Posts by Alec Ash

Twelve photos from young China

Between 2008 and 2010, I took a series of photos for The China Beat blog (R.I.P). The theme was China's "new youth", also the focus of my then blog. To capture the experience of being young in today's China in a handful of images is a hopeless (but not fruitless) task, not least for a point-and-shoot artist like myself, who thought SLR was the name of an X-factor winning boy band. Still, it threw up some interesting images, in the course of my life in Beijing and travels out of it.

Following on from Rana Mitter, here's another video interview I've drudged up from my archives, this time with none other than Chris Patten.

He describes his own first sight of China, in 1979, looking out from the northern territories of Hong Kong into Shenzhen – then nothing more than a "sleepy fishing village", now "Adam Smith out of Hieronymus Bosch".

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University and author of some really excellent books, including A Bitter Revolution. Sweeping behind the digital sofa of my old blog, I found this video interview I did with him in Oxford in 2008. He talks about his first visit to China, to Guangzhou in the late 80s, back when foreigners were still a rarity. Here it is, with Mandarin subtitles to boot (but hosted on Youtube, so 要翻墙).

Forced labour on the Inner Mongolian grasslands – by Alec Ash

The blades of a hundred wind turbines chugged languidly, stirring the dry morning air over an expanse of cracked grasslands pock-marked with horse droppings. A klick away, inside our ger, we reluctantly pushed off our blankets to meet the morning and rubbed the sleep from our eyes. It was a grudging start to the day, but missing breakfast would be worse.

We were in the Huitengxile grasslands, Inner Mongolia – an Englishman, a French woman and a Russian, like the start of a bad joke. It was 2010, it was Qingmingjie – tomb sweeping festival – and we had the long weekend off from our language school in Beijing. None of us had been to Inner Mongolia. It sounded exotic. Horses and horizons, that kind of thing.

Our host, who had rented us the ger, gave us each a plate of flat noodles with chopped veg and a mischievous smile. I may have imagined the mischievous smile.

“Would you like to participate in a traditional Mongolian activity today?” he asked, stoking the dung-fueled samovar.

We don't generally post news on the Anthill, as it's designed for narrative writing and there are too many China news aggregators anyway. But this is breaking news I discovered myself and have to share: the municipal authorities for the Gulou area of central Beijing have, as of midnight last night, made riding fixed gear bicycles in the area against the law.