For centuries the West held a near-monopoly on global economic, political and cultural power. But in 2008, on the eve of the Olympics in Beijing, the world woke up to a huge pivot towards the East, and particularly towards China. Interest in this behemoth of a country and its population of 1.4bn, about whom so little was known, was at fever pitch: and for one brief moment, the Communist Party was giving journalists the chance to have almost free access to it.
That chance? I grabbed it: embarking on a 12,500km journey across the country, to build an archive of the innermost thoughts, dreams and fears of some of those who would inherit the country’s rising influence, and therefore have a disproportionate impact on how the world will one day look: namely, China’s youth.
Averaging 420-km a day for 30 days, I travelled all points of the compass to unearth as diverse a range of voices and experiences of those aged 18 to 30 as I could: rich and poor, educated and illiterate, student, businessman, migrant-worker, nomad. To each, I gave a piece of paper, told them to write whatever they wanted on it, and photographed them holding the results.
The portraits provide an extraordinary insight into and archive of the lives and minds of young Chinese at that exact moment in time resulting in iSpeakChina being seen by more than 18 million people.
The project is also currently unrepeatable, given how unlikely it is that travel and access to China on this scale will be granted again any time soon.
