Eric Arthur Blair was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
Coolie was a pejorative term used for low-wage labourers, typically those of Indian or Chinese descent.
Paul Mackintosh Foot was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Jonathan Saul Freedland is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
British Chinese, also known as Chinese British or Chinese Britons, are people of Chinese – particularly Han Chinese – ancestry who reside in the United Kingdom, constituting the second-largest group of Overseas Chinese in Western Europe after France.
John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, was influential. He lived in France for over fifty years.
Hukou is a system of household registration used in mainland China. The system itself is more properly called "huji", and has origins in ancient China; hukou is the registration of an individual in the system. A household registration record officially identifies a person as a permanent resident of an area and includes identifying information such as name, parents, spouse and date of birth. A hukou can also refer to a family register in many contexts since the household register is issued per family, and usually includes the births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and moves, of all members in the family.
A migrant worker is a person who migrates within a home country or outside it to pursue work. Migrant workers usually do not have an intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work.
Orlando Guy Figes is a British historian and writer. He was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2022.
The Information Research Department (IRD) was a secret Cold War propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda, provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers, and to use weaponised information, but also disinformation and "fake news", to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. Soon after its creation, the IRD broke away from focusing solely on Soviet matters and began to publish pro-colonial propaganda intended to suppress pro-independence revolutions in Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Middle East. The IRD was heavily involved in the publishing of books, newspapers, leaflets and journals, and even created publishing houses to act as propaganda fronts, such as Ampersand Limited. Operating for 29 years, the IRD is known as the longest-running covert government propaganda department in British history, the largest branch of the Foreign Office, and the first major anglophone propaganda offensive against the USSR since the end of World War II. By the 1970s, the IRD was performing military intelligence tasks for the British Military in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.
Arturo Barea Ogazón was a Spanish journalist, broadcaster and writer. After the Spanish Civil War, Barea left with his wife Ilsa Barea to live in exile in England where he died.
Toby Harnden is a British-American author and journalist who was awarded the Orwell Prize for Books in 2012. He is the author of First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11, published by Little, Brown in September, 2021. He spent almost 25 years working for British newspapers, mainly as a foreign correspondent. From 2013 until 2018, he was Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times. He previously spent 17 years at The Daily Telegraph, based in London, Belfast, Washington, Jerusalem and Baghdad, finishing as US Editor from 2006 to 2011. The book's title is a reference to paramilitary officer Johnny Micheal Spann, a member of the CIA's Team Alpha, whose eight members became the first Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks of 2001. He is the author of two previous books: Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh (1999) and Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story of Britain's War in Afghanistan (2011). He was reporter and presenter of the BBC Panorama Special programme Broken by Battle about suicide and PTSD among British soldiers, broadcast in 2013.
Internal migration in the People's Republic of China is one of the most extensive in the world according to the International Labour Organization. This is because migrants in China are commonly members of a floating population, which refers primarily to migrants in China without local household registration status through the Chinese Hukou system. In general, rural-urban migrants are most excluded from local educational resources, citywide social welfare programs and many jobs because of their lack of hukou status. Migrant workers are not necessarily rural workers; they can simply be people living in urban areas with rural household registration.
Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour is a non-fiction book by UK-based journalist and author Hsiao-Hung Pai, first published in 2008. It is about the lives of migrant workers from China in the UK. The book was shortlisted for the 2009 Orwell Prize and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. To research the book, Pai went undercover.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a staunch believer in democratic socialism and member of the anti-Stalinist Left, modelled the Britain under authoritarian socialism in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism and on the very similar practices of both censorship and propaganda in Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.
On 23 April 2005, Mi Gao Huang Chen, a British Chinese restaurant owner, was attacked by a large group of youths outside the Chinese takeaway he ran in Scholes, Wigan, Greater Manchester. He died of his injuries on 28 April at the age of 41. The police arrested 23 people in connection with the attack, four of whom were eventually convicted of murder.
The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing is a British literary award presented for the best radical book published each year, with radical book defined as one that is "informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns" – in other words, ideologically left books. The award believes itself to be the UK's only left-wing only book prize. Books must be written, or largely written by authors or editors normally living in the UK, or international books available for purchase in the UK. Winning authors receive £1,000. The Bread and Roses Award is sponsored by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers and has no corporate sponsorship.
Chinese Whispers may refer to:
James Bloodworth is an English journalist and writer. He has authored two full length books, also writing articles for newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. Much of Bloodworth's work concerns the struggles of working class people, yet he has been praised by both sides of the political spectrum. He lives in London.
Angry White People: Coming Face-to-face with the British Far-Right is a non-fiction book by London-based writer Hsiao-Hung Pai. It was published by Zed Books in 2016. The book is about racism amongst Britain's white working class, with a focus on the English Defence League. The foreword was written by British poet Benjamin Zephaniah.
