Paul French, Author of “Midnight in Peking” and “City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir”
Jo Lusby, Co-founder, Pixie B
Join us for the second in our series of webinars where we are joined by leading authors focusing on China.
With his true crime book Midnight in Peking about the murder of a young Englishwoman in 1930s Beijing, Paul French put Chinese history on the New York Times Bestseller list. His follow up City of Devils, a story of gangsters, dancehalls, and old Shanghai, is currently being developed for TV in Los Angeles. Paul is also involved in a number of film, TV and podcast ventures in China. In this “fireside chatâ€, Paul and his former publisher at Penguin, Jo Lusby, talk creative opportunities in China.
Telling China stories can be a business. Books, movies, TV, audio are all areas where Chinese consumers want to hear what the world has to say. The opportunities are as limitless as our imaginations – from history to science-fiction; from publishing to CGI. The UK is a world leader in the field of creative content creation and in terms of China – co-produced moves, jointly created TV shows, reading each others stories in translation, listening to each others voices on audio we’re only just beginning. Moving from selling British books into China, helping develop TV content and movie using the UK-China Television and Film Co-Production Treaty to more recent sectors such as audiobooks and podcast to reach China’s ‘ear economy’. British creative talent is at the forefront of foreign involvement with China.
Paul French was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. His most recent book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir has received much praise with The Economist writing, ‘…in Mr French the city has its champion storyteller.’ Both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils are currently being developed for television.Â
Jo Lusby is co-founder of Pixie B, an independent consultancy and agency specialising in publishing, film, and the creative sector in China. The company works with organizations and individuals seeking strategic and commercial advice, as well as negotiates partnerships and agreements for a wide range of IP brands. Clients include Pottermore and the Blair Partnership, BBC Studios, The Financial Times, The Publishers Association, and others.
A fluent Mandarin speaker and veteran publisher, Jo was North Asia CEO of the world’s largest consumer book publisher, Penguin Random House (and, prior to its merger, Penguin Books) from 2005-2017. She set up and managed local operations across Asia, establishing a market-leading, award-winning local publishing business in English, Chinese, and Korean. Bestsellers published during under her tenure ranged from the #1 children’s hit Peppa Pig and the autobiography of tennis sensation Li Na in Chinese, through to the fiction of Nobel Laureate Mo Yan and the non-fiction bestseller Midnight in Peking. Jo serves as a director of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, and is a high profile member of the regional business community.
Facing an escalating demand for entry into the United States by German-speaking Jews in Shanghai in early 1941, the United States Consulate called the JDC for help. No one forewarned Laura Margolis, a translator for immigration interviews, about the living conditions of 16,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, all desperate for food and housing. She set up a new JDC Shanghai office, which stood as a rock for Jewish refugees under four directorships, four different regimes, and two wars.
Drawing from the JDC Archives, testimonies, and memoirs, this lecture by Sara Halpern, PhD candidate at Ohio State University, offers a tale of how the JDC Shanghai office — both a transnational American and an international Jewish relief organization — and its ingenious directors navigated the regimes of the treaty port controlled by multiple powers, the Japanese puppet government, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Mao Zedong. In contrast to Europe during the same period, the small, isolated JDC office in Shanghai had to rely on the goodwill of the various consulates and local authorities to assist with the Jewish refugees’ survival and emigration to other destinations. Hailed by the senior administration in New York, the “Shanghai job†was one of the most difficult in the world.
Closed captioning will be available during this program.
XXth Century magazine was a Nazi-funded English language publication in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation edited by Klaus Mehnert. Though funded from Berlin it was not overly politicised, though the message is clear. As it was designed for an audience in Shanghai largely and to build the Nazi alliance with the Japanese it was not anti-semitic, though is full of Nazi obsessions with racial hierarchies. A lot of foreigners around in Shanghai picked up work on the publication as well as English-speaking Chinese journalists including a young Eileen Chang (whose husband was obviously a collaborator) who wrote on fashion and submitted film reviews. In an article on Russian emigres in China the publication used these photographs….
Avenue Joffre (Huai Hai Lu) – Little Moscow
Russian Orthodox Priest on Peking’s Tartar Wall with the Orthodox Mission behind
Reading a Russian wall newspaper in ShanghaiThe Russian Brigade of warlord Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin)Russian man selling newspapers on the street, Shanghai
Uniformed principal and smallest boy at the St Tikhon of Zadonsk’s Orphanage
Archbishop Victor of Peking (Svjatin), served 1933—1956
TheRussian Orthodox MissionChurch on Xinle Lu and Xiangyang Lu, Shanghai – the archbishop’s house can be seen to the left which also still remains with retail shops at street level now
Of course due to October 1 1949 and Mao’s pronouncements in Tiananmen (not actually much of a formal square back then)
On October 1st 1949 the victorious People’s Liberation Army paraded through Peking. A new national anthem, The March of the Volunteers, was blasted from speaker trucks, a new Chinese flag, red with five yellow stars, was unfurled. Chairman Mao took to the rostrum:
‘Comrades! Today, I hereby declare the formal establishment of the People’s Republic of China! The people throughout China have been plunged into bitter suffering and tribulations…’
And, although everyone believes Mao said it that historic day:
‘The Chinese people have stood up…’
He actually didn’t. It’s an urban myth. But you get the point – everything had changed in China.
Gangsters….pirates…the 1930s was a wild time all over China. This weekend on RTHK3’s show Hong Kong Heritage i’m talking about Aleko Lilius, who came to HK from Finland in the late 1920s and wrote the rip roaring 1931 “travelogue” “I Sailed With Chinese Pirates” – a great read but just how much of it was true? Click here to listen…
In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan’s challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan’s interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets.
This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims’ religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.
Journalist Lina Ferreira interviewed me for Macao’s Portuguese language tv station about Strangers on the Praia, WW2 Macao and the Jewish refugees (I’m in English with subtitles; Lina in Portuguese)….
David Cheng Chang’;s The Hijacked War vividly portrays the experiences of Chinese prisoners in the dark, cold, and damp tents of Koje and Cheju Islands in Korea and how their decisions derailed the high politics being conducted in the corridors of power in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.he Korean War lasted for three years, one month, and two days, but armistice talks occupied more than two of those years, as more than 14,000 Chinese prisoners of war refused to return to Communist China and demanded to go to Nationalist Taiwan, effectively hijacking the negotiations and thwarting the designs of world leaders at a pivotal moment in Cold War history.
Chang demonstrates how the Truman-Acheson administration’s policies of voluntary repatriation and prisoner reindoctrination for psychological warfare purposes—the first overt and the second covert—had unintended consequences. The “success” of the reindoctrination program backfired when anti-Communist Chinese prisoners persuaded and coerced fellow POWs to renounce their homeland. Drawing on newly declassified archival materials from China, Taiwan, and the United States, and interviews with more than 80 surviving Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war, Chang depicts the struggle over prisoner repatriation that dominated the second half of the Korean War, from early 1952 to July 1953, in the prisoners’ own words.
