The Making of Chinese Boxing
How the show came about
We all remember March 2020.
When Covid struck I was hoping for a busy year of acting. I had just been ‘recalled’ by the casting director for a promising theatre job, and I was close to getting the role in a one-man show for a producer based in the South of England. Then it all stopped.
In the early days when we were still allowed to drop by for a cup of tea, a close friend who works in TV and I swapped sad stories about cancelled work. She tried to buck me up with the advice: ‘Now you’ve got time, you should write your own one-man show. Every actor has one up their sleeve.’
She suggested prominent writers, political figures, actors from the recent past, the sort of solo show where a chap sits in a chair and tells funny stories. There’s never any shortage of material.
I thought I had a better idea. China is a hot topic. I lived there for 18 years. I know the country, culture and society, and a fair bit of its history. Why not create a one-man show about China.
It was a news item that inspired me: a report on how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretly supports and encourages ‘online trolls’ to attack its perceived enemies, especially foreign ones, but no less its own citizens who dare to speak out of turn. As with so much the CCP does, they are clever about it. The trolls are trained not to directly attack or abuse their targets but to subtly distract the discussion from the unsavoury topic – unsavoury to the CCP that is. Occasionally they are given free rein to take down the victim and they fire up a ‘human flesh search engine’, a quaint Chinese internet term for hunting someone down in person. The trolls have a nickname, the ‘Wu Mao Bang’, the Fifty Cent Army, because that is supposedly what they get paid for each online post. And while the CCP supports, encourages and enables them, the Fifty Cent Army is kept at arms’ length should it be necessary to disown it. Then there are the hackers who take things to another level. They get paid more than fifty cents.
It was the term Fifty Cent Army that made me think of the Boxers, the peasant rebels co-opted by the Qing dynasty to drive out foreign interlopers, invaders even, in the early 1900s. The government took advantage of its own dissatisfied citizens and in this case sent them to their deaths. And when it went wrong, they disavowed them.
I had an concept: tell the story of the Boxers and the foreigners and the last days of the Qing dynasty and see if I could draw a parallel with the current situation between the West and China. I knew the story of the Boxers. Years ago I had read Peter Fleming’s (brother of Ian and a much better writer) ‘The Siege of Peking’. I dug out my copy and re-read it. I purchased more books (see here for a short bibliography) and did my research online, as one does.
I did not have to look far for my three characters. They all but wrote themselves. I think they are perfect. And three is the ideal number, two polar opposites and one in the middle to balance. It is a fitting coincidence and irony that the book that gave me the most material is called ‘History in Three Keys’, see the image above.
