The resilience needed in the post-lockdown world

In 2003, as a young graduate, I embarked on a journey that would change my life. After spending 10 weeks in Mongolia, trekking the Gobi desert, building medical clinics out of straw bales and doing environmental research, I travelled with a team of young people across the border on the Trans-Siberian train towards Beijing.

When I arrived in China, I fell in love. Not with a person, but with a country in transition. A bustling, lively, energetic place that fueled and inspired my sense of adventure….and seriously challenged my thinking in everything I had done or thought up until then.

China is a law unto itself. A vast, monolithic, totalitarian state in the eyes of the West, but a chaotic, tumbling mass of paradox, humanity and desperately kind people to anyone who has ever had the privilege of living there. There, I set up a non-profit, Hua Dan, that uses participatory theatre to work with migrant women and children, some of the millions of rural peasants, flocking into the cities on the eastern seaboard in search of job opportunities in factories, construction sites and the service industries. These are the people at the heart of globalisation, the individuals who have sacrificed so much, not just for China’s rise, but for the growth of the global economy that has made cheap goods available to the West and fueled the consumerism of…