finally have I want more of both of them. Neither have anything to do with China but both write superbly – Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi contains one of the best recreations of the London art and hack set decamping briefly to Venice for the Biennale which is by turns sad, tragic, hilarious and not a little portrays a rather louche lifestyle to be envied. Dyer is being described as the best British writer around at the moment and he may well be – fortunately this is being whispered in London circles in stark contrast I note to the group wank of social commentators and bullish American male reviewers in the USA praising the overrated Jonathan Franzen to unseemly orgasmic heights.
I’m also plugging James Runcie’s Canvey Island, which is a few years old now but I picked up recently and found myself addicted to throughout a whole afternoon and into the evening feeling a need to finish it in one sitting. Is ‘one sitting’ the best praise a book can have – quite possibly. Anwyay Runcie captures the passage of time in British society from the 50s to the 80s or thereabouts and the weird sort of nondescript but also somehow very specific place that Canvey Island is too.
Blurbs below as per normal:
Jeff Atman, a journalist, is in Venice to cover the opening of the Biennale. He’s expecting to see a load of art, go to a lot of parties and drink too many bellinis. He’s not expecting to meet the spellbinding Laura, who will completely transform his few days in the city. So begins a story of erotic love and spiritual learning that will reach its conclusion amidst the ghats of Varanasi.
It is 1953 in Canvey Island. Len and Violet are at a dance. Violet’s husband, George sits and watches them sway and glide across the dance floor, his mind far away, trapped by a war that ended nearly ten years ago. Meanwhile, at home, a storm rages and Len’s wife, Lily and his young son, Martin fight for their lives in the raging black torrent. The night ends in a tragedy that will reverberate through their lives. This poignant novel follows the family’s fortunes from the austerity of the post-war years to Churchill’s funeral, from Greenham Common to the onset of Thatcherism and beyond, eloquently capturing the very essence of a transforming England in the decades after the war. It is a triumph of understated emotion, a novel about growing up and growing old, about love, hope and reconciliation.
Holiday weekends are upon us in China as the ancient mid-Autumn Festival collides with the arriviste National Day (really Communism Day as the 10/10 should authentically be the National Day). Nowadays of course people pop of to Thailand or somewhere (well, maybe not this year so much). In the old days when they got a holiday Shanghailanders headed for the hill resorts of China – due to its proximity Moganashan was popular (and its history recently told in Mark Kitto’s China Cuckoo, by the way – which, if you haven’t read then you should) but Kuling in Jiangxi was also popular, particularly with foreigners in treaty ports close by and missionaries. Chiang Kai-shek had a place there too. Kuling is still around and still worth visiting – sadly though the landmark, and delightfully named, Fairy Glen Private Hotel (British Owned and Managed!) is gone but was open to welcome you, meeting you at the steamer terminal too no less. Kuling – 3,500 feet above sea level in the Lushan Mountains was, and actually still is, a nice way to escape the summer city heat.
Apparently, in one of those so-good-it-must-be true stories, the Fairy Glen was one of only two hotels in Kuling. The other, the Journey’s End, placed (according to Jonathan Fenby’s bio of Chiang Kai Shek) a bible and a collection of French pornography in every room in case the guest’s found themselves spiritually in need of one or t’other.
I had to pop in to the American Express office in Shanghai the other day to pick up a new card but of course all my maps, guidebooks and telephone directories are extremely out of date (though far better designed, written and presented than any Lonely Time Rough Out Planet attempt I’ve seen lately which are all uniformly drearily formulaic).
So, just in case you’re like me and only ever bother to read old pre-war guidebooks, you’ll need to know that American Express are no longer on Kiukiang Road (now Jiujiang Road), where they were in 1941 (as the ad below shows) but have moved to that ugly bastion and long running virtual American ‘Green Zone’ in Shanghai, the Shanghai Centre on Nanjing Road (formerly Bubbling Well Road). The Shanghai Centre, incidentally, having the least worthy namesake successor to the great Shanghai Long Bar imaginable -Â a dreadful, and horrendously decorated dump, where boring corporate types in their middling years drink factory produced lager, talk about golf and admire each others significantly younger and usually rather tarty eye candy.
In short, the Shanghai Centre lacks charm the way Wayne Rooney lacks hair but that’s where American Express (I can’t quite bring myself to say ‘AmEx’) are these days. Whether they can book you a steamship ticket these days is unlikely I reckon and I bet they won’t hold your mail for you either anymore. They will sort you out with a credit card though and, admittedly, did so quite efficiently and perfectly politely for me the other week.
NB: and note, back in the day, the Americans could spell ‘cheque’ correctly too!
OK, time for another plug. Access Asia director Matthew Crabbe will be plugging his, and co-author Paul French’s (that’s me by the way), book Fat China (you might have heard of it already) at the following venues:
Thursday 23 September: Evening event at the Beijing Bookworm from 7pm onwards. Contact Alexandra Pearson for details: alex@beijingbookworm.com.
Monday 27 September: Evening event at the Suzhou Bookworm from 7:30 onwards. Contact Alexis Lefranc: alexislefranc@suzhoubookworm.com.
Tuesday 28 September: Breakfast event with the EU-China Chamber of Commerce from 8-10am. Contact Scott Goodfellow: sgoodfellow@euccc.com.cn.
Wednesday 29 September: Time and venue TBC for the Shanghai Foreign Correspondent’s Club. Contact D’arcy Doran: Darcy.DORAN@afp.com.
We hope to make these events as relaxed, inclusive and discursive as possible, as this is a topic that deserves input and opinion from all quarters, so feel free to come along to ask questions and raise issues. Copies of Fat China will (of course) be available for sale at each event.
