RAS Shanghai Book Club – Monday 19 November – Lynn Pan on “Old Shanghai, Gangsters in Paradise”

RAS BOOK CLUB

Monday 19th November 2012 at 6:30pm

Venue: glo London (3/F, VIP Room or Lounge)

1 Wulumuqi, near Dongping Lu (across from American Consulate)

The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss:

OLD SHANGHAI

Gangsters In Paradise

by Lynn Pan

On Monday evening, November 19, the RAS Book Club will meet to discuss Old Shanghai, Gangsters in Paradise by Lynn Pan.  The book discussion will be attended by the author, and an autograph session will follow the meeting for those that are interested.

Copies of the book will be available at RAS events prior to this meeting. You may also obtain a copy of the book by contacting the RAS Book Club at the email address below.

Suggested contribution: RMB 70 (RAS Members) and RMB 100 (non-members)including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, or glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption prior to this RAS Book Club event. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

RSVP: bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.

China’s Urban Billion Extract – Tom Miller on Tianjin

I can’t recommend Tom Miller’s China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History enough. I have to confess it is the latest book in the series I edit for Zed Books in London, Asian Arguments, which means I get to commission books that answer questions that fascinate me. Tom has managed to produce an incredibly concise round up of the issues facing the urbanisation project in China and China’s urban population – established and new. Among the questions he answers that have intrigued me are :

• Why do so many Chinese cities look the same?
• Why is heritage and history so far down the urban planning agenda?
• Why have we yet seen problem estates/projects emerging in China’s cities?
• Who’s doing the planning, such as it is, and what are their priorities?
• Will the much reported “ghost cities” remain ghost cities or eventually fill up?
• What’s a typical Chinese city going to look like in the future?

Anyway, as a little teaser for Chinarhyming readers I’ve excerpted a small piece Tom has written on Tianjin – a city oft mentioned on this blog as a former treaty port – that may be of interest as it ties the old city to the new….though you really need to buy the entire book at its very reasonable price!

Tianjin: scrubbing up

Exiting Tianjin station used to be a dispiriting experience – like arriving in grimy Middlesbrough in northeast England or rundown Bridgeport in Connecticut, only worse. But thanks to a major city re- development scheme, all that has changed. The honking three-wheel taxis and hotel touts that used to assault visitors have disappeared. Instead, a giant piazza leads down to a riverside boardwalk lined with landscaped gardens and colonial architecture. Whisper it, but China’s fourth city is almost nice.

Tianjin’s history as a treaty port, in which successive European powers and Japan built self-contained concessions, always gave it tourist potential. But until the late 2000s, the city’s fine colonial buildings lay neglected, as it did its best to forget its humiliating past. Tianjin remained famous across China for its local steamed buns, sweet twisted dough sticks and stand-up comedians. But few people wanted to visit this large, grimy, polluted city.

The transformation over the past few years has been remarkable. The focus is the Hai river, which runs through the centre of the city. The city government has renovated the fine array of Western build- ings on the riverbank and replaced ugly brutalist architecture with replicas of old colonial mansions. Now tourists in open riverboats glide past the handsome new-old buildings, whose burgundy-tiled roofs glisten in the sun. Passengers disgorging from the railway station can walk across the handsome iron-rivet Liberation Bridge, constructed in 1927, to the gleaming new World Financial Centre. At 337 metres, it is taller than any building in Europe.

Further down the river, crowds lunch al fresco in the restored former Italian Concession, sitting at tables in cobbled squares. Meanwhile, fans of British colonial architecture can step back 150 years in the newly restored Astor Hotel, where former US president Herbert Hoover was a regular visitor during his days as a mining engineer in China. Most tourists from the capital return on the high- speed shuttle service, which leaves every ten minutes and completes the 115-kilometre journey in half an hour.

Just a decade ago, Tianjin was a quintessential modern Chinese city: big, ugly, charmless. Most of the city is still unattractive, but the Tianjin government deserves enormous credit for stopping the rot, restoring the long-neglected colonial quarters, and turning the city into a viable tourist destination. Some things, however, have yet to change. Outside the futuristic new St Regis hotel on the riverside walkway, a short stroll from the World Financial Centre, two old men unzip their flies and urinate casually on the pavement. Tianjin has scrubbed up, but it retains the rough edge of old.

Midnight in Peking (Audiobook Extract) read by Crawford Logan

Penguin UK have uploaded a teaser of the full audiobook of Midnight in Peking – read by the excellent Crawford Logan (who did the abridged BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week). A little weekend listening for you….

Amazon

Audible.com

Audible.co.uk

Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa

Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa is a lovely book of photographs from the National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita just published. It’s the result of a five year project by the intrepid snapper to capture Tibet on film.  I can point you to an interview with him about the book from the Asia Society in Hong Kong and Yamashita’s own blog. Signed copies are available via his site or from Booktopia.

This Sunday – Suzhou Royal Asiatic Society – Lao She in London – Anne Witchard – 18/11/12 – 2pm

The Old British Consulate Turned Watch Shop

I posted the other week on the conversion of the old British Consulate at 33 Bund into a watch shop selling Patek Philippe timepieces to the wealthy and chronologically challenged. Looks OK on the outside actually but suffers, of course, from the traditional love of walls, fences and guards….This snapped when passing in a bit of a rush and no time to take anything else….sorry….

Winter Reading Suggestions – a whole bunch of choices from the Indie and one special thriller from Manila

Thinking about your winter reading now the nights are drawing in and its cold? the Independent did a long and good list of the 50 best best winter reads this year (in which I got a plug admittedly) but might also offer some choices.

However, for regulars at this blog I’d like to recommend one book that really wowed me recently – it’s a deep noir thriller and mystery from the Philippines set in the crumbling run down Chinatown at the heart of Manila. Charlson Ong’s Blue Angel, White Shadow is a great read and the winner of the 2011 Philippine National Book Award – and only GBP2.60 on Kindle!!

No one is safe, no one is wholly innocent in Charlson Ong’s “Blue Angel, White Shadow.” What seems to be a suicide attempt by a lounge singer in an obscure part of Manila’s Chinatown leads to a complex web of murder, corruption, romance, ambition, and vengeance. Everyone is somehow linked to the crime, and disgraced inspector Cyrus Ledesma cannot trust the police nor the mayor. When Cyrus Ledesma’s past catches up with him, his only ally seems to be an aggressive former crime journalist, who has secrets of her own.

“She reminded him of a small bird with its neck broken by a giant hand, laid to rest on a bed of dried leaves. Her head tucked against the left shoulder blade seemed anxious to leave the rest of her. There was blood on the sheets, blood everywhere. So much blood, he thought, she was soaked in her own blood, how could anyone have so much blood, until he realized that she was wearing a shiny red cheongsam and red heels. Then he saw that the blood was really just from the right wrist that had a sharp object protruding from it. She seemed to have been nailed to the bed. He looked closer and saw that it was a hairpin. An elaborate one with a phoenix head, nearly ten inches long, part hard wood and part stainless steel. It was one of those contraptions Chinese ladies used to wear in their hair. His own grandmother had one. She had shown it to him once when he was a boy to scare him off, then told him a story about how her own mother had stuck the brooch into the small of her husband’s back, the tip of his spine, to stop “his stream” and “ebb the swell of his tide,” once when they were “riding the tiger” and he could not “dismount.” “That’s why every mother must give one to a maiden daughter who marries,” his grandmother had said, poking the hairpin menacingly at his eyes.”

Tonight 12/11/12 – Channel 4 8pm UK time – Chinese Murder Mystery – A Dispatches Special – The Murder of Heywood

Channel 4’s Dispatches programme is covering the Neil Heywood murder tonight in a special….

November 2011, Old Harrovian Neil Heywood was murdered in a hotel room China, allegedly poisoned with cyanide by the wife of one of China’s rising political stars, Bo Xilai. The killing of the 41-year-old from southwest London shook the foundations of the most populous country in the world.

Bo Xilai, who had been widely expected to become China’s Vice President, and whose father was a founder of the Communist Party, was ousted and faces a criminal inquiry. His wife, Gu Kailai, a multi-millionaire lawyer, was convicted of the murder, in a trial that lasted just one day. Guagua, their British-educated son, who had counted Heywood as a personal friend and counsellor, is today in hiding – allegedly pursued by secret agents of the Communist state.

As everyone scrambled for an explanation, a series of increasingly lurid stories emerged. They portrayed Heywood as a spy, swaggering around Beijing, driving a Jaguar with personal 007 number plates, a linen-suited philanderer who had seduced the politician’s wife and then tried to blackmail her. She was portrayed as ‘Dragon Lady Gu’, who lured Heywood to a tryst in a remote city where his whiskey was laced with cyanide.

Her husband, Party bigwig Bo, was revealed as a political piranha, who had consumed a legion of enemies, rising to within a whisper of becoming Vice President of China. Their son, rich kid Guagua, was described as having been chauffeured in red Ferraris between a succession of ever-wilder parties on both sides of the Atlantic while his dad campaigned on a back-to-basics austerity platform. Millions of pounds had allegedly exchanged hands in shady business deals between Bo, his wife and the victim. For the first time the inner machinations of the world’s most secretive state had been revealed for public perusal – and what could be seen was ugly.

One year on from Neil Heywood’s lonely death in Chongqing, almost every person connected to the case in China has gone to ground, raising concerns that many have been rounded up and disappeared. Those who are still free are silent, too cautious or scared to risk talking. Websites mentioning the case are blocked, any debate of its consequences in China is stifled. Working in this climate of heightened paranoia, Dispatches has unearthed a gripping tale at the heart of the political machine: an Englishman abroad whose death was used to stack the outcome of an internal power struggle within the heart of the Chinese Communist Party.

Dispatches has made contact with a close personal friend of both Neil Heywood and his alleged killer, a first-hand witness to many of the events in the saga, whose testimony challenges everything we thought we knew about the story. Far from being in the Bo family’s inner circle, or the broker of six figure deals, this insider claims that Neil Heywood was a peripheral figure, who befriended the family’s son Guagua: an Old Harrovian giving succour to a new Harrovian, carrying out mundane and unprofitable tasks for the Chinese pupil at sea in an English public school. He reveals the details of Heywood’s first meeting with the family, and expose how, when Heywood’s luck ran out, his own businesses in Beijing failing, he twice approached the family, asking for millions of pounds, demands that, according to the insider, were reported to the police by the woman who would later be accused of murdering him. A dutiful wife, who forsook her own lucrative legal career to support the political ambitions of her husband, Gu Kailai had narrowly survived an attempt on her own life, details of which we can reveal for the first time.

The insider’s testimony maintains that Gu was then framed for killing Heywood. Her husband’s numerous political opponents foresaw how the death of an inconsequential English associate could disbar Bo from office, dismantling his deep-rooted support among China’s poor for whom he remains a champion, and, creating a global scandal.

As the Chinese Communist party holds its 18th National Congress – a once in a decade meeting to decide who will be the country’s next leader – this film (from the multi-BAFTA winning True Vision stable, directed by Edward Watts and produced by award-winning investigative journalist Cathy Scott-Clark) reveals the truth about a murder that has changed the course of China’s history.

Commissioning Editor: Daniel Pearl

Exec Producer: Brian Woods

Producer: Cathy Scott-Clark

Director: Edward Watts

Prod Co: True Vision