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The 4-month "Walk to Beijing" campaign in 1997 was
organized by Sowers Action, a
registered Hong Kong charity with a mandate to raise educational
funds for impoverished
areas in rural China, where an average annual income per capita
is 400 yuans (US$50).
The 1997 Walk raised HK$20 million (US$2.5 million), which will
be applied as direct
aid to needy schools and children in the five provinces the Walk
traversed. Sowers Action
(P.O.Box 23302, Wanchai, HK; Fax:852/2597 4731) denies that "Walk
to Beijing" was
a celebratory event for the colony's reunification with China.
Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Journey
to Beijing* is the first
documentary feature by writer-director Evans Yiu Shing Chan,
whose fiction feature credits include To Liv(e)(1991) and Crossings
(1994). Chan is, wrote Barry Long in Hong Kong Babylon (1997,
Faber & Faber), " the most intellectual of the current
crop of Hong Kong directors." Gina Marchetti, author of
Romance and the "Yellow Peril" (1993, University of
California Press) describes Chan's films as addressing "issues
that find only a marginal voice in Hong Kong and the US...[creating
a new type of] transnational, transcultural discourse."**
Chan, also known as a veteran cultural critic, is the author
of The Last of the Chinese, ***a collection of critical essays
on dance, cinema and literature.
*[Website] http://members.aol.com/evanschan/films.html
** [Marchetti, Postmodern Culture] http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.198/8.2marchetti
*** http://www.chinesebooks.net/bookcard.asp?PubName=4a0418&ID=000-0298928 |