General election 2015: "It pumps me up!!!" not a lot

"IT PUMPS ME UP!!!"

I KNEW David Cameron would try the Obama "anger translator" trick and screw it up. His speech today launching his small business manifesto (sic!) in London was made even more hideously embarrassing by not actually hiring in the translator. Perhaps it's an English flaw, confusing mere rich-kid petulance with the fiery passion he'd dearly love to exude but can't. And, one mo' thang, Dave, it's "you've got another THINK coming," not "another thing" (which is what I heard mumbled on Radio 4's World At One programme just now). Perhaps Dave should be given the opportunity to spend more time with his book after 7th May.

Team Cameron are making much of Dave's claim that he has plenty of other things to do with his life and that being Prime Minister doesn't mean as much to him as it does to the other party leaders in the general election. Smell the BS, taste those sour grapes and pucker up. Surely the role of PM is supposed to be the greatest honour this nation can offer short of tea and crumpets with Her Maj.

Ed is much more likeable, especially as the right's relentless Bullingdon bully-boy tactics have won him the sympathy vote with the nation's young women and given rise to the phenomenon of the Milifan. This is almost as bizarre to me as when mighty efforts were made to transform Margaret Thatcher into a sex symbol in the 1980s and overnight she was turned into Marilyn Monroe ... at least in the eyes of old colonels, Little Ingerland and Alan Clark (who perved about her ankles). I felt like the little boy who saw that not only did the King have no clothes, he was wrinkly and ponked of formaldehyde as well.

Same thing happened with Tony Blair. Was I the only person on the planet who saw a bland posh-git Nigelesque twit whose only stand-out character trait was acquired when he achieved war criminal status over Iraq?

It didn't bother me that Ed was caught inelegantly chowing down on a messy bacon sandwich, not a fraction as much as that Labour "immigration controls" mug (and I don't mean Ed Balls). Re housing — which is surely part of the Labour USP — he's tinkering at the edges, bringing in a mansion tax that catches accidentally asset-rich but income-poor Londoners; bashing the Buy To Let sector, which is a nice juicy target for skint governments, instead of tackling the root cause — NOT ENOUGH HOUSES BEING BUILT FOR THE PAST DECADES. Try that one, Ed, along with increasing decent social housing stock ... and watch those pesky BTL landlords wither away as fast as their savings in the age of deflation.

While Austerity Bastard and Austerity Lite battle it out, we almost missed the super-rich doubling their wealth in the last ten years, thanks to the main parties politely pretending it didn't happen like a fart at that tea with the Queen I was talking about.

It took the Labour Party more than a year to decide that the bedroom tax was a travesty and even longer to challenge the Tory narrative about the deficit, which has now set like concrete and for which you'd now need the equivalent of a political pneumatic drill to break through the lies accreted during the past five years. This election should have been a walk-over after the cruelty, theft and vandalism of the Tory/LibDem Coalition. Ed should heed Aditya Chakrabortty's warning highlighting parallels between Labour and Greece's Pasok party.

Who voted for the Royal Mail firesale? For tuition fees trebled, for tax breaks for the rich, the poor and disabled hounded to suicide? The explosion in food bank use? The whole IDS DWP nightmare?

On the other hand, look at the overlaps of ghastliness with the last Labour government. Who can forget the Private Finance Initiative, loving up to non-doms like Lakshmi Mittal (yes, Ed is doing something now), the near-complete collapse of house-building? Who was it who brought in tuition fees in the first place? How many in the Labour camp have financial interests in privatising the NHS (hi, Alan Milburn and Cherie Blair!). How many Labour peers voted for the NHS Privatisation Bill ... and then it turns out they have financial interests? Former Home Secretary Dr John Reed a director of G4S, Jack Straw selling himself ...

Ach! They're all awful. Having personally witnessed how the far left is just another ruling class in waiting, I'll probably vote Labour just to get rid of the Tories. It pumps me up not a lot!

Britain's "liberal" media and UK Chinese: from London Chinatown to the general election

The Guardian has always been sloppy about China matters, but its publishing stable now appears to have given up any pretence of writing about UK Chinese issues informatively.

"It was a genuine community built by the emigrants from Hong Kong who, having been bombed out of Limehouse in the East End in the 1940s, made this patch of London, with its cheap commercial rents, their own," writes Daniel Boffey in the Observer about Soho's Chinatown

Er ... I don't think so. I know we all look the same to the "liberal" media but it was Cantonese and Shanghainese sailors and their families living mainly in the two streets of Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, not Hong Kong migrants, who were bombed out during the war: a large number were rehoused in Poplar.

My father was an early Chinese occupant in Soho's Chinatown from 1947 when it was mostly Indian and Jewish. It wasn't until the 1950s — but really the '60s — that waves of Hong Kong migrants got the takeaway industry going after the domestic washing machine rendered laundries largely obsolete. They bought up the fish 'n' chip shops that were going under and started serving their own food.

You wouldn't find many HKers in that early Soho mix. A few Kuomintang diplomats finding new ways to make a living and former Cantonese and Shanghai sailors, but hardly anyone from HK.

In the ten-part series Chinese in Britain, which I presented on BBC Radio 4 in 2007 (repeated last year), we looked at the history of UK Chinatowns including Limehouse and Soho, but the pattern of not allowing ethnic minorities to tell their own story persists in some organs which continue to get it wrong.

At best, invisibility is thrust on us; at worst, the Chinese are still defined as villains. From the yellow-peril Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer to the BBC's Sherlock reboot, where even innocent Chinese passers by in Soho Chinatown were portrayed as sinister and "other", the Chinese are dehumanised and excluded. Yet none of the liberal media paused for breath between BAFTAs and plaudits to question why, well into the 21st century, the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation was breathing life back into what should be moribund racist tropes.

In Channel 4's recent  debate concerning the role of the ethnic vote in the imminent general election, chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, only one single solitary east Asian face could be seen in the audience — placed on the corner in the seat nearest to Krishnan where he stood more chance of being picked up by the cameras, presumably after someone panicked on the night at the oversight. None on the platform. Yet Chinese are Britain's third largest Black and Asian minority ethnic minorities (BAME) after South Asians and African Caribbeans.

In a piece for the South China Morning Post magazine last October, I outlined how the ethnic vote could swing results in the marginal seats, with the Chinese key to the outcome in 36 seats including Barnet in May. Still, here are the Chinese being excluded yet again.

So when the Chinese are next accused of being the authors of their own exclusion ... think on.

My article on the Ming Ai Chinese in Britain project for the South China Morning Post magazine.

Pic from Red Scarf

Don't let Disney whitewash Mulan

This is modern identity theft on a grand scale. All those east Asian girls in the West already rendered invisible being denied their greatest positive role model in the popular culture. Please sign the petition.

The Great Wall at Mutianyu: Anna and Paul in China

Another movie from the China trip last month. The Great Wall of China at Mutianyu, an hour and a bit drive north of Beijing, which is not only less touristy but has the advantage of a chair lift so you can be right in the landscape, and a toboggan run back down!!!

In between, some awesome history, breathtaking scenery, blue skies and lovely mortar work.

Sadly, I obeyed authority and put away my camera for the toboggan ride. Now regretting it. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Thanks to all at the Bookworm Literary Festival for getting us there. With Paul Anderson, Frané Lessac, Mark Greenwood and Pornima.

More videos of Anna and Paul in China:
The Kung Fu Pandas of Chengdu.
Anna and Paul in The Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City video: Anna and Paul in China

In China for the Bookworm Literary Festival and only a day left in this astonishing city of 30 million, so what to do? You can't visit Beijing and not see the old quarter, the hutongs, Tiananmen Square and, of course, the vast Ming era (15th century) Forbidden City.

It makes a welcome relief from the endless glass and steel towers of modern China. Imagine Canary Wharf. Now multiply it by dozens, going on for miles. That's what the big Chinese cities look like, even the secondary ones. Lil ol' Chengdu, nestled in the Himalayan foothills in the middle of the country, has a population of 14 million. Five more than London. Think on that.

The low-lying Forbidden City and its environs are exactly what these tourists craved. The air may be polluted but the streets are the cleanest you'll find anywhere, due in part to the government's Keynsian employment of human beings to sweep the streets with old fashioned twiggy brooms and cute little motorised carts.

We were supremely lucky, according to our friends, to enjoy a rare run of blue skies and warm spring weather for our sightseeing. The first time I'd seen Beijing was on a trip with my parents in the 1970s, where everything was Mao suits and bicycles and not a grubby thought to be had. Now everyone has pollution-gauge apps on their smartphones and shops at every familiar western outlet from Gucci to H&M.

We were as fascinated by watching ordinary Chinese at play as they were by my lovely companion, Paul Anderson. The young people like their fashion and electronic kit. The elderly marvelled at the inner sanctum of imperial life that had always been denied them, despite being built on the backs of their ancestors. They were all eager to learn about their own history and grab a little piece of it on their smartphones, as was I — watch the scrum around the throne pavilion in the video. We are indeed all more alike than different.

The fact that the Chinese have any access at all to this beautifully preserved city — now known as the Palace Museum — is fortunate, considering the looting and destruction perpetrated by both the Kuomintang and the Japanese during the first half of the previous century. When I saw it in the 1970s, the painted woodwork was faded, with many of the tiles broken and fallen, and there were few tourists. It's undergone a transformation as stunning as the Chinese economy.

We arrived earlyish at around 10.30am and the place was already thronging. The long queues through the airport-style security outside Tiananmen Gate were packed into narrow avenues protecting us from terrorist attacks such as the one a couple of years ago that killed several tourists when a jeep ploughed into the crowd and exploded in a fireball – but they got us through quickly enough.  

By 4.30pm, when the kicking-out music was played over the loudspeakers, we'd barely seen a quarter of it. You can sense the ghosts of residents past and trace the route taken by emperors borne in palanquins by eunuchs over magnificent stone carvings. Imagine the imperial writhings on the silk beds in the private quarters; hear the pillow talk, the intrigue. What must the palace politics have been like? What must it have been like to be a minion? A concubine? Trapped, never seeing the world outside these dusty red walls for an entire lifetime?

It must have felt eternal, as if it would continue for another five hundred years at least. But nothing lasts forever, especially if rulers grow complacent and forget the interests of the wider population. That's a lesson we're learning in the West, a lesson that knows no national boundaries.

The first movie I stuck on the telly when I returned home? The Last Emperor, natch, shot in the Forbidden City itself by Bertolucci nearly thirty years ago in 1987. Reader, I woz 'ere!

More videos of Anna and Paul in China:
The Kung Fu Pandas of Chengdu
The Great Wall at Mutianyu

The Kung Fu Pandas of Chengdu: video

I'm back!

I saw pandas running. I saw pandas rollin' and a tumblin'. I saw pandas sprawling with a filthy "come 'n' get me, boys 'n' gurls" look in their over-kohled eyes. I saw marzipan pandas and made short work of them. I saw flaming pandas off the shoulder of Orion. And, yes, I saw pandas doing kung fu with some mighty nifty left and right jabs.

What's more, dear reader, I videoed them at it.

I have tales of my return to the motherland of my fathers to enthral you here in the fatherland of my mother, but Paul Anderson has written a thorough overview of our China trip so I don't have to. Yet.

First, the holiday snaps. As indeed it did. Let us begin at the beginning, with the furry chaps and chapesses (video above — you tell me which is which!). Black and white, unite and fight!

I still have jet lag and the bronchitis I went out with, but I'm a happy bunny, inspired and ready to roll. A big thank you and a massive panda bear hug to all at the Bookworm Literary Festival: Peter Goff, Mojdeh Sheik, Tom Price, Anthony Tao, Julia, Alana, Pornima and all in Beijing; Catherine Platt and the team in Chengdu — not forgetting William Hall of the Crowne Plaza hotel who laid on the marzipan pandas, Earl Grey tea and unforgettable breakfasts; Daniel Clutton and Tammy in Suzhou; Alan McCluskey in Ningbo; Wena Poon and Xiaolu Guo, two utterly different writers but amazing women who I now hope to count as my buddies; and Bidisha, part fairy godmother, part martial arts master/mistress without whom ...

When pandas get biblical, we're living in interesting times. The pandas know.

This one's from the Panda Channel:

More videos of Anna and Paul in China:
The Great Wall at Mutianyu
The Forbidden City