The professional association of foreign journalists in Beijing.

The time has come, the FCCC board has decided, to give the monthly Happy Hours a fresh coat of paint and a bit of zip and we are starting the new season today, Thursday, April 11th, in the Press Bar at The St. Regis hotel. 

The bar is so named because the hotel was built on the site of the old International Club, whose bar was a favourite haunt of foreign correspondents back in the day. We thought it would be fun to pick up on that tradition. So come and breathe new life into an FCCC social tradition and bring your friends. Cheap booze in very hospitable surroundings: what more could you want?

The Happy Hour will stretch for two hours, from 7.00 pm until 9.00 pm.

BRING YOUR FCCC MEMBERSHIP CARD! WITHOUT IT THERE WILL BE NO PRICE DISCOUNTS!

A discussion with Richard Burger, author of Behind the Red Door: Sex in China, about how China’s sexual revolution took off and where it is heading.

Extramarital sex has soared in China’s cities in recent years, yet many husbands expect their wives to be a virgin. Prostitution is cracked down on periodically yet is available everywhere. Richard Burger chronicles sex in China from ancient times through complete blackout during Mao’s era to present day, as the tug-of-war continues between liberal Western influences and traditional Chinese values.
Topics will include sex in ancient China, China’s prostitution industry, China’s gay population, “yellow fever” and the role of the Internet in the country’s sexual transformation.

DATE: Apr 16 (Tuesday)
TIME: 3-4:30pm
VENUE: Embassy of Belgium, Sanlitun Lu 6
ENTRANCE: free to FCCC members, 80 RMB on the door to non-members
REGISTRATION: email fcccadmin@gmail.com

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Richard Burger has more than 20 years of journalism and public relations experience. He started off as an indexer for the New York Times, back when newspapers were indexed manually. He worked as a business reporter for the Fairchild News Syndicate in D.C. and as the news reporter for a Maryland radio station. He managed public relations programs for both the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo, and lived in greater China for nearly eight years. He blogs at The Peking Duck (www.pekingduck.org), which he launched in 2002. It was one of the first blogs dealing exclusively with China.

Jamil Anderlini will provide analysis of this high political drama  and why it matters for the world’s second largest economy and the rest of the world.

His book, “The Bo Xilai Scandal”, documents the extraordinary tale around the rise and fall of Bo Xilai, the disgraced former politician and contender for the top leadership of the Communist Party. Weaving together lurid details and political context, Anderlini provides a compelling account of the popular politician’s fall, brought about by his wife’s murder of a British businessman, and involving the most serious defection attempt in recent Communist Party history.

DATE: Apr 11 (Thursday)
TIME: 2:30-4pm
VENUE: Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Liangmahe Nanlu 4
ENTRANCE: free to FCCC members, 80 RMB on the door to non-members
REGISTRATION: email fcccadmin@gmail.com

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Jamil Anderlini has been Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times since February 2011 and has worked as a reporter in China for more than a decade. In 2010 Anderlini was named Journalist of the Year at the prestigious Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Editorial Excellence Awards, and won the Best Digital Award at the Amnesty International Media Awards for his coverage of Chinese petitioners seeking justice in Beijing.

In 2013 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and short-listed for Foreign Reporter of the Year at the Press Awardsin the UK. He is the author of a recent ebook, published by the FT and Penguin and entitled “The Bo Xilai Scandal” (2012).

No other country has gone through the leap to prosperity that China has over the past thirty years. With modes of behaviour becoming blurred and options endless for China’s new rich, it’s not surprising that many of them are seeking new guides to tell them how to behave with the westernised global elite they seek to join.

Sara Jane Ho, founder and principal of China’s first high-end finishing school, Institute Sarita, tells you what her students really want when they come to learn etiquette.

DATE: Apr 10 (Wednesday)
TIME: 1:30-3pm
VENUE: Embassy of Switzerland, Sanlitun East 5th Street 3
ENTRANCE: free to FCCC members, 80 RMB on the door to non-members
REGISTRATION: email fcccadmin@gmail.com

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Sara Jane Ho is the founder and principal of Institute Sarita.
A native of Hong Kong, Ms. Ho, then attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in USA. She holds a BA degree in English Literature and Government from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Ms. Ho holds a diploma in International Etiquette & Protocol from Institut Villa Pierrefeu, a traditional finishing school in Switzerland. It was there that she was inspired to bring the art of international savoir-vivre and etiquette to China, bridging East and West .Ms. Ho is the youngest person on the Forbes list of“Future Women in the Mix in Asia: 12 to Watch” in 2013.

Take a peek into the opaque world of China’s officialdom with best-selling author Wang Xiaofang. Even though new “house aunties”, “house sisters” or “watch brothers” crop up at least once a week, the inner workings and doings of Chinese officialdom are about as clear as Beijing’s “pristine” sky on a sunny winter day. Wang Xiaofang, once a bureaucratic hotshot himself, not only had the opportunity to see it from the inside, he also decided to share his experiences with the world. And it is so much more than just the corruption (yawn, yawn…)! There is factional infighting, political horse-trading, mean accusations and the equally cynical a** kissing.

While we wait impatiently for a Chinese version of the “House of Cards”, let’s hear from best-selling author Wang Xiaofang, who can surely tell us all about it….

DATE: Mar 14 (Thursday)
TIME: 5-6:30pm
VENUE: Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Liangmahe Nanlu 4 – 荷兰王国驻华大 使馆 – 北京, 中 华人民共和国北京市亮马河 南路4号, phone: 85320200
ENTRANCE: free to FCCC members, 65 RMB on the door to non-members
REGISTRATION: at fcccadmin@gmail.com

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Wang Xiaofang was born in 1963 in Shenyang and was Shenyang Deputy Mayor Ma Xiangdong’s private secretary from 1997 to 1999. Ma became infamous for gambling away millions of RMB, all of which came from public coffers, in Macau casinos. He was later sentenced to death for his crimes. Wang Xiaofang was found innocent of any involvement in his boss’s misdeeds and left the civil service in 1999 to begin a career as a writer. He has published thirteen political novels in China. His novels have always been bestsellers in China, and “The Civil Servants Notebook,” which has been translated by Eric Abrahamsen and published by Penguin in 2012, is his first book to be published in English. Although Wang has been hailed by some as an “anti-corruption” writer, others have criticized him for using his earlier insider position as the “Mayor’s Secretary”—this is literally the title of one of his novels—to profit from official corruption in China.