There has always been something surreal about Wham!’s 1985 trip to China. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley looked like alien visitors on the streets of Beijing, their bouffant hair and flamboyant outfits setting them apart from the Mao jackets and drab uniforms of the Chinese people they encountered. Andrew Ridgeley attends the screening of Wham! 10 Days in China in London. Photograph: Ian West/PA Now the full strangeness of the duo’s brief trip, which made them the first western pop act to play in the country, is explored in a…
Tag: Culture
The Guardian view on Chinese workers picking up the pen: poetry in motion | Editorial
The hundreds of millions who have built modern China from the ground up – sweeping its streets, labouring in its factories and ferrying its goods – are often overlooked. But they refuse to go unheard. Last week, a food delivery rider won China’s top literary award. Wang Jibing, 56, first caught attention when a poem about his experiences went viral in 2022. The following year, Hu Anyan’s memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, became a bestseller. In the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals sought to capture the harsh realities of working-class…
Dear You review – enjoyable Chinese romdram crosses generations as it tracks down a missing husband
With a story that ranges from the 1940s to the present and, although mostly set in Bangkok, revolving largely around Teochew-speaking Chinese from Guangdong, this generations-spanning drama feels like a good old-fashioned novel. A romantic beach read, perhaps, the kind in which coincidences and random accidents cause misunderstandings that last for decades until the truth is finally revealed. It’s sentimental in places, sure, but there’s also a fair bit of salty, bawdy humour to cut the sweetness, lashings of period colour, and impressively naturalistic performances from a mostly non-professional cast.…
Girlfriends review – love and growing pains in queer coming-of-age tale that goes from Hong Kong to Taiwan
It can stretch credibility a little when an actor plays the same character over a long time span in one film. Richard Linklater solved the problem in Boyhood by shooting scenes over succeeding years; AI and de-ageing effects are now an option. With this intimate queer coming-of-age drama, film-maker Tracy Choi instead casts a trio of actors to play one woman from high school to her mid-30s. The three don’t look particularly alike; their temperaments overlap but are by no means identical. The point is perhaps to show how intense…
The Guardian view on culture in China: artist Gao Zhen is paying again for the country’s painful history | Editorial
Sixty years ago, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution – a decade of fanaticism that consumed China. Perhaps 2 million people, from top leaders to impoverished farmers, were killed or driven to suicide for political “crimes” or their family background. Tens of millions more, including the father of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were hounded. The party, and most of those who lived through the movement, prefer to forget it. But the years of chaos, violence, zealotry and stagnation, which ended only with Mao’s death, have left deep scars. Among the many victims…
Jessie J’s triumphant return puts lucrative Chinese market in spotlight
One week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people. On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California…
China wants to suppress independent cinema. But young film-makers are undaunted by red lines
Class started at 9am. Assignments were doled out, ideas were pitched and scripts written, followed by a long day of shooting and editing. Twelve hours later, 20 aspiring and exhausted film-makers were sat in a crowded, makeshift studio, listening to their work being trashed. “The content is still too poor,” the course director, Nan Xin, remarked, after watching a two-minute film about boys on the loose who harass a stray dog. “I didn’t see any deep thought in it. What you did left me with no clue how to actually…
Being Towards Death review – Chinese hospital comedy drama uses plucky patients to ask big questions
‘You know the law of entropy? Life is a process of constant decay,” ssays a doctor in this Chinese hospital comedy drama – but not that you’d know it from the gabbling, frenetic first half-hour of director Chen Sicheng’s death-fixated film. Being Towards Death kicks off with caregiver Xiaobing (Jiang Long) about to throw himself off the roof because, after a scheme to flog his superiors care robots fails, he’s in hock to triad loan sharks. Thankfully the film later settles into an intermittently touching ensemble drama with a meta…
‘The story of Hong Kong is the sound of it’: the cross-cultural joy of the city’s Cantopop music
Emma-Lee Moss, a singer-songwriter who released four albums as Emmy the Great, was born in Hong Kong to an English father and Hongkonger mother. She lived there until she was 11, when her family moved to England, one of many who left Hong Kong before its transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997. Emma-Lee Moss. Photograph: Alex Lake Even as a child, Moss understood the significance of the handover, which returned Hong Kong to Chinese control after 156 years as a British colony. “Thanks to our British…
Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass review – furry foes out of their depth in candy-coated Chinese adventure
This expensively rendered, eye-searingly bright animated feature from China rests on a truly weird premise. Tom and Jerry, the cartoon foes of yore, are chasing each other around a museum in present-day New York City when they are supernaturally transported, thanks to a magic compass doodah, to a quasi-medieval China where humans mix freely with gods and cryptozoological animals including phoenixes, gargoyles and talking rats. Which, admittedly, isn’t a massive conceptual leap from Tom and Jerry’s usual imaginary world, where a cat and a mouse can be endlessly regenerated after…