Happenings Archive

20,000 training centers, 70,000 football pitches and 50 million players by 2050. That’s just the beginning of China’s long march towards its goal of becoming a “football superpower”, as the media
have already called it. President Xi Jinping wants to qualify for, host and, eventually, win a World Cup and the Chinese Football Association has been tasked with trying to turn that dream into a
reality. Football fever is spreading across the country, with new football centers opening, offering business opportunities for many -and not only those in in China.
But behind the headlines, what state is Chinese football really in today? Is ‘football superpower’ status just around the corner, or an unattainable goal?

Three experts on Chinese football will join the first event in what wehope will be a football series:

-Rowan Simons, Chairman of ClubFootball, Beijing’s first joint-venture football club
-Bai Qiang, Entrepreneur, Creator of Sport8, an app designed to help introduce football to the lives of young Chinese people
-Feng Tao, CEO of Shankai Sports, one of China’s premier sports marketing firms

The event will be moderated by Calum McLeod, China Correspondent for The Times.

Free to FCCC members, 40 RMB for members of the Bookworm, 80RMB on the door for non-members

The dynamic artistic centers of China are producing some of the most interesting and compelling contemporary art of our time. In 2011, Sydney writer and art educator Luise Guest began a series of interviews with Chinese contemporary artists. As she went from studio to studio, and gallery to gallery, she began to question why the extraordinary female artists she encountered were not more widely known. From this experience, her book ‘Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China’ was born. Luise realized that, despite the continuing international interest in China and in Chinese art, there are fascinating stories as yet insufficiently told: the stories of women artists. It was Mao Zedong who said “Women hold up half the sky”. Her book reveals the work and lives of the artists of three generations, working in diverse media, who are doing just that. She spent the next 4 years travelling to China many times, visiting the studios of female artists in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi’an and Chengdu. From all of these encounters she selected (with great difficulty) the 32 artists who feature in the book. The book is launched in Beijing with an allied ‘pop-up’ exhibition of some of the artists, at Red Gate Gallery on 23-25 April.

50RMB, 40RMB (Members)