Chinese Characters Podcast
1) Deng Xiaoping: Black Cat, Yellow Cat
He was nicknamed "the steel mill" for his capacity to just keep going on and on. He was Mao's lieutenant who was purged twice and rose three times, the final time to the very top. He enabled China's e...Show More
2) Bruce Lee: Screen Warrior
He may still be the most famous non-western film star in the world. Yet he made only a handful of films in the early 1970s, none of which are artistic masterpieces. It wasn't his acting that made Bruc...Show More
3) Mao Zedong: The Man Who Made Modern China
In the early 1920s, he was just a library assistant at Peking University. Yet by the end of his life, he would rule a fifth of all humanity, turn China into a major power, and destroy the lives of mil...Show More
4) Factory Girls: Modern Girls, Modern Dreams
They came out of the countryside and helped to build China's industrial revolution. In the late 19th century, textile factories started to appear in the Yangtze delta, and working in them, teenage gir...Show More
5) Cixi: Ambivalent Empress
She rose to power behind the scenes in China's late 19th century imperial court, and became one of the most powerful women ever to exercise authority in the empire. Cixi was a dowager empress, and her...Show More
6) Hong Xiuquan v Zeng Guofan: The Duellists
This was the duel that shaped China. Hong Xiuquan was a poor boy who went into a trance and became convinced he was Jesus's younger brother, with a mission to conquer China. Zeng Guofan was a loyal Co...Show More
7) Wang Jingwei: Revolutionary Renegade
He is condemned as China's worst traitor. What made him do it? In 1938, as China was plunged into war, Wang Jingwei defected to the enemy, Japan. Yet in his early life, he had been one of the great fi...Show More
8) Lu Xun: Compassionate Cynic
To create one character who says something profound about the society you live in might be a stroke of luck. To create three suggests you really do have your hand on the nation's pulse. That creator w...Show More
9) Robert Hart: Chinese Customs
He was a servant of the Chinese empire, respected in Beijing and London alike. Yet he was no son of Shanghai, but of Ulster. Robert Hart grew up in Portadown, but his real life started when he shipped...Show More
10) Zheng He: The Admiral Goes to Africa
China rarely had an image as a great maritime power. But for a brief time in the mid-15th century, that all changed under the Ming dynasty and its admiral, Zheng He. He was sent out on seven voyages t...Show More