Branch newsletters: Hawkes' Bay
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JULY

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NEXT MEETING:
Friday 1 August at 7:30pm at the Hastings District Council Chambers, Lyndon Road, Hastings.
The Beijing Olympics begins at 8 minutes past 8 on August 8th, a very auspicious date for China. We are screening Beijing, Are you Ready? that follows famous American Public Broadcasting Service host Mary Windishar and focuses on preparations for the Olympics. The enthusiasm of the Chinese people promises to make the 2008 Games one of the most exciting gatherings the world has ever seen. A discussion will follow.

The Chinese Olympic uniform in the national colours of red and gold. The National Aquatic Centre, known as the Water Cube, is one of the most dramatic and exciting venues to feature sport events for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Resembling a gigantic blue box of bubble-wrap, the Water Cube looks iridescent, elegant and magic.

Dates for 2008:
Keep the first Friday night of the month for New Zealand China Friendship Society
PLEASE NOTE: September 5th - there will be no meeting this month
October 3rd - Banquet to celebrate China’s National Day
October 2008 - Branch Tour to Guangxi and Sichuan.

LAST MEETING:
Hastings District Councillor Derek Brownrigg and members of his group gave an informative and enjoyable presentation of their trip to Guilin, Xian, Beijing and Shanghai. For those experiencing their first trip to China, the reality far exceeded their expectations. Highlights of their Tour included looking at different farming operations around Guilin, having our friend Mike Meng show them around, and the contrast between rural Guangxi and ultra-modern Shanghai, and the wonderful food and ‘everything else’.

‘KIA ORA - NI HAO’
Maori Television will screen six sessions of ‘Kia Ora-Ni Hao’ at 5.30pm on Sunday evenings beginning on 3 August. At our NZCFS Conference in Masterton this year we previewed this excellent series initiated by Auckland Branch President and TV documentary-maker George Andrews. A six-part series features six students from North Island Kura Kaupapa schools reporting in Te Reo (with English subtitles) using video diaries on their three weeks in Beijing.

They lived with host Chinese families and attended classes at an English Language Experimental School and followed their own interests in Beijing and visited the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. They stayed in the homes of students their own age and shared school lessons and joined in cultural and sporting activities. Their visit was co-ordinated by the NZ China Friendship Society and Palmerston North's Kura Kaupapa Mana Tamariki, who signed a sister-school agreement with Xuanwu High School during the visit. The group leaders were Mana Tamariki Principal Toni Waho, and Hinurewa Poutu who co-ordinates Media Studies for the Kura.

Sichuan Earthquake Appeal
Thank you to everyone who helped our fund-raising activities and donated money to the appeal. Special thanks to Janice and Lou Klinkhamer, Dave Bromwich and Sally Russell who on two Saturday mornings honed their selling skills with surplus produce. Sally and Dave will travel to China on August 9 and spend two weeks in Shaanxi and Sichuan. To fund this we have applied for a KOHA, Partnership for Development grant of $5000 to assist with expenses. Liu Guozhong from Shandan Bailie School will join us and we plan to establish partnerships with NGO’s in the earthquake-affected regions of Sichuan and Southwest Shaanxi

The area in Shaanxi across the border from Sichuan suffered serious damage from huge after-shocks and holds particular interest for NZCFS as it includes Shuangshipu, Feng County where Rewi Alley established the first Bailie School in 1941. The Shaanxi Women's Federation reports that in Feng County, 12 townships and 100,000 people or 76.9% of the county population have been affected. Although there was less loss of life than in Sichuan 26,000 people were evacuated to safety and half the houses in the rural areas (10.000) have been damaged.

In Xian the capital of Shaanxi, we will discuss with the Provincial Women’s Federation (WF) details of a rehabilitation project with NZCFS seeking an on-going partnership to extend our work with cooperatives in poor rural areas where Rewi Alley worked. In Sichuan, we plan to discuss with Gung Ho (ICCIC) an earthquake assistance package and meet General Secretary Du Yintang.

Currently Gung Ho is liaising with cooperatives in Sichuan, and are considering the following possibilities:
- Cooperatives they have worked with before;
- Areas with a historical ties, e.g. where Rewi Alley went for his yak's wool in the 1940s;
- Areas where people have turned to the cooperative movement for self-help.

A "Disaster Relief Service Cooperative” has been established in Dujiangyan city. There are two NZAID funds that NZCFS as an NGO can apply to: .The KOHA fund we have used for most of our projects to date is for community development and ..the Humanitarian Action Fund (HAF) is for emergencies, relief and rehabilitation.

‘IS THIS THE ASIAN CENTURY?’
The following article is by Robert Cribb, Asian Studies Association of Australia's President, and ruminates on themes emerging from their bi-ennial conference in July 2008.

‘The economic rise of China, and behind it the looming economic presence of India, raise the prospect of a fundamental change in the balance of global power in the 21st century. With economic power will come, surely, strategic power. The military hegemony of the West, so evident during the last two centuries, is likely to give way to a more complex global order. Perhaps that order will be fragile and vulnerable to the kind of collapse that precipitated the First World War, perhaps it will be resilient, thanks to the systems of economic and technological inter-dependence which will make another World War as unthinkable as a war between the Australian states.

Much harder to forecast is the cultural and intellectual impact of the rise of Asia. Throughout the era of Western economic and strategic hegemony, there was a significant ‘backflow’ of Asian culture to the West in many different forms – from curry, to Chinoiserie, to gamelan, to Zen. Cultural historians have shown how easily complex societies recruit and absorb foreign cultural elements without being assimilated to foreign culture.

We can expect these processes to continue – the recent East Asian fad for things Korean may spread to the West, or it may give way to some new enthusiasm. The real question is not whether there will be intensified cultural interaction between Asia and the West. Of course there will be. Nor is there any doubt that Asia can beat the West at its own games, building better cars and more powerful weapons, devising better software and better pop music, distilling better brandy and better biofuels.

The consequence will be more and more Asian faces and institutions in the world’s various Alists and more and more canny Westerners fluent in Asian languages. But we also know that the West is far from finished as a global force for innovation. If ‘the Asian century’ means a global century in which Asia is a full participant, commensurate with its size and energy, then – within the constraints of resource depletion and environmental change – we can certainly expect an Asian century. In other words, the rise of Asia does not need to mean the fall of the West.

But the bigger question is whether Asia’s enhanced presence on the global stage will change the world’s ways of thinking. The rise of the West generated the new modes of thought about the nature of things and the character of humanity that we call modernity. Western societies themselves were transformed before their expansion transformed the rest of the world. Asian societies responded creatively to the Western challenge, but the most important and creative ideas coming out of Asia – from Gandhism to Maoism to the Grameen Bank (the first micro-credit bank) – were responses to the global agenda set originally by the West; they were not independent attempts to set new agendas for the future. A century in which Asia takes charge of the world’s thinking agendas? Now that would be an exciting change’.

 

JUNE

NEXT MEETING:
Friday 4 July at 7:30pm at the Hastings Council Chambers, Lyndon Road, Hastings
Hastings District Councillor Derek Brownrigg first visited Guilin and China in 1998 and has been back every year since, except for the year of SARS. He is a strong supporter of our sister city relationship, on the Hastings Guilin Board of Directors and a good friend of China. This year in April he took a group of family and friends to show them the places he enjoys and to introduce them to some of the delights of travelling in China.

Derek and friends will come to the next meeting and we will have a chance to hear some of their stories and adventures and to share our love of China with them. As its mid-winter and getting colder lets have a warm night with mulled wine and some supper. The Chinese Embassy has given us books on China and these will be available as well as an earthquake sales table.

LAST MEETING:
Red Sorghum is the first of many great films that Zhang Yimou has made, depicting the harsh rural life in the 1920s and 30’s. This is a family story which portrays the tumultuous period of modern Chinese history. Zhang uses colour particularly red hues and cinematography to great effect.

Dates for 2008:
Keep the first Friday night of the month for New Zealand China Friendship Society
August 1st Focus on the Olympics
September 5th No meeting this month
October 3rd Banquet to celebrate China’s National Day
October 2008 Branch Tour to Guangxi and Sichuan.

DVD Library – for Members Only
We now have a collection of over 40 titles in the collection. Red Sorghum, the film shown last month is also in our library for those who missed it. A new addition is Tibet in the Past a documentary based on a series shot before 1960 and features current interviews with the participants and eyewitnesses of historical events, experts and scholars. It recreates the social conditions in Tibet and the lives of ordinary Tibetans before 1959 and is fascinating viewing.

Books on China
The Chinese Embassy has donated to our branch and to Hawke’s Bay schools a wide range of books on topics such as culture, modern Chinese life and wildlife.
Building Sustainable Cities for Human Settlement looks at some of the new planning that is occurring in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai so that they are sustainable into the future.
Art in China looks at film, art, music and theatre with chapters such as Senior and Junior film directors Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke, and New Folk Music.
Countryside of China provides a detailed description and photographs of 34 villages, ranging from the Yongding earthen houses of the Hakka people to fishing toruism on Changdao Island.
These and more will be available at the next meeting for members.

BBC Reith Lectures 2008:
Chinese Vistas, by Professor Jonathan Spence
On Sunday afternoons after the 4 pm news the National Programme (radio) has been broadcasting this year’s thought provoking Reith Lectures. On 6th July the third in the series is American Dream - exploring the two centuries in which the United States gradually moved from being a dominant beacon of freedom and democracy for China, to a more demanding global rival during World War II and beyond (Pt 3 of 4, BBC).

NZCFS Sichuan Earthquake Appeal & Update
BEIJING (Xinhua) Updated: 2008-06-29 -- The death toll of China's massive earthquake increased by seven to 69,195 as of Sunday noon, the State Council Information Office said in a statement. The number of the injured stayed at 374,177 and people reported missing dropped to 18,404 after the 7.9 magnitude quake jolted Sichuan Province and neighbouring Shaanxi and Gansu regions on May 12. About 1.58 million tents, 4.87 million quilts, 14.1 million garments and 1.52 million tons of fuel oil had been sent to the quake-hit areas.

As of Saturday, relief workers had built 372,800 temporary houses and another 25,600 were being installed, while the materials for 47,600 of such shelters had arrived in the affected areas.

As of Sunday noon, dangers had been basically removed for 31 out of 34 quake-formed lakes in Sichuan. In the 24 hours that ended Sunday noon, 125 aftershocks were monitored in the quake zone. A total of 14,595 aftershocks had been detected since May 12.

NZCFS has launched an appeal to target the period of community reconstruction or rehabilitation phase. In the medium term massive work will be needed to help people and communities pick up the pieces and re-establish their lives. It is in this phase that we can contribute effectively as we have proven project experience. We aim to implement a project(s) before the onset of winter. Thank you to members who have made a personal donation. Please send donations to our Treasurer Jackie Peacock, 31/905 Gordon Road Hastings.