Time Out Heroes Beijing - Travel, Design & Campaigner Heroes

To celebrate 40 years of Time Out worldwide, we invited 40 of our heroes to a party. We gave them champagne, told them to be themselves and sat back as they did their thing. This is what happened.

One-woman juggernaut
Liang Zi

We’ve never met anyone with more energy than Beijing-born explorer and photographer Liang Zi. In 2000 and 2001, she travelled solo across huge swathes of Africa, living in tribes in places like Lesotho and Sierra Leone for up to five months at a time. A respected photographer and filmmaker, she is now finishing a documentary about life in India. She describes her perfect day in Beijing as bike riding in the morning, rock climbing at lunchtime, swimming in the afternoon and meeting friends in the evening. During our shoot we could barely make her keep still long enough for us to  take photos.

Liang’s hero: Sanmao, a Taiwanese female writer who travelled around the world and wrote several famous essays in the 1980s.

Chinese design hope
Xander Zhou

Xander Zhou is a rare thing – a young Chinese designer who is making waves in the international fashion world. Having only started his eponymous menswear label last year, Zhou was a big hit at the 2007 London Fashion Week, and the 26-year-old’s designs have been worn by the likes of British singer MIKA and Chinese actresses Zhou Xun and Xu Jinglei.

Zhou studied fashion in Holland and worked with Dutch designer Jeroen van Tuyl, but he always planned to return to China, and set up shop in Jianwai SOHO last year. His menswear range, which covers both everyday items and haute couture, features classic cutting and tailoring with a few twists such as slashed shirts and jackets made with heavy fabrics, PVC and silk.

‘Being in China is important to me,’ he says. ‘But then again, my fashion is international. I don’t want to be seen just as “a Chinese designer”, but as a good one.’

Zhou’s hero: Yves Saint Laure

Beijing to Baghdad 
Chen Si

Chen Si was a history student reading about the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2004 when he decided that he had to go during his summer holiday. ‘It was a hot topic here but there weren’t actually any Chinese journalists there, which seemed wrong,’ he says. ‘I wanted to know what people there were thinking.’

He got there on a 14-hour bus journey from Jordan to find that most of the reporters there had armoured cars, bullet-proof vests, translators, bodyguards and guns. ‘The other journalists were surprised to see a Chinese person, let alone one with no protection,’ he says. ‘A few days later, they saw me and said “How are you still alive?”

But gauche as he was, Chen’s reports for the Beijing News and Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily made a huge impact in China. He interviewed hundreds of Iraqis and wrote reports which went against the prevailing view in China that the Iraqis were wholly against the US invasion. ‘Some people accused me of being pro- this or anti- that. I just say that I’m pro-truth.’

Chen’s hero: Buddha.

First class citizen
Jonathan Hursh

Three years ago, Jonathan Hursh founded Compassion for Migrant Children (CMC), which has since grown to be China’s biggest and most influential NGO supporting migrant workers. CMC provides a huge range of services, from after-school activities to teacher training and vocational training with 16-20-year-olds, all run with impressive professionalism and purpose.

‘We want migrant kids to be born not thinking that they’re second class citizens,’ he says.
Hursh’s hero: Paul Farmer, a doctor and anthropologist who has proposed preferential healthcare for the poor.
 

Mardi great
Li Yinhe

Professor Li Yinhe is the sociologist, sexologist and activist who has done more than anyone in China to promote the rights of homosexuals. The former newspaper editor sits on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and has unsuccessfully proposed the legalisation of gay marriages three times. She has also proposed decriminalising orgies and prostitution.

Li’s hero: Fei Xiaotong, a pioneering Chinese sociologist who researched birth control in Chinese villages. 

Mr Great Wall
William Lindesay 

William Lindesay first saw the Great Wall on a map as an 11-year-old in 1967, and vowed to go one day despite his headmaster’s advice that it was impossible. In 1987, he walked 2,470 kilometres across the Great Wall from Jiayuguan to Shanhaiguan, getting arrested nine times and being deported once along the way.

He has since been a crucial campaigner for the Wall’s protection, forming the International Friends of the Great Wall, writing influential books on its disintegration, and writing letters which have resulted in new protection laws.
Lindesay’s hero: William Edgar Geil, who likely became the first man to traverse the entire Great Wall at the turn of the 20th Century.

Superwoman
Wang Xingjuan 

Having just retired from her work as an editor and women’s rights researcher in 1988, Wang Xingjuan decided not to don her pyjamas and head to the park, but to set up the Maple Womens’ Psychological Counselling Centre, one of the first NGOs in China, and the first dedicated to women’s issues.

The centre has done a huge amount of campaigning on issues like domestic violence, sexual harassment and equality in the workplace, and provides hotlines, counselling services and a whole team devoted to supporting single mums.

‘When the economic reforms came in in the 1980s, a lot of people were left behind, especially women,’ says Wang. ‘A lot of those issues are the same now. This just felt like something I had to do.’ The centre, like Wang, is still going strong, and has been an inspiration not just to many women but many other NGOS.

Wang’s hero: All my heroes are female political heroes like Soong Qingling and Wu Yi.

Hate-love relationship
The Fuwas 

The Fuwas are our heroes for prompting the kind of massive swing in public opinion that most politicians would kill for. Two months before the Olympics, if you asked most people what they thought of Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini, most would have used terms like ‘irritating’, ‘vapid’ and ‘stupid’.

But then the Games started and as a city we fell in love with them – the big inflatable suits, the funny little legs, the way they danced; we loved it all. One friend said that, apart from watching Usain Bolt win the 100 metres, her favourite Olympic moment was watching the Fuwas chest-bumping each other at the boxing.

Our other Olympic heroes: Beijing-born Zhang Yining, whose gold made her the most successful table tennis player in history, is a definite hero – sadly, she was unavailable for our shoot. In the Paralympics, swimmer Du
Jianping was a star, taking four gold medals in the men’s S3 class. Congratulations to both Chinese teams for topping the medals tables.  

The volunteers may not have had the answers to every question, but they were heroes for their sheer friendliness, even as many reported putting in 12-hour shifts.

And thanks to former Beijing mayor Liu Qi, who led the original bid, headed up BOCOG and made opening and closing ceremony speeches far less boring than those of IOC President Jacques Rogge.
 

The green machine
Ma Jun

With the increasing worries about China’s environmental impact, water pollution specialist Ma Jun is one of the
world’s most important environmentalists. The former journalist made his name by writing the shocking book China’s Water Crisis in 1999, which Time magazine described as ‘the country’s first great environmental call to arms’.

He has since founded the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which has done a huge amount of effective lobbying of the Government, Chinese companies and multinationals. Among many other things, it publishes the China Water Pollution Map (ipe.org.cn), which names and shames the companies which pollute the most. If companies want to be removed from the map, they need to agree to be audited by the institute, when they will be encouraged to agree to sign a green charter.

Ma says that over 70 companies have voluntarily been audited and that many have accepted the institute’s protocols. He has also encouraged many companies to agree not to use suppliers if they are heavy polluters.

The impressive and pragmatic Ma says: ‘Most companies don’t want to destroy the environment, but they are victims of mechanisms which allow people to cut corners to win contracts. We need to create a level playing field where that’s not possible.’ Ma’s heroes: The ancient philosophers Confucius and Laozi.

Giving lawyers a good name
Wang Canfa 

For nine years, Wang Canfa has run the Beijing-based non-profit Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. He has been working on environmental laws since 1983 (the first was passed in 1979), but realised that the laws could not be executed properly if victims of pollution couldn’t sue.

‘I saw a story in a newspaper of a farmer who lost 400 ducks because a brewery up the river had dumped liquid waste. The man wrote to the brewery to ask for compensation but they refused, and he couldn’t afford a trial. I decided to help the man, and eventually he won 400,000RMB. Cases like that made this something I had to do.’

The centre has since pursued over 100 cases and won some notable victories, including blocking an animal testing lab in a Beijing neighbourhood, having a polluting steel factory moved and winning a $730,000USD ruling against a Shandong chemical plant.

Wang’s hero: Martin Luther King