DJ wins award for giving voice to Chinese community in UK

DJ Alice hosts Chinese Spectrum every day between 5 and 8 pm UK time. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

A radio presenter has won an award for her work preparing British Chinese youngsters for jobs in the media.

Alice Yu, who goes by the name DJ Alice, received the Asian Media Group's GG2 INSPIRE Award, which recognizes outstanding work in the community that has served to inspire young people.

The presenter hosts a daily radio show called Chinese Spectrum, which broadcasts music, current affairs and discussion about British-Chinese community issues in Mandarin and Cantonese.

"I never thought I would win an award like this," she told China Daily. "It gives me motivation to do more with the community and much more with the younger generation."

After arriving in Britain from Hong Kong as a student in the early 1980s, Alice started a Chinese community radio program in Manchester. She later joined the Spectrum Radio Network, which hosts several shows for ethnic minority communities in the UK.

Alice has volunteered for the British Chinese Project, which promotes Chinese issues in British politics. Eleven years ago she started the Chinese Youth Radio project, training young people from the British Chinese community in radio and presenting skills.

"We are underrepresented in media, in television, in politics," Alice said. "I feel the strong need to train second generation Chinese so they can have a platform and are able to voice their opinions more than their parents have."

Chinese people make up just 0.28 percent of the journalism workforce in the UK, despite accounting for 0.7 percent of the population, according to a study by Neil Thurman, a lecturer in communication at City University London.

Thurman said his research revealed a lack of diversity in British journalism.

The 2016 study found 94 percent of journalists are white, compared to 87 percent of the UK working population.

"British journalism is unrepresentative of the general population, and certainly the number of Asian journalists does not represent the number of Asians in the UK," Thurman told China Daily.