The Correspondent, January – March 2021

FCC member Dr Jenny Pu, president of the Hong Kong Neuro-oncology Society and chair of the PVW Brain Tumour Foundation, talks to Rebecca Feng about how she became the first Hong Kong-born female neurosurgeon.

A large, looming hospital planned to be built on historic Bishop Hill, adjacent to the FCC, has been curtailed by the Town Planning Board.

FCC member Angus Forsyth has been described as having “the eye of one of the greatest living collectors of Chinese jade”. Here he talks with his old friend Jonathan Sharp about his latest book.

One in every four of us will struggle with mental health issues at some time, and FCC members Nic and Becky Gaunt decided to raise awareness of the issue in a creative and unique way. Kate Whitehead reports.

Take a look at the club’s newest members.

When a theatre company in the UK needed a story to introduce the Second World War to schoolchildren, Clare Hollingworth And the Scoop of the Century was born. Absent member Peter Cordingley and Sue Brattle report.

Australia suffered a slight slip down the World Press Freedom Index in 2019, largely because its media ownership is concentrated in so few hands. Sian Powell explains why.

Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist whose criticism of his government landed him in jail in 2018. But that hasn’t silenced him, as Rob Gerhardt discovered when he caught up with him in New York.

When artist Pam Williams first came to Hong Kong in 1996, she was armed with a sketchbook and a fax machine to record the build-up to the handover. Now she’s back and drawing daily life around the city and at the Club.

The latest group of members to join the FCC is, as always, an interesting bunch. The membership committee meets regularly to go through applications and is always impressed by the diversity of people who want to join the Club.

Derek Maitland’s photographs from Vietnam were featured in the FCC’s Wall Exhibition in September 2018.

The FCC’s archives may have dropped down the Club’s list of priorities in recent years, but they’re not forgotten. Carsten Schael makes a passionate case for bringing them centre stage again.

Despite suffering from red-green colour blindness, Ernest Chang has produced a collection of photographs taken inside the original Blue House that won him wide media acclaim in September 2017.

Xyza Bacani is a Filipino street photographer and a Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow, known for her stunning B&W images of Hong Kong street life.

Professional photographers in the past decade or so have had to struggle with declining markets for their photos as publications around the world have faded in the face of online competition.

Student protesters were getting increasingly gun-shy as jail sentences were handed out during January.

China has moved from censoring domestic and foreign news media to cracking down on academic publications as well.

Pollution and over-use of the Ganges is seeing one of the world’s great rivers heading in the direction of other East Asian rivers that have been made unusable at a time when water quality and shortages are becoming critical.

A Hong Kong lad and his mates have put their bodies and minds to the ultimate test and completed one of the world’s great physical challenges: rowing unaided for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic inspired by two FCC families.

The Main Bar might not be somewhere you would expect to find leading sportsmen, but over Macau Grand Prix week in November it became a regular haunt for some of the world’s leading riders and drivers.

Journalist Luke Hunt’s second book “The Punji Trap” pries open the life of Pham Xuan An, the Viet Cong spy whose work for the Communists was a major factor in the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975.

Here, we introduce some of our newest members – if you see them at the bar, say hello and buy them a drink.

The viral Chinese pollution documentary ‘Under the Dome’ has disappeared behind a wall of, no not smog – censorship. Created by former CCTV anchor and newswoman Chai Jing this documentary has been compared to Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth. Greening …

The now ubiquitous yellow umbrellas surged around the Hong Kong government offices to mark the first anniversary of the pro-democracy Occupy movement which shut down  central Hong Kong for 79 days last year. While Occupy failed to achieve its goals, th …

Professor Johannes Chan, speaking at a Human Rights Press Awards fundraising luncheon on December 10, addressed the cloud of controversy that has followed him this year, calling into question the larger issue of academic freedom in Hong Kong. The uproa …