BBC Soft Power and Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Anna Chen – 11 June 2025, BBC and China

With soft power ripping off its velvet glove and ruling the cultural sphere with an iron fist, the BBC is doggedly determined to keep China’s image in the dark. After a brief “Golden Age” (when I was allowed to make pioneering radio programmes for the beeb), we’re back to the bad old days of Othering and demonisation.

If you’re Chinese, you can be an Empire tool. Or invisible. Or backward. 

I’m invisible. Here’s backward. 

This week’s BBC Radio 4 serialisation of the newly published book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, by Barbara Demick, bludgeons the audience’s perception of the rising superpower into shape by placing it in a dark past. 

Set in the early 2000s, it tells the story of the former LA Times Beijing bureau chief’s adoption* of one of separated twin girls. It’s written as a heart-warming tale of civilised Americans heroically battling against China’s “brutal one-child policy,” fines, threats of violence and orphanages, and features abandoned girl children and US saviours. (See the Amazon book blurb.)

Listening to episode two on the radio yesterday, I couldn’t believe I was hearing so many clichés. There I was in my kitchen, minding my own business as I fixed lunch, when it was as if Doctor Who’s TARDIS had heaved into view. But it was only the sound of the BBC time machine dragging us back to a Cold War era when everyone knew their place and Empire was unassailable. 

In the vacuum of Chinese representation since Trump1’s accelerated US hostilities against the talented rival, the book’s anachronistic image of shadowy fixers and inhumane bureaucrats becomes the one that sticks as an ever-present now. You’d never know that China has moved on spectacularly. 

If this assessment sounds harsh, remember there are little girls in China right now who America’s Marco Rubio, the entire US establishment, Nato’s Mark Rutte and a whole raft of European warmongers are sticking in the MIC’s crosshairs as they press for war on the successful superpower. The BBC’s role is to ease the public into acceptance.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove revisits a key theme of the cheesy 1963 Hollywood movie, 55 Days At Peking, in which Western saviours rescue China the child from barbarians. Invading military officer Chuck Heston juts his jaw manfully at the Boxer rebels and David Niven arches a nonchalant eyebrow as they do battle against dark forces. 

I wrote a review of it in 2008 and concluded the movie sucked. Any writing that seriously has this white rescue scenario at its centre (I can’t bring myself to call it a heart) also sucks. Especially if written years later when we are all supposed to be so much more sophisticated regarding these stereotypes.

BOXERS COME UP SHORT IN CHINA

That was my favourite headline in the review.

I also wrote this: “China as a pretty loveable malleable child in need of rescue by the paternal force of US imperialism. At the end, as Lewis is riding out of the city at the head of his troops, he bends down to Teresa. ‘Here, take my hand’. And she rides off on the back of his horse — presumably into a future where she’ll learn fast, trounce him at manufacturing, and poison his dogs and his kids with tainted pet-food, toothpaste and leaded toys. Heh, heh! And serves him right.”

The BBC should try producing a drama set against the recent exodus of millions of American TikTok refugees to the Red Note Xiaohongshu app where two cultures met and gained illumination in a dramatic epiphany. It was a moving, heart-warming, educational and entertaining resistance against oppression: one big love story waiting to be told. I may even write it. After all, my BBC drama, Red Guard, Yellow Submarine, is well overdue for a follow-up.

Movie watch: 55 Days At Peking and the China narrative

EDIT 12 June 2025: *Correction – Barbara Demick worked with the adopting couple and was personally involved but wasn’t the distressed mother herself.  Why is this outdated story being touted now when America is gunning for China and there’s a huge anti-China propaganda budget?

Of all the contemporary stories that could be told about China one hears nothing. It’s a complete info lockdown on modern China, which is why I’ve pointed out for years that rendering us invisible turns us into a blank canvas onto which any monsters can be projected. Just like this radio serialisation. (I’ll never read the book.)