A life paralleled by a changing China

WHEN Professor Fan Hong returned to China after studying abroad, she stopped in the neighbourhood where she thought she had lived and wondered where her home had gone.

“I stood in the middle of the road. I couldn’t figure out where to go. So much change had happened, so much building and development. All the older housing just disappeared. I had to ring my parents and ask them to come and find me.”

Prof Fan had only been away a few years but the change that preceded that return visit in 1993 was extraordinary and the pace has accelerated since. Now director of the School of Asian Studies at University College Cork, she sees those changes through the eyes of both a Chinese national and a long-time resident of the West, finding them remarkable, promising and unsettling.