This Way Forward

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...

Trash or Treasure is a season of podcasts finding out what happens to all the stuff Europeans throw away – a surprisingly fascinating journey around the rubbish heaps of Europe, looking at some of the innovations helping us to reduce our waste and even turn it into something useful. 

In this episode we’re taking a closer look at where our waste goes when we’re hoping it’s going to be recycled. When we throw our plastics, metals or p...

Recycling – and reuse – has been practiced in some European countries for decades. And that has given rise to some brilliant creative thinking as to how to lessen the waste burden, and to use the things that some might see as useless in whole new ways.

In this episode, we've scoured the continent to bring you some of the most ingenious new solutions for reusing and recycling waste as we unveil the best ideas for turning trash i...

The UN estimates that each year, we throw away almost a billion tonnes of food. That's an almost inconceivable amount, and one which has given rise to increasing innovation and activism. It's not just about not emptying our plates or clearing out our fridge before the food goes off: one estimate has it that a third of perfectly edible food is thrown away at source simply because it looks misshapen or unappealing.

In this e...

Clothes. We all wear them. That's billions of items being worn every day, billions of items being made each year – and billions of items being thrown out.

The environmental impact is huge – in the UK alone, 300,000 tonnes of textile waste ends up being sent to landfill each year. And that is a small fraction of the worldwide figure. Less than one percent of material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing at the ...

Death is the final act of our lives, and it can be environmentally devastating: every cremation uses the equivalent of about 40 backyard-barbecue propane canisters and creates one tonne of carbon dioxide, while traditional burials eat up the land and can leach chemicals into the soil. 

In this episode, we explore the increasing choice of alternative methods that are appearing for disposing of our mortal remains – from chemical-free ...

As we move into 2021, our CGTN Europe correspondents talk to us about an unprecedented year of change.. 

COVID-19 changed our lives forever, and across Europe each country experienced it differently. We speak to five reporters who were on the frontlines reporting on the virus, and ask them how they tried to make sense of an epidemic that would change the world forever. 

We start with Toni Waterman who arrived in Brussels in March. Sh...