Chinese in Britain this week: South China Morning Post and BBC Radio 4 Extra

Two lots of Chinese in Britain from me this week.

Today, my cover article for the South China Morning Post magazine — "Personal tales of a journey to a new land" — about the sweeping Ming Ai oral history project, backed by the Heritage Lottery Fund documenting, as many UK Chinese as possible 2012-2015. Drawn from stories being published online at the British Chinese Workforce Heritage website.

The second is Chinese In Britain, the repeat of the ten-part series I presented for BBC R4 in 2007, broadcast 14:15 daily from tomorrow on R4Extra. Produced by Mukti Jain Campion at Culture Wise.

Chinese Britons could swing the general election vote in some constituencies

Sonny Leong and Ed Miliband

As the British local and European elections heave into view, watched closely for how likely the 2015 general election is to yield victory for feudal baron David Cameron or milquetoast Ed Miliband, here's my South China Morning Post column from last year in which the Chair of Chinese for Labour Sonny Leong explains why non-white voters may hold the balance of power in some constituencies.

Does this mean the end of racial discrimination against BAME Brits ? Or could it also partly explain why the white male establishment is hell-bent on protecting its last gobby bastion of crude race dominance, Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear team at the BBC?

City scope: Ready to be counted
Anna Chen in London
13 October 2013

With the numbers of ethnic-minority voters exceeding the electoral majorities of sitting members of parliament in 168 constituencies, it is being suggested that minorities hold the key to the outcome of Britain's next general election, in 2015. Britain's ethnic-Chinese population, meanwhile, has reached almost half a million, and Chinese voters exceed in number the MP's majority in 36 seats. Political parties may well decide it is time to attend more to their interests.

In an era of no outright winners and coalition fudges, those 36 seats might mean the difference between power and limping along in opposition for five long years. Sitting MPs, fearful for their survival, now have to target communities within communities. There could be some interesting horse-trading with Chinese constituents.

Sonny Leong, chair of the Labour Party's Chinese for Labour, says, "The Chinese have reached a certain size where they can be power brokers. The ethnic minority is an important group that no political party can ignore."

Leong alludes to a certain complacency that has existed until now. Labour was long able to take ethnic votes for granted, but politics have become less tribal and voters no longer adhere blindly to family tradition when choosing which party to put their cross next to. Just because Grandpa voted for a party all of his life doesn't mean his independent-minded grandchildren will back the same one.

More than ever, issues and policies determine who gets votes and, for Chinese, educational opportunities and immigration issues tend to be priorities. Every Chinese here is likely to know of someone affected by immigration clampdowns. For Labour that could be good news, electorally; for the parties who form the current coalition government - the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats - recent accusatory, anti-immigration ad campaigns do not bode well for gaining Chinese votes, especially as the MPs of both are still overwhelmingly white.

Unlike in other Western democracies, in Britain Chinese have practically no parliamentary representation, other than one member of the House of Lords, the baby-faced Baron Wei of Shoreditch, of whom few had heard before Prime Minister David Cameron made him policy "tsar" for his Big Society initiative in 2010.

Just as little has been heard of him since he resigned his tsar-ship in May 2011 (because nobody had told him it didn't come with a pay packet).

The forced repatriation of Chinese seaman from post-war Liverpool: my column for the South China Morning Post

Photo: Pak Hung Chan

In 2007 I made a ten-part series for BBC Radio 4 called Chinese In Britain. Along with my wonderful producer Mukti Jain Campion at Culture Wise, we covered hitherto largely unknown issues and events such as the forced repatriation by the Attlee government of Chinese seamen who'd risked their lives keeping Britain's merchant navy running in World War II.

Last year, Moira Kenny at Soundagents helped organise a commemorative plaque on the site of the Blue Funnel offices in Liverpool. My South China Morning Post column on the subject:

"Keep my funnels tall and blue and look after my China men". So reads the quote from Victorian magnate Alfred Holt on the newly erected plaque outside the former Blue Funnel shipping office (now the New Capital Chinese restaurant) on Nelson Street, in Liverpool's Chinatown. 

It has taken more than 60 years but at last the thousands of Chinese mariners who worked for the company are being remembered. The plaque's blue denotes a historical marker and Holt's "China men" wrote their own chapter in Britain's seafaring tradition - only to be shamefully cast away in the aftermath of its "finest hour". 

For too long their experience constituted an episode the British authorities seemed to want to forget. Thousands of men sailed from Shanghai and Canton to Britain in the years following the Blue Funnel Line's establishment, in 1866. For decades it was Britain's main trading conduit with China - and by the second world war, some 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese sailors had made Liverpool their home. ...

READ MORE HERE

Also, read Don Flynn at Migrants' Rights

Chinese coolies on the Western Front in World War I.

South China Morning Post: RSC The Orphan of Zhao

Royal Shakespeare excludes British East Asians from their own culture: maids, dogs and ghosts all right, though.
by Anna Chen — (written 30 November 2012)

South China Morning Post magazine

When the hallowed Royal Shakespeare Company cast east Asian actors in a miserly three roles out of 17 in the Chinese classic, The Orphan of Zhao, (AKA,"the Chinese Hamlet") , they sparked an uprising of British east Asians that was to gather support from as far afield as the Americas and Australia. Their production was a British courtship of Chinese moolah that included research trips to China and ads in Mandarin, and yet we were virtually excluded from both cultures.

Given the roles of maid, ghost, and working the dog puppet, the three young actors of east Asian heritage were left with their noses pressed against the glass while all but one of the leading roles were hogged by white actors. So much for "colour-blind casting" whose original purpose was to open up the acting profession to us ethnic minorities.

The excuse for this slap in the chops was that the other two plays in the trilogy — reworkings of Brecht's Life of Galileo and Pushkin's Boris Godunov — had "no Chinese connection". You could be forgiven for thinking that a play set in a nation spanning the landmass of Europe and Asia might have included characters with features closer to our lovely high cheekbones rather than the neanderthalesque eye ridge so beloved of western beauty standards. Or questioned if Brecht was in fact so much of a realist. Or even wondered why a white gal could play a Chinese princess but a Chinese could not play a heretical scientist, as if white was somehow the universal default for humanity.

Perhaps it was the claim that RSC artistic director Gregory Doran had interviewed "lots and lots" of east Asian actors when our investigations uncovered eight auditioned out of a possible hundred plus candidates, that set us off. Or the charge of "sour grapes", because one vociferous complainant had been one of the auditionees.

Invisible and neglected, we'd been sagging under the weight of our own ineffectuality under the remorseless onslaught of the yellowface monster swallowing yet another generation of Chinese, east Asians, Pacific rimmers — call us what you will.

Suddenly, here we were, the barbarian horde, camped outside their gate and wanting to play nice but also quite looking forward to the odd head on a stick if they didn't. The RSC have now acknowledged under-representation of east Asians in theatre and have promised to address it, but they've yet to recognise their casting was a shambles. And until I see results, I ain't budging.

"Successful Orphan taps into Shakespearean vein in Chinese classic." Highly selective puff review in the SCMP thankfully corrected in the comments. So much for all the lip service.

Anna Chen's article on the RSC The Orphan of Zhao casting at the Guardian.

Anna Chen's review of The Orphan of Zhao in the Morning Star.

Review by academic Amanda Rogers.

British East Asian Actors release a statement.

British Chinese and the England riots: South China Morning Post

Here's my South China Morning Post column from 28th August, on the British Chinese take on the England riots and why Tiger Mom's efforts are irrelevant. (Click on pic above for larger version.)