This Way Forward

So there used to be this term called 'airpocalypse' in China, a decade ago. In 2016, The New York Times even ran a piece about the issue dramatically titled: 'Life in China, Smothered by Smog.'

A decade later, an unprecedentedly short period for a nation of its GDP and size, China has brought these blue skies - cleaner air - across the country. Since 2013, the peak of the airpocalypse era, China has gro...

China is a nation of history, metropolis, art, industry, and, the focus of my career and expeditions - the wild: covering 42 percent of the country. In Europe, wilderness covers only 2 percent. But the percentage of wilderness itself doesn't tell the whole story: What about protection?

In 2021, China announced the creation of the first 5 of 49 planned national parks spanning land and sea. How does a national park func...

To avoid a global climate catastrophe we need to triple the amount of global renewable energy by 2030. About half of this is expected to come from solar. And, since 2006, the solar panels China has produced account for 70-80 percent of the total, global GW of the installed capacity today. But China is also getting the most pushback from the U.S. and Europe. What's happening here? Why is China leading and why, given the crisis ...

Five years ago, a paper published in one of the world's most prestigious peer-reviewed journals made headlines across the world. The authors used NASA satellite data to claim that at least one-quarter of the world's green leaf area increase since the 2000s was due to Chinese tree planting efforts. Some celebrated, some couldn't believe it. What went on here and are China's newly planted forests as successful as ...

Electric vehicles, or EVs, from China are the focus of a global debate. On the one hand, they are affordable, climate-friendly, and advancing technology at a breakneck pace. On the other, the U.S. has already slapped a 100 percent tariff on them and the European Union is moving towards tariffs up to 36.3 percent on the grounds that they harm local carmakers. During a climate crisis, how can necessary technology like EVs be so wrapp...

In April 2023, Andrea Papi became the first Italian in 150 years to be killed by a bear. Mauled while jogging, he became an unwitting victim of a well-meaning EU-funded rewilding program designed to reintroduce bears to the Italian Dolomites. This podcast explores where responsibility lies for his death and  how it has exacerbated a growing divide in Italy and beyond about the wisdom, safety and management of rewilding large c...

In this podcast, meet Uganda’s first wildlife vet and expert on mountain gorillas Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka. She’s not your average vet, her work has brought back Uganda’s wildlife from the brink of disaster and her winning formula is being adopted across Africa but this is just one of her many achievements. She says:
‘I would like to be remembered as someone who went outside their comfort zone to change the world and somebody who...

Zoë Reed’s English mother Susan met her Chinese father KC
Sun at college in the late 1940s. He had been brought over as the first ever
mature Chinese student funded by British United Aid to China; she was
one of only three women – from the cohort of 103. “She had a pretty good choice of which young man to fall in love with and told me there was a chap from Iceland she quite liked,” smiles Zoë. “But it was my father from...

Zi Lan Liao is one of the leading exponents of Chinese music. Her busy career on the international concert circuit has resulted in her being the most widely heard and best appreciated performer on the gu zheng worldwide. Her work includes Oscar-winning scores and modern fusion music – but her real passion is passing on her musical heritage to the British Chinese children of the Pagoda Arts Centre in Liverpool. 

In the late...

In this series of podcasts, the story of how a brutal policy of forced repatriation caused thousands of Chinese men to disappear from Liverpool at the end of World War II. This policy, orchestrated by the British government, would leave families traumatized and the community broken.

The deportations were shrouded in secrecy for decades, until declassification of Home Office files entitled “Compulsory repatriation of undesirable Chin...

In this series of podcasts, the story of how a brutal policy of forced repatriation caused thousands of Chinese men to disappear from Liverpool at the end of World War II. This policy, orchestrated by the British government, would leave families traumatized and the community broken.

During World War II, one in seven merchant seamen in the UK was Chinese. When the war was over, many returned to the lives they had built in Liverpool. ...

In this series of podcasts, the story of how a brutal policy of forced repatriation caused thousands of Chinese men to disappear from Liverpool at the end of World War II. This policy, orchestrated by the British government, would leave families traumatised and the community broken.

In 1866, shipping group Alfred Holt & Company was founded in Liverpool. It quickly became one of the UK’s biggest shipping merchants, building estab...

Seventy years ago, a small group of British businessmen and women traveled to China to unlock opportunities between the countries – they became known as the icebreakers. Jack Perry was one of the original Icebreakers. Growing up the son of poor Jewish immigrants in the devastating years before World War II, he was inspired to help China rebuild itself and fight poverty by encouraging international trade.  

Stephen Perry gr...

In this podcast, we meet the Guo family – presented by son and London-based vlogger Toto, who describes himself as "a child of two heritages'. His father Guo Yi grew up in a musical family in China and is a renowned sheng musician and his British mother Manda is a professional garden designer. As Toto says, "Yuanfen" or fate brought his parents together in the 1980s when Manda spotted Yi busking at South Kensing...

Frances Wood was born into a family of linguists – people who loved studying foreign languages. In her childhood and teens she mastered French and Spanish, so by the time she was thinking about what she wanted to study at university she was looking for a new challenge. She chose Chinese at Cambridge and in 1971 following her graduation, she was able to visit China with the first British youth delegation allowed to enter the country...

When Alex Hua Tian competed in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, he became the first ever Chinese eventing rider in Olympic history and also the youngest person to compete in his chosen field at the Games. Since then, Hua Tian has also represented China at both the Rio and Tokyo Olympics and was awarded both a bronze and a silver medal at two different Asian Games. In this podcast, Hua Tian talks candidly about his dual-heritage upbrin...

For more than 40 years, Michael Wood has brought history alive for viewers and readers all over the world. His recent Story of China films and documentary on Chinese poet Du Fu have charmed Chinese and international audiences alike – making him a household name in China. 

Michael Wood’s books and TV documentaries span many different periods of the past – from the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great to the Dark Ages in England and th...

The World Bank estimates that without urgent action, by 2050 we will be generating 3.4 billion tonnes of waste globally. So what can governments and citizens do to curb this trend? And whose responsibility is it? Our Trash or Treasure special will investigate which European countries are the biggest waste creators, which are leading the way in waste disposal and recycling – and we meet the people that are coming up with some surpri...