THIS MONTH’S
CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE:
Amy Hawkins is a
freelance journalist
who writes about
Chinese culture,
technology and society.
You can follow her on
Twitter @XLHawkins.Trifonia Melibea Obono
is a novelist, activist and
academic from Equatorial
Guinea. Her recent work
focuses on lesbian lives in
her country.Helena Norberg-Hodge
is founder and director
of Local Futures, an NGO
dedicated to cultural
and biological diversity
and strengthening
local communities and
economies worldwide.EDITOR’S LETTER
FEAR OF A RED PLANET
It’s 1860 and the ‘century of humiliation’ is underway:
China is forced to open up to the opium trade and Hong
Kong has been handed over to London. British troops
slaughter thousands and burn the emperor’s Old Summer
Palace to the ground.
Today it’s Britain that goes to Beijing cap in hand. A
Chinese firm is putting almost £2 billion ($2.4 bn) into
redeveloping London’s Royal Albert Dock, from where
imperial ships once set off, and partly financing the UK’s
largest infrastructure project, a nuclear power plant in
Somerset. George Osborne, former chancellor, put it
bluntly: ‘China is what it is. And we have to either be
[there] or be nowhere.’
The average Briton is likely unaware of this historical
reversal. The average Chinese person is very much aware.
As a factory worker in Guangdong told the journalist Alec
Ash, who collected vox-pops for this issue: ‘I hope [China]
will become even stronger, so that in the future no-one
will bully us, like your country did a hundred years ago.’
But what is China really planning for the 21st century?
We have sought to answer this judiciously. There
are more than enough ‘red scare’ stories in the Western
press that treat this nation of over one billion people as a
monolith. But nor should the prospect of a nationalistic
superpower with a powerful betrayal narrative fill
internationalists with much hope.
Elsewhere, there is a moving cartoon history of the final
days of Sri Lanka’s civil war and, in the Long Read, gay
women from Equatorial Guinea vividly and unflinchingly
tell Trifonia Melibea Obono their experiences of forced
motherhood and ‘family values’.Ma Tianjie is managing
editor of chinadialogue
in Beijing. Before this,
he was Greenpeace’s
Programme Director for
mainland China.YOHANN KOSHY for the
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Cover: Shi Lei, a 45-year-old mine
worker, photographed at his plant
near Baotou, Inner Mongolia.
PATRICK WACK