L – R: Monica, Alexandria, Renée, Paul, Dejeonique, Lawren and DeLisle
The coordinators of the ABCF’s Study in China initiative and our joint Youth Forum with the Zhejiang International Studies University gave a send-off to Lawren Fontenelle, a graduate of our free Mandarin tutorial programme, at the GL Yummy Chinese Restaurant on August 8th. Lawren, a UWI graduate, is off to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, one of the highest ranked universities in China and the world, to do a Master's degree in Environmental Studies. Lawren has been an active participant in the Youth Forum and he took advantage of the Mandarin tutorials to equip himself to enjoy the fullest experience of Chinese society and culture during his stay in China. The ABCF Study in China group provides help, advice and support for his preparation and for the duration of his programme in China.
Yiwu: What Globalization Actually Looks Like
Located in central Zhejiang just a few hours south of Shanghai on the high-speed rail, the small county-level city of Yiwu is the small commodities wholesale procurement capital of the world. Despite that, it’s still basically unknown outside of a few sectors.
Originally, I visited and wrote about Yiwu assuming that it would become part of my “Off the Beaten Track” series. But then I wasn’t so sure. Yiwu IS actually pretty well-known in the supply chain and sourcing sector. And to be fair, most Chinese people and even some non-Chinese will have heard of it too.
Sure, it’s not famous like Chongqing or Wuhan, but you can find many videos on domestic and international video platforms of people visiting the city, and the international media likes visiting Yiwu quite a lot as well, especially the Yiwu International Trade City (YITC), which is the largest light goods wholesale market in the world. So, I wondered: is it really off the beaten track?....
Yao Yang: Hong Wang's groundbreaking achievement and Chinese women's retreating ground
Declining workforce participation, dismal representation in political leadership, and resurgent traditional expectations suggest that decades of gains can no longer be taken for granted.
On 23 July 2026, Hong Wang became one of four recipients of the prestigious 2026 Fields Medal, awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40 for outstanding achievement and future promise. Born in Guangxi and educated at Peking University before continuing her studies in France and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the 35-year-old is the first Chinese-born woman — and only the third woman in the prize’s 90-year history — to receive the medal.
In China, the reaction to Wang’s victory soon extends beyond mathematics. On Chinese social media, women recalled being steered away from STEM; others joked darkly that Wang should not return to China, where she would definitely be pressed to marry and have children. That discussions of Wang quickly turned to whether she should marry her fellow laureate Yu Deng showed how readily a woman’s scientific achievement could be reframed in terms of her private life.
Individual accounts on social media cannot, of course, describe the experience of an entire generation. But the intensity of the response suggests that Wang’s achievement touched a deeper tension….
The Business of Beaches and Land Reclamation: Failure and Success on Hainan's Coast
Hainan's beaches are really excellent, and not just 'good for China'. The white sand beaches east of Sanya up the southern coast of Hainan are world-class...as nice as any I've seen.
Probably the very best sand quality I saw was Clearwater Bay in Lingshui (陵水), which is a small autonomous county just east of Sanya. The white sand here was thick, fine, and soft, with clear turquoise water and great views up and down the coast for many kilometers.
Further up the coast, beach quality varied quite a lot, with both white and yellow sand, but rocky beaches were generally rare, sea grass/kelp was minimal, and the water was always very clear. It was easily equal to the best beaches I’ve seen in the Philippines.
Besides beauty, Hainan’s beaches also offer strikingly clear lessons about how coastal real estate development succeeds (or fails) in China. Clearwater Bay has very little development on it, and qualifies as an utterly squandered opportunity in my eyes. Aside from a single luxury hotel (a Raffles) there's hardly any commerce on the 10+ kilometer strip...just a handful of coffee shops and photo-op locations. There's a lighthouse and a marina full of expensive-looking private boats, but not much beyond that. Compared to the dense commercial development of similar beaches elsewhere - even just one city over in Sanya - my impression was that it was all quite bizarre...until I started asking questions….
Zhao Shukai: From National Policy to Local Politics
Regional traditions, local leaders, and the political cultures behind markedly different policy implementation across China.
Regional stereotypes are a staple of Chinese humour: Shandong is associated with bureaucracy and protocol, Sichuan and Chongqing with bluntness, Beijing with political savvy and grand talk, and Shanghai with commercial pragmatism.
But do these contrasts go beyond personalities and reflect deeper differences in regional political culture? In this short essay, Zhao Shukai asks whether such regional traditions give rise to what he calls a “geography of policy.”…
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s leading DRAM maker, went public last month in China’s biggest IPO of the year, delivering a huge paper windfall to its Hefei government backers — another celebrated success of the “Hefei model.”
That makes this 2022 Pekingnology piece worth revisiting. Its original Chinese report was written not by Hefei, but by officials in Luoyang, another Chinese city, studying what Hefei got right and what others could learn from it — a perspective quite different from that of international media or investors.
Tom Hancock at Bloomberg last year wrote a very good piece How China’s communist officials became venture capitalists (via the Times of India, so it’s free):
Hefei has pioneered a shift in Chinese capitalism over recent years in which local governments are increasingly taking minority stakes in private companies. Since the 1950s, Hefei has been a hub of scientific research, but today its shrewd investments have transformed it from a relative backwater to a bustling metropolis of about 5 million people. In terms of economic growth, what Chinese media call the “Hefei model” appears to work. In the decade to 2020, Hefei was China’s fastest-growing city in terms of gross domestic product….
Zhao Shukai: China's “National Conditions” Are No Argument Against Reform or Enlightenment
“National conditions” is one of the most durable phrases in Chinese political debate. During the failed reforms of 1898, reformers often felt compelled to present railways, women’s education and representative government as ideas already sanctioned by Confucianism — the ideological foundation of the imperial order. Nearly a century later, some Chinese leaders warned that a market economy was incompatible with the country’s conditions and would bring chaos.
In both cases, the existing political order was portrayed as a natural outgrowth of China’s enduring national conditions, rooted in its culture, history, demography, and other distinctive circumstances. History, however, proved far less fixed. Within a generation, intellectuals were challenging the authority of the classics; decades later, market reforms would transform China.
In the following essay, Zhao Shukai argues that no set of national conditions lasts forever, because the people who shape those conditions do not stand still. He calls for an enlightenment aimed not at teaching citizens, especially farmers, to comply with government directives and obey the Party and political leaders, but at enabling them to think independently, understand their rights, participate in public affairs, and hold those in power accountable.
Zhao Shukai: China’s Rural Reform Began with Political Change
China’s rural reform is commonly recounted as a series of policy breakthroughs, above all the shift from collective to household farming. Zhao Shukai, however, argues that the political changes that preceded — and made possible — policy shifts should not be overlooked. A less monolithic distribution of power at the top, together with growing disagreement over rural policy, weakened political controls and created greater room for local initiative. It was within this newly opened political space that rural reform became possible.
Zhao Shukai: the policy failures that enabled China's rural reform
In the following essay, Zhao Shukai (赵树凯; b. 1959) argues that rural reform was not the result of far-sighted planning or the guidance of some enlightened “thought” or “theory”, but was driven largely by farmers’ own innovations, which policymakers gradually accepted after failing to suppress them.
China’s Debt to Its Migrant Workers
… For much of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the unequal treatment of rural migrants was not merely the indirect consequence of an uneven welfare system. It was written directly into government rules. Rural residents could be required to obtain official permission before leaving home to work. Cities restricted the occupations they were allowed to enter. Employers needed approval to hire them and sometimes had to pay special fees for doing so. People found in cities without the required identity, residence and employment papers could be detained and forcibly sent back to their hometowns. In practice, many were confined, stripped of their belongings and compelled to labour briefly before being released.
These restrictions have since disappeared. For younger Chinese today, the ability to leave one’s hometown, take a job hundreds or thousands of kilometres away and move through a city without carrying a special employment permit is so ordinary that the opposite can be difficult to imagine. Yet the most abusive elements of this system were dismantled only in the early 2000s, and discriminatory employment restrictions persisted for several years after that….
It Takes Four Generations: Demographic Replacement and the Statistical Legacy of China's Development
… To have been 65 in 2006 means you were born in 1941 into Nationalist China at war with Japan. Your primary school years were roughly 1946-1952, tumultuous years of civil war in which the Nationalist government was overthrown by the Communist Party and the nascent People’s Republic established.
On the other hand, to have been 65 in 2022 means you were born in 1957 into Mao-era China. Your primary school years overlapped with the Cultural Revolution, which disrupted education throughout the country, especially in 1966-68. However, the worst disruptions were for secondary education and universities, while primary education enrolment actually expanded during the period.5 This China saw substantial gains in basic literacy and primary school access, even as secondary school completion rates plummeted - both of which are visible in the demographic record decades later.
These two Chinas are already very different. But neither remotely resembles the China of 2022, where only 0.3% of people aged 16-20 had failed to complete primary school and almost 50% of young people went on to post-secondary education.
This weekly newsletter is put together by DeLisle Worrell, President of the ABCF. Visit us at Association for Barbados China Friendship | (abcf-bb.com).
Thanks to everyone who sent contributions for this week’s Update. Please send items of interest to me via the contact page at ABCF-BB.com or to info@DeLisleWorrell.com
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
