China

Welcome to China.

These photos are a sample of those taken during several sojourns in China between 2006 and 2019 – three times for work, the others to explore – covering thousands of kilometers overland. My travels took me from the most southern-visited area on the island of Hainan, through Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guilin, then north to Shanghai and Beijing and west through Taiyuan and Xi’an.

Anyone who’s experienced China has their own sense of its reality. This is mine, my China – a land both familiar and unfathomable. It remains forever paradoxical: a land I admire and one whose forceful and ubiquitous government causes me great trepidation. It’s a nation that has frustrated and dismayed me, but also one that has captivated with its stunning recent progress and its long history of innovation. While travelling and living there, China revealed the beauty of its natural landscapes into which is nestled impressive architecture and sculpture. China’s ancient culture and the wisdom of the great philosophers this spawned still ring true today guiding modern life for anyone willing to listen. Amid its accelerated consumer driven modernity, the nation’s impressive multifaceted heritage in fine art, music and handicrafts also cling on amid the glass and steel of skyscrapers. As expected, the impressions I gained through touring contrast against those I formed while living and working in vast cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

Shanghai was an exciting East-West hybrid – a thrilling place to live and teach where I became familiar with early twentieth century inspirational figures like Lu Xun and Sun Yat Sen and where I’d spend too many hours in jazz clubs, restaurants and swanky bars.

Beijing in comparison, rather than architecture left behind by European colonialism with western precincts like the Former French Concession, boasts magnificent ancient palaces and gorgeous university grounds surrounded by lakes and gardens, hillsides that turn golden in autumn and fabulous museums and galleries to showcase Chinese culture. Although it too has its nightlife, I’ve felt less culture shock moving between disparate nations that I did contrasting Shanghai with Beijing where I was ever aware of an overpowering watchful government. I’d pass forty-two CCTV cameras on my two minute walk to work each day. The inner city is formal and regimented with police and the military never far away. In the centre, the very air smells of government surveillance.

These observations along with the way western ‘individualism’ butts heads with the ‘collectivism’ of Chinese culture are but a few hints of why I have both laughed and cried, loved and lost in that vast nation. Whether joyous or heartbreaking, my memories of China became woven into the fabric of my inner landscape as treasured components of my life. The images of extraordinary beauty and the kindness of everyday Chinese exist side by side with memories of confrontational issues that focused my moral compass, heightened my appreciation of freedom and sharpened an awareness that, in me, democracy runs as deep as the marrow in my bones.