'Welcome to China' thirty four years ago remains true today

In 1992, I started a year on an exchange programme between Guangdong Province and my Scottish regional government. I would be based at Guangdong Foreign Languages Normal School living, as was then the norm, alongside many colleagues and of course the students. It was an introduction to China which ordinary travel could never provide. I was amazed at the dedication to study and seriousness with which lessons were treated. In conversation, some of the youngsters who came from across Guangdong, would explain quietly what China had experienced, the turmoil, over much of the 20th century. How they represented the future for the country, that they were determined to succeed but also that China was going to succeed. Returning regularly to Guangzhou I would reunite with some of them, they had become successful,

Guangzhou today almost unrecognisable from 1987, the country moving rapidly forward. Where to even start explaining what I had seen over three decades?

In 1993, near the end of my year in Guangdong, I was in Shaoguan, a city in then little visited north of the province close to Hunan. Sitting outside a pleasant restaurant, appreciating chilled local beer I noticed three westerners. One came over, explaining they were a European film crew producing a feature on what was happening around the Pearl River Delta. Realising I had lived amidst the transformation, could they interview me? Happy to recount some experiences I started chatting in front of the camera. Suddenly the director stopped the filming. looking straight at me he enquired, "You are being too positive, we want to know the downside, the negative view of what has happened!" I politely stopped the interview. It was odd, there was so much energy, positivity, many changes happening of which they were not interested in hearing?