Aurora (2020 - 2023)

Updated 12th Feb 2024

I'm delighted to announce the launch of my new film series, Aurora. It follows my first short film, An Impossible Poison (click the link for full details, to watch for free and to view film festival laurels) which premiered in Berlin in November 2017 and has been selected for numerous international film festivals, screened widely and very generously reviewed. 

Aurora is an esoteric guide, self help guru and quantum soul healing leader. Follow her for healing, validation, acceptance and inner peace. The films were made during lockdown in 2020 and 2021: written during the spring months, then remote directed, rehearsed via Skype, with all costume and make-up consultation done via screens. I painted all the backdrops and sent them to LA, where my star Alessia Patregnani is based, and sent sketches and film, photography and framing references via email. We recorded three-second test clips to make sure the framing was right, then went through at least ten takes of each script, which I assessed at home and edited in the middle of the night here in London. In short it was all the fun of film making, without the fun. Full credits and images from forthcoming clips in the Aurora series are at the bottom. 

You can watch all the Aurora films for free (or check them out here and below
on YouTube, although the colour balance there is mucky). Go to full screen and turn up the sound.

Since lockdown began in March 2020 I found myself working all day at my desk in my study (or trying to work), doing the usual hackwork while listening to various self-styled spiritual leaders, wellness therapists, healers, meditation guides and self-appointed esoteric shamans who use YouTube to speak to vast audiences all over the world. I found myself fascinated by their speech patterns, presentation and phrasing, which they combine to hypnotic effect. The Aurora series, which I'll be adding to gradually until the end of the year, is my response to these persuasive and captivating self-help videos. They're in line with my interest in performativity, fallibility and superstition, the difficulty of distinguishing the fake from the real and the persuasiveness of style and mannerism over content and morality. I've always been interested in con artists who seem genuine people who aren't believed and unwitting fakes who truly believe that they're helping people (for example, pyschics who believe that they're psychic but aren't).

The Bagri Foundation have written a very generous feature and interview as part of their 30 Artists, 30 Years series, which explains my process and provides a good career retrospective, the Writing on the Wall festival have recorded an In Conversation with me which gives a little more and I recently did a quick career retrospective podcast which can be heard via Anchor, Spotify and Apple. And there's a nice interview with Renaissance One here.

CREDITS:

Starring Alessia Patregnani 

Directed, written and art directed by Bidisha 

Produced by Bidisha and Alessia Patregnani 

Hair and makeup for 1st four films by Tracey Anderson 

Costumes for the 1st three films by Natasha Simchowitz and Bidisha

Costumes for films 4, 5 and 6 by Bidisha 

Hair and makeup for films 5 and 6 by Alessia Patregnani

Music from Freesound under Creative Commons license 

On Europe, insularity and the UK's identity crisis

This is an extended version of an article written for the British Council....before Brexit.

I’m currently away from home. Every morning I log on and read the news headlines, opinion pieces and arts pages in the British papers. From a distance, the UK looks like a tiny little island riven with inequality and lack of opportunity and tormented by suffering, poverty and precarity. On the international or pan-European rankings for social mobility, gender equality, quality of life, political representativeness of the population and a host of other social and political indices it comes up shockingly low.

It is human nature that people who are suffering look for someone to blame, a scapegoat for their pain – preferably a stranger who cannot answer back. The current government, the tabloid media and noisy attention-grabbing outliers like UKIP have taken that urge and focused it, as ever, on whoever is ‘other’, foreign, alien, different. They have managed to conflate unrelated factors to produce a false image of threat and imminent crisis, a phantom danger looming from outside in, making the leap from the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks to encouraging Islamophobic ignorance to threatening that Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Daesh are just this moment planning on coming to England to radicalise everyone, along with the millions of refugees who are actually fleeing them and wanting to leech off the state with their nasty greedy foreign ways, along with unscrupulous economic immigrants from beyond and within the EU all coming to steal English jobs and dare to be everything from doctors to waitresses to students to parents, which is why there aren’t enough schools, jobs, homes and hospital beds, because the foreigners have taken them and nasty faraway ‘Brussels’ (the stand-in word for the EU) has said it’s okay, led by mean Ms Merkel who secretly runs the whole show for some evil Germanic reason of her own.

It’s a lie. A toxic, widespread, all-encompassing, all-connecting conspiracy theory that has obscured the facts and poisoned the debate as we approach the referendum like a runaway train heading towards a brick wall. I don’t like getting party political – after all, yuppie New Labour were just as craven in their courting of the rich and famous as any Tory and Jeremy Corbyn is such a male-cronyist bro that he deserves honorary Bullingdon membership. But the present government has a lot to answer for and the present opposition have failed in countering the rhetoric with the facts. Under Cameron’s government, resources have been moved away from education, healthcare, housing and essential social services, kicking those who were already down, robbing at least two generations of a decent future, punishing the poor and disadvantaged, putting the abused at risk and hobbling anyone who isn’t privileged and financially well-supported. It is the same government that has granted asylum to shockingly low numbers of refugees during the biggest humanitarian crisis since the second world war, while allowing the false idea that millions are on their way to the UK to destroy society to flourish. 

It’s as though Britain has faced and failed a challenge to its identity which has played out over recent decades. Following its century-odd of benefitting from its colonial exploitation of 84% of the world, including carving up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, it was painfully made to see the arrogance, greed and racism of its ways. Then came the slowly dawning realisation that England was no longer a great Imperial power and that people everywhere speak English now not because of England but because of America; and that England itself is not important in the political scheme of things despite its cultural prestige which includes Harry Potter, Downton Abbey, Dr Who, Sherlock and the BBC and despite its desperation to pal up with George W Bush and enjoy a random killing spree in Iraq which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and dozens of British soldiers. And despite its past riches including Shakespeare, Milton, King Arthur, the Bloomsbury set, medieval architecture, the plague, The Tudors, Oxbridge, the Elizabethans, The Victorians and all the rest of it. And despite Cool Britannia which Tony Blair so loved. Because the world is a large and varied place, there are more than 7 billion people on Earth, times move on, colonialism wasn’t a great adventure for the colonised and contemporary India, China, Latin America and the protests and demonstrations, civil wars, fragile states, terrorist threats, breakdown in civic life, forced conscription, collapse of law and order and unliveable consequences of climate change in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Mali, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere just seem more interesting and important at the moment. 

Britain has had to accept that despite its past wealth and power, and despite ongoing cultural prestige, it is no longer a major political player it used to be. Following that, it had a choice. 

One: humbly accept its change in status, recognise that it’s part of a world community and become an involved member of that community, willing to learn and make friendships across nationalities and languages and surface differences, taking a seat at the table in EU summits, contributing wholly and equally as one of a number of participants, being guided by a vision of what is best and fairest for those most in need, gaining in some instances, conceding in others, taking a humanitarian, open, internationalist and collective approach rather than a competitive one. 

Two: throw all the toys out of the pram, keep a vision of white male aristocratic Englishness front and centre (because it was chaps like that who once led Britain to colonial greatness, oh happy days), close the doors against foreigners, close the shutters against dissenting voices, pull up the ladder, pull up the drawbridge, go deep inside and hunker in the aristo-bunker against outsiders, heathens, invaders, meddling foreign dignitaries, homegrown rebels and dirty diseased grasping peasants. Because if you can’t rule the sandpit you don’t want to play.

It made the wrong choice. Now it looks as though Britain will no longer be a European nation but instead an unimportant, unhappy, unhelpful island floating on the north-west edge of the continent. Britain gains nothing from shrinking away from the rest of the world except the likelihood of shrivelling away, eating itself up with inequality and deprivation, starved of the enriching influence of the wider world and the interest and variety it brings, hypnotised by visions from the past. It will develop a worldwide reputation, not of strength and sovereignty, but of xenophobia, jingoism and hostility to those who are in need of sanctuary. It is already gaining that reputation. 

One could argue that Cameron was compelled to hold a referendum into EU membership following pressure from a significant minority of MPs in his own party. Or one could say that the referendum came out of nowhere, cooked up to derail political, activist and media critics of the government’s attitude to refugees and immigrants alike by stirring up the far louder invective of all those Britons who are full of rage, uncertainty and frustration and are looking to pin it on some mythical threat, and the whole thing has now got out of hand. One could add that even if Cameron was challenged on Europe by some of his own ministers, as Prime Minister his role is to handle such challenges within the party and show firm leadership without panicking and throwing the country’s future over to the public on a whim. 

As I said to my mother, “It’s as though David Cameron randomly lobbed a parcel of shit into the middle of his own dinner party and now he’s got to clean it up, only to find that it’s gone everywhere. Now he’s having to get every single one of his high-profile friends from bankers to artists to business leaders to go on the record saying what a disaster it’s going to be if we leave.”

It’s true that the EU is bureaucratic, that some decisions satisfy the biggest power players and (no doubt) various vested interests. That is true of every single major institution and organisation in the world. That’s also what it means to be part of a world community: you don't always get your way, but you do always get to have your say. The oft-repeated complaint that 'Brussels makes all the decisions' is misleading: yes, EU meetings are held in Brussels... and the UK is supposed to play its part, show up and contribute at those meetings as a member of the EU. That's what being in a community means. You have a place at the table and you can say what you need to, in front of everyone else, and they listen to you respectfully and you listen to them respectfully, because you are pulling together with a common purpose which is bigger than your individual desires. Political decisions can be made with a long view, a wide lens and a collective vision; individual states’ leaders are not compelled to make the sudden wild promises or baseless claims that emerge when they’re tied into their own short election cycles and have to campaign amongst an indecisive public for votes. Collective EU membership overrides the pettiness of national process politics. 

This referendum should never have come about and the question of leaving the EU should never have arisen. It signals something dangerous and depressing: England's increasing conservatism, inequality, isolationism, cynicism about multiculturalism and unwillingness to be part of any world community. It's as if, having rightfully been turfed off its colonial victory track and then its warpath, England is now sulking. 

But you can’t stand by and let a great vision die. You have to fight for it, or else those who are the most angry, who can shout the loudest and perform the pernicious psychological trick of tapping into the worst people’s worst fears will win. 

To throw away EU membership is to squander an opportunity to be a part of the wider world of varied languages, co-operation, cultural exchange, mutual opportunity, recognition of common humanity, symbolic sorority and fraternity. Leaving the EU sends a strong message that "we" are better than everyone else and are exempt from the challenges and inspirations of diversity, collaboration and change. Instead of doing to right thing by stepping out, standing alongside our neighbours, acknowledging our responsibilities in a troubled world and making things better by offering sanctuary and humanitarian assistance, we are slamming the door shut, blocking our ears and shouting insults to drown out the cries for help. Leaving the EU will not turn Britain into a strong fortress but into a decrepit prison whose inhabitants will first turn on each other and then waste away.

China Flash: Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in modern China

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing last month.

A Lean In Beijing meeting, image (c) Lean In Beijing

Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s book about how she battled corporate sexism to rise to the top at Facebook, has struck a chord with young, ambitious women in China. “I saw Sandberg’s TED talk in March 2013,” says one of Lean In Beijing’s founding members, Allison Ye. “I was shocked because I had never seen a successful Chinese female leader talk with such openness and honesty about how exactly she got there. It was refreshing. Her message was that we can be responsible for our situation and we can control our lives. It was very positive.”

The talk triggered the formation of Lean in Beijing, which sent a survey [PDF]to more than 500 women, asking about their aspirations, their careers and the challenges they experienced in their lives. It revealed that 90% of respondents had never seen a professional women’s network – and wanted one. “We had 60 to 70 women at our first meeting, and every one had a story to tell. Things they wouldn’t tell to their own friends and families, they would tell to strangers,” says Ye. The Lean In message of female solidarity, boosted by speaker events, high social media connectivity, consciousness raising 'circles' and the open discussion of everyday sexism has proven so popular and necessary that Lean In has spread to several Chinese cities far beyond Beijing. Even within the capital, Lean In members have founded their own offshoots like the Lean In Thinktank led by Yolanda Wang and Maggie Zhang and the six Lean In College mentoring schemes founded by Alicia Lui. The mentoring scheme involves bringing in younger professional women to be mentors to college age students, Lui tells me. “Mentoring is a really great way to work through relationship, career and family pressures. At our last event in May, 150 students showed up and we had 15 mentors, all from different industries and with different interests. After the event, lots more professional women wanted to be a part of the network as mentors.”

We are meeting up at a time when gender inequality is back with a vengeance in China, with ancient stereotypes about femininity, double standards about gender roles, endemic and normalised violence against women, media misrepresentation and longstanding pressures on women meeting new corporate injustices around equal pay, property ownership, female leadership and opportunity, as chronicled in Leta Hong Fincher’s brilliant and vital book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.

Lean In Beijing’s discussions aren’t just about strategising within a corporate context, combating institutional sexism, why prominent Chinese women business leaders stand at less than 5% or why women are paid less than men for the same job. “It’s [also about] the pressure of getting married young, the pressure that’s coming from all directions,” says Ye, “not just the family but the media, the government, society. Every young woman in a family is pressured to get married really young. The message behind it is that a woman cannot be happy by herself, she needs to be someone’s wife, someone’s mother in order to be fulfilled in her purpose in life.” Yolanda Wang agrees: “For a man in China, at the age of 30 you’re meant to have a career, a car, a job. For a woman, the main responsibility is to find someone, to get married. And the pressure on her [to do that] starts at the age of 22 or 23.”

Recently, the journalist (and friend of Lean In Beijing) Roseann Lake co-organised the Leftover Monologues – women’s monologues from all over the world, prompted by a combination of the Chinese women’s movement, Leta Hong Fincher’s work on gender inequality and activist Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. It was the first time many of the Chinese contributors had presented their own stories. “It’s really hard for Chinese people to speak out. They’ll be judged by society as a bad girl, judged by family and friends,” says Maggie Zhang. The Lean In movement in China is radical in itself, for its fostering of open dialogue. The conversation goes far beyond tips on how to negotiate for higher salaries, be less self-critical, manage career progression, handle confrontation or consider a company job versus entrepreneurship - although Lean In Beijing members have discussed all these and more. “The idea is not necessarily limited to work or career, or even family,” says Lui, “it’s more about a close knit, confidential community of women who listen to you, empathise with you and help you.” “Women at big companies are afraid to speak out at meetings,” says Wang, adding, “In the US women sit and talk about their [professional and life] dreams. In China people ask you, ‘Do you have a boyfriend? What does he do?’ Nobody thinks a woman has a dream.” “We asked women how they saw their purpose in life,” says Ye, “and lots of women told us that that was the first time they’d ever asked that question of themselves.”

“Our parents tell us not to get a boyfriend when we’re at college, so we can concentrate completely on our studies,” says Maggie Zhang, “but then, when we turn 25, they pressure us to get a husband.” “I was told, ‘You should never try to be too smart or you won’t find a boyfriend’ by my mother’s friend,” says Lui, “and I was pressured to marry from the age of 26. The family is still considered the centre of everything. I’ve heard, ‘You can’t get a PhD because no-one wants to marry a PhD.’” 

"The other side of the ‘leftover women' story is that we’re moving forward as never before,” says Ye. “Women don’t need a partner to sustain their lifestyles. It’s inevitable that women in China will have more freedom and that this will force change. The post-90s generation is already changing things, they’re really independent. They see that it’s important to have your own thoughts.” Lui chips in, “On one hand China has been one country that’s done the best in equalising everyone to some extent. People’s lives are getting better. But there are problems with the way it’s being done and the consequences. The Chinese haven’t got used to money yet. They want to show off, to show people what they've got. CEOs of companies are in their 20s and 30s. They start a company, they make money. The Chinese mentality-change is one of the fastest in the world, because of the way modern China has started itself up.” “The economy is changing very fast. But society changes slowly,” says Wang. Ye says, “My parents went through the hunger, when they didn’t have enough to eat. That’s why what they want for me is the best: comfort, a husband. When my generation has its kids, it’ll be different.”

While women are regarded as valuable only within the domestic sphere, where their labour can be exploited for free, domestic duties are regarded as demeaning for men to do. “If a man is a stay at home dad, people think he doesn’t have what it takes to go out into the world and support the family. It’s about saving face,” says Zhang. “In Chinese TV shows the man is always rich, tall, successful and the woman is obedient and subservient.”

“There are a lot of social barriers,” Ye agrees when I balk at the idea of individual women changing themselves in order to somehow evade, circumvent, win out against or contend with endemically antiwomen structures, judgements, customs, stereotypes and activities. “We can’t change the outside of society very fast but within our generation and the next we can change the policy-makers of the future. There’s only so much one person can do, but if everyone plays their part you can change a lot.” However, the barriers to equality and liberation are high. “You are discriminated against as a single woman,” says Ye. “Single women are barred from adoption. Sometimes a woman will choose her family over her career. Or she’ll choose her career. But women aren’t allowed to be both.” Yolanda Wang’s company asked one of her female colleagues to sign a piece of paper promising that she wouldn’t get pregnant for two years. “We never hear about men’s work-life balance, only women’s. And you’re judged badly whatever you choose,” she says. Maggie Zhang adds, “We have to educate not only women but also men, who are under huge pressure to be successful.”

Alicia Lui believes that Sheryl Sandberg’s inspiring talk and book have “raised issues which enable us to have more open conversations about [sexism]. Lean In was a catalyst. It said to women, if you really feel you have a need for something you have to raise your hand and ask for it.”

Ye believes the movement is a chance for women to look at their lives afresh: “Before you change anyone’s life you have to change the way they see themselves. We have high rates of employment for women here, but sometimes women are happy with less demanding hours and less pay, because it means they still have time to do all their family duties. I believed all that too – until I was brave enough to say that that was not what I want. Once people see alternatives then they can begin to lean in and change their lives. We want to help women pursue their own definition of success, help them when they’re young and share stories of other women’s lives so they see themselves in these women.”

Lean In Beijing derives its momentum and power from its focus on co-operation between women. “Why do women judge each other?” says Allison Ye. “We don’t have that tradition of women helping women.” “We support each other to take the next step,” says Alicia Lui, “but starting something requires the other side to response. I argued with my mum [who put pressure on me to marry] and now she’s coming to understand my thinking. Each of us has a personal stake in Lean In Beijing because these issues affect us personally.”

Yolanda Wang says, “At my first Lean In Beijing meeting I realised I’m not on my own, I’m not crazy. Women are so honest, so encouraging, they push you to change things. For women it’s very hard to be their real self. Who they are now is who their family wants them to be, who society wants them to be. The cliché was that the only thing between girls was jealousy. But that’s not true. It’s so good to see girls who say to each other, ‘I like you because you’re awesome.’”

For a full list of my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here.

China Flash: Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing, where I am currently doing a stint as Deputy Editor.

Jenny Man Wu is a film-making powerhouse, describing her work as “soul led, not fantastical or abstract” and “inspired by a European arthouse sensibility in terms of the acceptance of the director as an auteur, rather than the Hollywood sensibility where a producer is the most important person and decides on the cast, the setting, the marketing and the distribution. It’s not important to me to make a million dollar movie. I want to continue to make low-budget movies where I have the right to do what I want, to show to and influence a certain small number of people. When I consider the price and sacrifice a director needs to pay to have a high budget cinema-style movie, I can say no to that. And if you’re making movies that you want to be screened in China you have to submit to censorship from the government.”

Over the course of four punchy short films, Man Wu has garnered international attention within just a few years of graduating from her studies in screenwriting and literature at Beijing Film Academy. Some Sort of Loneliness, A Choice (Maybe Not), Crime Scene and Last Words, all produced between 2012 and 2013, feature women in the throes of tragicomic contemporary despair. “It all starts with very little things, small daily situations,” says Man Wu. “Then I start to describe them, to look at them from a different angle.” In A Choice (Maybe Not), two young women are in a coffee shop, “and one of the girls is a little bit OCD about the choices she makes. She doesn’t want coffee. She doesn’t want lemonade. The beer is overpriced. The wine’s been open for two days. It's a comedy but it’s really about the pressure on women to choose. Women in the olden days almost never walked out of the house alone – and now we have all these choices, it seems. But there are so many choices it's hard to tell if you've made the right one or not. And sometimes when you're forced to make a big decision it's easy to put it down to fate, to the inevitable or the subconscious.”

Last Words, a monologue which Man Wu acted in herself, examines the notion of choice in a far darker way. “It’s a stream of consciousness, a woman talking about suicide and presenting her last words. She’s thinking about something [abusive] that happened in her childhood. The core of the film is not about how she develops her obsession with suicide but her recent experience of domestic violence, her struggle with her parents and the restraint she’s experienced from her father. It’s about how a female wants to have a different kind of life, about her struggle against patriarchy and disappointment and her desperation about her future. She feels that suicide is the only thing that she can do because she’s a perfectionist and an idealist – and these beliefs make her suffer all the more. At the end, she looks into the camera and asks, If I kill myself, does it mean I’ve surrendered to the world?”

Man Wu is committed to focusing on the issue of gender in China. “I have a political view about gender in general and that comes through in my work. Gender issues are political issues. I have a responsibility: I understand how it is overseas and how it is in Beijing and feel I must connect the two, to show that women could be living in so many different ways. We had a women’s revolution in China in the 1920s but all this did was release free female labour into the market.” In giving voice to the ambivalence, pain and wit of her women characters, Man Wu points out that she is going against society’s assumption that “women’s feelings and emotions are small and not political.”

When it comes to gender, Man Wu “can’t say it’s going backwards. It’s very complicated, how [society] sees single women. It’s related to capital and economics. It’s also that under the one child policy, girls do feel cherished within their family, they are insulated and protected from the frustrations of gender inequality at a personal level, so many don’t understand why they should fight for their rights. But it’s important to recognise that a lot of the problems in daily life are actually related to gender. For example I know of a young woman at school who wasn’t a virgin. But she was with a new boyfriend and to pretend to be a virgin, she put some [red] colour in herself – and the colour wouldn’t wash off the guy! And this was presented as a big joke by the guy’s friends. But there’s a double standard: girls really are expected to be virgins.”

Man Wu was selected to show at the 2013 Beijing Independent Film Festival, has just got back from the high profile Elles Tournent Film Festival in Brussels and is currently directing the Beijing Queer Film Festival, which will be running at various venues across town until December. However, both the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the Beijing Queer Film festival have both been shut down by the authorities on their launch dates in the past. One typically clever strategy for circumventing this possibility has been to screen films on special buses driving around the city; yet another example of the ingenuity which has developed in China as a response to the caprices and controls of those in power.

“I can’t leave Beijing,” vows Man Wu. “A lot of things are happening here. I see the changes and they’re not always good. It’s sad to see old buildings being demolished, places becoming more commercial. It’s always good and bad – but that’s what makes the world interesting. As Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Beijing Night
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law
• Beijing storms, turtles and dogs
• Two Chinese characters
• Hair envy

China Flash: Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing.

Kerry Brown has been a China hand for two decades now. Formerly head of the Asia Programme at Chatham House in London, he also worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London and Beijing and is now Executive Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He has gained expertise and shared his insights not only in diplomatic politics and academia but also in the literary world, speculating on the future of Shanghai in Shanghai 2020 and collecting voices from across China in Carnival China, an essay collection reflecting the country’s recent social, cultural and ideological transformations.

Brown returns to Beijing this month to discuss a project that may constitute the riskiest move of his career: The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China, published this year by I B Taurus. The New Emperors examines the culture of the ruling Communist Party and the personal and professional histories of the seven men elected to the Standing Committee of the current Chinese Politburo in 2012. Brown describes an insular network of wealthy, strategic careerists whose existence is dominated by an all-consuming political culture which absorbs all their ambition but isolates them from the lived reality of the country.

The New Emperors is a fascinating, subtle and timely insight into the most delicate relationships: those between the rulers and the ruled; between politicians’ personal ambition and adherence to the Party; between Communist roots and capitalist shoots; between what is asserted publicly in theory and practiced in secret; between stated ideology and private values; between the mechanics of control and strategies of evasion and subversion; between the major cities and the provinces, local and national; and between the privileged minority and the struggling majority.

Brown reveals a world in which it is possible to rise to the top of a massive communist organisation while remaining firmly within the patriarchal boys’ club and collecting lucrative business stakes, innumerable off-the-books perks, plentiful sexual exploitation opportunities, shady accomplices and a diversity of ideologically, politically, financially, socially, culturally and morally dicey interests along the way. These guys wear their inner and outer hypocrisy as easily as the regulation black hair dye and heavy tailoring which render them deliberately identical in the public eye.

The book hasn’t been translated into Chinese and probably hasn’t been read by the ‘princelings’ and ‘new emperors’ themselves. However, given the targeting of those within China who write critically about politics, I am skeptical when Brown tells me the only risk he has undertaken in his work is ‘an aching hand from typing so much’. When he arrives in Beijing for an event at the Bookworm on Wednesday 15th October, his discussion of The New Emperors will necessarily include issues which the Party deems sociologically sensitive. In advance of that conversation, in which I will be Brown’s interlocutor, he shares his thoughts on China’s past, present and future.

Your first visit to China was as a teacher exactly 20 years ago. How have you seen it change in that time?

The China I lived and worked in 20 years ago was on the cusp of its great economic awakening: here had been reform for over a decade, then the shock of 1989, the withdrawal of many foreigners and the end of the relatively liberal era of politics in the 1980s. The city I was based in for two years, Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, was pretty sleepy and represented the ‘half awake’ atmosphere that prevailed at the time: lots of qualified expectation and hope [which was] still weighted down by the unfortunate events of the last few years. There was one ersatz fast food place in Hohhot, a sort of local rip-off of Kentucky Fried Chicken, then large swathes of the city that were pretty makeshift and ramshackle and looked like they could be blown away in a strong gale.

If you visit Hohhot today the whole place has been rebuilt almost from scratch. Materially, on the surface, China is dramatically different today compared to then. But in the habits and thinking of the people, I think the change has been less dramatic than we think. Networks around you [which enable you] to get by in society were important then and they remain so today. The only difference is that in those days the most powerful person in the city seemed to be in charge of the local station ticket office, because it was so hard to get train tickets. These days, it must be the local Louis Vuitton boss who is the person everyone wants to know, or the director of the Inner Mongolian Apple outlet.

Have you also witnessed a transformation in the way the rest of the world views China?

The world outside could largely ignore China in 1994. I remember speaking to an eminent academic in the UK back then, after I got back from China after two years living there. When I suggested we might need to study China's language and society more and prepare for a future in which it was a more significant global player, he laughed aloud and said, “Well, people have been saying that for two hundred years.” It would be impossible to make this sort of dismissive comment so sweepingly now. But I suspect the same old misgivings and misperceptions of China as some kingdom of otherness still prevails, despite the fact that its people, culture and impact are in our daily lives outside of China much more deeply than they have ever been before.

What do you think underlies the Western stereotype of China as avaricious, inscrutable and alien?

Stereotypes of China have always carried this slightly unsettling element of inscrutability and unknowability. Films and plays in the past, like the notorious Fu Manchu figure from the 1930s, distilled this. It’s odd that these ideas can still linger when you think that in the UK, US and Australia, ethnic Chinese have been part of our communities for well over a century and a half.

Perhaps some people feel a deep need to have these distorted but dramatising images buried in the recesses of their imagination to liven their lives up. But it is a very deliberate and perverse act to maintain in a world where China and its people are in fact so visible, accessible and knowable.

You have engaged with China not only as a writer but also as a diplomat and an academic. What is it that draws and keeps your interest?

I find it to be a world of surprising surprises. It is a place where the things I expect to find startling often feel very familiar - like relating to people, despite the cultural and historic differences. Things which I expect to find familiar are often baffling – [for example] I have never really worked out what many Chinese really think of the outside world.

The New Emperors focuses on the seven men who essentially run China. What is these men's remit?

The seven men in the current Chinese Politburo are best seen, as I interpret them, as in charge of the big vision or strategy for their country. They sit almost like the board of some massive company, signing off the broadest general directives but living in a zone where administrative or specific policy implementation is left to others. They are, in many ways, the guardians of the values and legacy of the Party. We forget that in this context their individual aims and ideas have to be subsumed within this entity to which they owe everything and which they must faithfully serve: the Communist Party. The Party is the strongman in modern China, not Xi Jinping.

What kinds of lives do the members of the Communist Party's upper echelons live?

I suspect [their lives] are dominated by calculation of who they can trust and who they must be wary of. Theirs is a very insecure and often pretty merciless political culture. And once they enter this realm, they can never leave it - not willingly, anyway. In that sense, it is an extraordinary cage they are in.

How did they rise to power?

They rose to power by accruing political capital across different constituencies and networks in the party. Former leaders, particularly figures like Jiang Zemin, [comprised] one of the key groups amongst the [various] constituencies the current leaders had to recruit to get where they are. In the 2012 leadership transition it was clear that in the end, as a kind of circuit breaker, Jiang and other senior retired cadres had a consultative role. This might have been no more than nodding through one candidate or pausing and damning another with faint praise. 

[The seven men] have reached their current position by making many friends and avoiding building up enemies, but also by avoiding binding commitments that marry them to interests that they have to satisfy when they finally reach the summit. In that sense, these current leaders have shown, mostly in provincial careers, the ability to serve but not belong. They carry out the Party's mandate, but they cannot be the servants of anything except it.

How do the current Politburo Standing Committee members benefit from their power and do they share these benefits?

Of course, having a link with someone elevated to the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China is a great asset and plenty of people overtly - or more often than not covertly or subliminally – try to leverage this in their business or other work. One day we can probably work out the dollar value of having a powerful authentic link to members of the political elite. But the general rule now seems to be that those who have such a link preserve its value by letting others allude to it and broadcast news of it while they keep silent.

You describe the indifference you witnessed among ordinary people in a Beijing hotel when the latest seven were elected. Why do you think they were so apathetic?

I suspect people felt disengaged by the 2012 leadership transition in China because it was something decided in ways that were very remote from their daily lives. This was not a universal franchise election where at least there were campaigners trying to engage with people, get their attention and wrestle their vote out of them. It lacked that link.

The current political system tries to do too much with too little. In the future, power will need to be shared out more widely. At the moment it is concentrated in the hands of too few, and they are unable to really continue making the quality of judgments that people in this society are increasingly demanding.

Walking around Beijing I am always surprised by the visible wealth of many of the young people in certain areas. Where does this wealth come from? 

The Party has created a society where almost anything can now be monetised. Perhaps that is the meaning behind the words of the Plenum last year: the ‘perfection of the market system’. In China, this means today that everything is in the market, from relations between people to education and marriage; there is no area of life that does not involve some sort of financial transaction. The puzzle for many in the manic market of China today is not why there are so many wealthy people, but why poverty still exists. To get rich is now glorious, and normal. I am sure the wealthy elite in cities or elsewhere in China are genuinely puzzled by how it is even possible to be poor in China now.

How do the communist and capitalist aspects of the country coexist?

Communism provides the elite with a common ideological and moral language that they can talk to each other in and concepts which can unite them and which derive from China's recent history [my addition: even if they live in a way which is completely and cravenly counter to the ideology, morality, conceptual framework and nationalistic devotion which they pretend to share]. For everyone else, this is like Latin in the medieval Christian church: something only the priesthood understood but which the rest of society didn't need to understand or know. They just had to take on trust what they thought was being said, and get on with their lives. The parallels between the Catholic church and the Communist Party are quite striking in many ways. Probably a good subject for a future book…

How would you categorise China? A capitalist country with a totalitarian core? A bureaucracy with a communist rationale?

I would categorise China by admitting it resists all categorisation. In some subtle ways it’s a unique system because of its scale, speed and complexity. It is [also] clear that our external categorisation of China carries little weight within the country itself. I was at a discussion on ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ with some Party officials and foreign scholars some months back. When the phrase was finally translated into Chinese, the Chinese officials looked genuinely perplexed. We have still failed to find a term for China or a framework in which those inside and outside the political culture here both agree on what it actually is.

What are the principal misconceptions the West has of China?

I think the West, or principal figures in the West, fail to see that while the Communist Party may well not be particularly loved by many Chinese people, when it appeals to the desire for China to be a rich, strong country it speaks a language that most people in this complex and often highly uneven society find appealing and unifying. We underestimate the desire for many Chinese people to have a strong status for their country - that is as much an emotional as a political desire. Underneath the surface, unity is lacking in China - it is a society where change has been too fast, where mobility has been huge, where people live in a place where they were not originally from and where cohesion is very fragile. This is a society where there are simmering frustrations and the need to create a sense of unity that doesn't just end up being a shrill nationalism is very important. That probably involves the state disappearing even more from people's lives as they seek new and more creative ways to become modern, global citizens.

Do you think that foreign countries criticise China for things that they themselves are guilty of? I’m thinking of nepotism, political corruption, extreme capitalism, too-fast development, commercialism, excessive police/army/state power, opposition to grassroots movements, surveillance culture…

There are a lot of double standards and hypocrisy with some of the international criticisms of China, just as there is a lot of defensiveness or wariness in the response to these criticisms by Chinese officials and elites. As the world's top emerging economy, however, they will just have to put up with attacks like these. It comes with the territory.

• Kerry Brown's site: here
• Publisher I B Taurus' site for The New Emperors: here
• Reviews of The New Emperors in The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Higher Education supplement, The Guardian and The Financial Times.

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law

China Flash: Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised Beijng

Afternoon tea at The Opposite House, in association with Jo Malone

This is a greatly expanded version of a short write-up which first appeared in Time Out Beijing where I did a brief stint as Deputy Editor. To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here.

Finally, an afternoon tea that smells as good as it looks. Opposite House, the chic Sanlitun hotel, is launching a month long celebration of perfume and pastries, scent and scones. In association with British lifestyle brand Jo Malone, the hotel will be serving an afternoon tea inspired by Jo Malone’s Peony and Blush Suede collection at 3pm every day from 22^nd September until 24^th October. Hosted at their sleek, warm-toned Mediterranean restaurant Sureño and designed for elegant ‘ladies’ who care as much about fashion taste as food taste, the experience includes a vial of Peony and Blush Suede perfume and a voucher for an arm and hand massage at Jo Malone’s Beijing boutique. 

Obviously it feels nice to spend a couple of hours slotting flavour-bomb pastries into one’s mouth in a flatteringly lit restaurant at a hotel full of attentive staff and beautiful patrons while a shoot for an international fashion magazine goes on upstairs, as it was the day I went.

The tea itself is as classy and considered as the fragrances and scented candles Jo Malone is famous for. I am treated to delicately sliced sandwiches whose bread is baked on-site, filled with tender crab, gutsy smoked salmon and creamy mozzarella; a colourful assortment of miniature cakes including a delicious macaroon that melts into a crush of crumbs and strawberry goo and a bright drum of citron tart; a soft peony-infused cream pot that comes with its own little bone china teacup and edible flower; and best of all, the golden, home-baked scones sitting like a line of tanned knees, rugged on the outside, soft on the inside, served with strawberry rose jam (again made on-site), organic acacia honey and Devonshire clotted cream. My cream was as runny as petrol, but never mind. The whole thing was fab.

“Everything is imported,” the Chinese person I’m with assures me. That is the new China: everything is imported. The country which is famous for its manufacturing and export for foreign companies has absorbed and internalised the value those brands place on themselves. What is considered good in China is foreign.

Afternoon tea is part of a Beijing trend for dainty, English-style pastimes. Or not so dainty: I am considering running a campaign against the cheap, sugar-reeking patisserie and bakery places that have opened up across the city, their displays piled with breads, brioches, biscuits, cakes and tarts all of exactly the same beige carb colour. Like the rest of the world, China’s youth are taking on an American style processed diet of over-refined, high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, sponge-textured junk that’s making them fat and giving them heart disease and diabetes in the space of a single generation, assisted by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle plugged up with video games, Net surfing and mobile phone chatting.

Back to the tea.

“The hotels don’t [usually] do bilingual flyers,” says my companion, showing me a leaflet for the afternoon tea, which is in both Mandarin and English. “In Beijing it used to be the foreigners that had the money. Now it’s the Chinese that have it. Beijing has the richest people in China.”

“Where does the money come from?” I ask.

“A lot of it’s new money. There are provinces with coal.”

“You’re talking about land sales and the licensing of mining rights.”

My companion nods.

“They make money like water flowing,” she says.

The afternoon tea sits alongside a relatively recent fad for heavily iced multi tier cakes and Disney princess wedding dresses, usually combined with plasticky perfect, unwittingly kitsch Stepford photo shoots to prove that an immaculate investment – I mean a momentous sacrifice – I mean a loving union – is taking place. The era and customs these trends reference never existed. It’s all a cartoon, an inauthentic, retrogressively feminine, Americanised fantasy about a historically hazy England where decorum ruled and social rank was set, stable and (in reality) stifling.

There is also a roaring trend for highly trained ‘English butlers’ over here. That’s one of the most lucrative of these ‘lifestyle’ jobs. I quite like the idea of the rich Chinese employing Little Englanders (ordinary Joes from bog standard Brit towns) to apparently confer some class and style but actually to be their dogsbodies.

“You have to understand that even ten years ago, Beijing was completely different,” says my companion. “These malls you see are being built after the hutong [traditional neighbourhoods with narrow lanes and black curved-slate tiled roofs] were demolished. I was here when the last family was evicted to make this development. That’s happening all over the city. It’s not a question of whether the hutong are beautiful, or characterful, or not. This development is ‘progress’.”

The Opposite House opened six years ago, the same day as the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of the new Beijing, the one that will probably become a single huge mall with internal streets and its own subway system. The hotel is in what is known locally, with heavy euphemism, as ‘the village’ – an enormous luxury shopping, food and lifestyle complex whose formal name is Taikoo Li. There are Balmain, Alexander McQueen, Carven, Balenciaga, Versace and Miu Miu boutiques. All empty. A 24 hour Starbucks. Beautiful girls everywhere, clicking on their phones, wonderfully dressed but with nothing to say, sugar daughters waiting for sugar daddies.

“I find the sight of these girls so depressing,” I say. “They’re so wonderful, so beautiful, so well-dressed. But I don’t see them laughing or joking. They don’t look like they’re having a good time. I don’t get it. And what do they do all day?”

“You only have to look at China’s history. Concubines.”

I say nothing. The Orientalist obsession with forbidden cities, palace compounds and the concubine system of institutionalised sexual exploitation neatly skips over the ‘revolution’ that was designed, deliberately, to break down the idea that women were objects to be bought, reared, sold, used and exchanged for sexual labour. Instead it put forward the idea that women could be used for any labour whatsoever.

“A lot of the girls in universities are being kept,” says my companion.

Again, I say nothing. It is not true that “a lot” of female university students are being sexually used, dressed, accessorised and paid for by the exploitative men they believe are their boyfriends and providers. But there is certainly a minority of younger women, highly visible around Sanlitun in particular who are like beautiful, precious-breed strays sniffing around melancholically for a new owner. The fact that they are visually striking makes them seem more numerous than they really are. The truth is that the majority of Chinese girls and women study and work and work and work, while withstanding pressure to court and marry and breed. And then they work and work and work at being a wife and mother and daughter and daughter-in-law, in addition to their other work.

“You know the new trend is for etiquette classes?” says my companion. “Even three week courses at finishing schools in Switzerland? Because the new Chinese rich are not sophisticates. They have to learn it all. They have no manners. They don’t know how to do anything.”

In this new world anything, even social skills, can be monetised and sold back to you. I have a (Chinese) friend whose cruel but lucrative side business is to give extremely over-priced wine and gourmet food tutorials to her newly wealthy compatriots, who believe anything she tells them.

At Taikoo Li there’s an Apple store whose glowing Old Testament apple logo (Eve bit the apple of temptation and iPods poured out, damning humankind and blighting the earth) is so aggressively huge, hanging heavily over the complex, that I often mistake it for the moon when I’m walking home. Opposite Taikoo Li is a stretch of nasty-looking bars with skinny young men outside, hair spiked, dressed sharply in Korean pop style shrunken suits, trying to entice people inside. Next to the bars is a mammoth zone of international embassies with fierce young guards keeping watch, clicking their heels together, chests out, buttocks taut. This morning I saw just three of them marching down a regular street in odd-numbered formation, silently, left, right, left, right, legs straight and high and in time, eyes ahead, like automata.

There’s also a Soviet era diplomatic residence compound that’s like a suburb in itself, housing the families of the diplomatic staff attached to all the different countries’ embassies. It’s built along classic Chinese/Russian communist-chic lines: huge boxy living room, high ceilings, oddly thick walls between the master bedroom and the adjoining room, either for sexual discretion or to contain the bundled wires and strategically threaded mics needed for clear tapping and surveillance.

“The place is enormous,” says my friend from [Feministania], “yet whenever there’s another family also from Feministania they put us in the same tower of the same block. They want us to talk to each other. With the families from all the other different countries, we are polite, we talk about the weather. With other people from Feministania of course we talk about politics.”

“Assume everything you’re saying is being heard. That’s what I was told when I arrived at my office,” said another friend, who works across politics and global finance.

To walk through Beijing today is to negotiate an ever-spreading grid of malls filled with Western European and Scandinavian lifestyle brands, nearly all of them associated with making over the body in some way. They offer clothes and jewellery, scent and makeup, all priced painfully high to accommodate the luxury goods tax. Nearly all the creams and body lotions, including underarm deodorant, contain whitening products and are called Lunar Glow or Pearl Shine or Moon Caress or somesuch. It’s best to look pale, untouched, dewy, delicate: a conflation of racial and gender judgements. Darkness is ugly, it means hard unfeminine work in rural areas, it means you’re not the preferred Han ethnicity but one of China’s many racial minorities from a far-off region, here to do menial or manual labour, having zipped everything you own into a checked plastic cube-bag and brought it on the train from one of the western border areas that bleeds into India or Nepal or even one of the mysterious barbarian –stans.

“You’re dark and you have tattoos,” said someone to me when I arrived. “Here, that means you’re poor. Provincial poor.”

Before I get to the Apple store in Sanlitun on my way home I pass one of the slickest buildings near my office. When I first saw it I thought it was a nightclub or a karaoke place. It’s a plastic surgery clinic called My Like. Its logo is the outline of a mermaid swimming up the side of the white building, with big bazongas and flowing hair. China’s one of the largest markets for plastic surgery globally, alongside Brazil and Korea. When the sun sets the gleaming white clinic lights up with lines of blazing neon pink.

Back to the tea.

Those aspects of the afternoon tea experience which were not directly within The Opposite House’s immaculate control fell short. To be blunt: the Jo Malone fragrance was laughably small. It was exactly the same as a sample you can beg from any woman at any beauty counter at any bog-standard outlet from Chengdu Airport to an Idaho mall. When I got home, me and my roommate – a lifestyle photographer who has a wine fridge filled with rare perfumes worth tens of thousands of dollars – screamed with mirth when inside my ribbon-tied Jo Malone bag we discovered….another, much tinier ribbon-tied Jo Malone bag, which contained….what looked like a Jo Malone matchbox… which contained what could only be called a ‘vial’ of perfume if looked at through rose-tinted binoculars by a pathological liar.

I had been a longtime admirer of Jo Malone, both the woman and the brand she built single-handed. I am shocked that a marque of such apparent sophistication would do something so unstylishly tight-fisted that my disgust is superseded by ridicule. The lavish booklet that accompanies the ‘vial’ (written, tellingly, all in Chinese apart from its headings, to court that new young rich generation of capitalist aspirants) actually has an entire page entitled ‘The Art of Gift Giving’, showing a male model holding an abundance of normal-sized boxes filled with goodies. If only someone at Jo Malone had followed their own advice.

My favourite Jo Malone scents are Pomegranate Noir, 154 and Red Roses but everyone will have their preferences. I would suggest that any fragrance brand wanting to match the culinary skill and presentational dedication of the Opposite House offer either a genuinely medium-sized wardrobe of multiple scents or a single large perfume of choice to customers who have paid for something special. They – we – are not to sign up, pay up and then be palmed off with something a princessy toddler would get in a novelty gift bag at going-home time.

Looking at the insultingly small offering, I wonder if there is some cultural disdain behind it. Do companies think they can fob off the Chinese with these minuscule trinkets because the Chinese will be happy to get their hands on something, anything, a Western brand gives them, no matter how meagre? Do they think the Chinese are so stupid and so desperate for a little acknowledgement by an English-branded company (which is actually American-owned: Jo Malone was bought by Estée Lauder in 1999) that they’ll be grateful for this pathetic sop? Equally, is China so in thrall to a fantasy version of the Western ‘lifestyle’ that it will overlook homegrown enterprises, no matter how nascent, to court an established brand that does not reciprocate its interest or its appreciation?

The Opposite House are already in talks with a range of (Western) brands to work on collaborations for 2015, while gearing up for a second major pairing this autumn: from October 13^th to October 24^th they partner with Brit designer Paul Smith for a business set lunch, also at Sureño, with a menu devised by prodigal chef Laia Pons Gonzalez. Paul Smith will be giving away a typically quirky notebook patterned with musical notes, a key motif in the label’s collection at this year’s Paris Fashion Week.

It’s a good idea for The Opposite House to host experiences alongside fashion and beauty brands who match their standards and style. However, those brands will have to step up instead of donating some samples they found in the back of the cupboard and putting them in fancy bags with a ton of marketing material thrown in to add insult to injury. The people who come to The Opposite House are chic and wealthy enough to have entire shelves of properly packaged, full-sized products by brands even more elevated than Jo Malone and Paul Smith. Those same people are well-connected if not outright famous in the very sectors in which the brands wish to maintain prestige; if an experience fails to live up to promises or expectations, they’ll walk. 

The Opposite House host a non-branded afternoon tea throughout the year. Although the flavours are slightly different it’s just as sumptuous, just as delicious, just as stylish and just as affordable as the Jo Malone collaboration. Western lifestyle brands who want to get in on the 21^st century capitalist China act must match The Opposite House’s quality and generosity or risk looking commercially cheap and culturally nasty by comparison.