Footprints

​Dr. Johnny Ng Kit-chong is a self-made entrepreneur and a national political advisor based in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Having integrated his career path with the development of the country in the past 20 years, he has been actively encouraging Hong Kong youths to closely combine their personal growth with the development of the motherland. He also expresses much hope in building Hong Kong as a “cultural passport” of China in the future.

Andrew Yao Cho-fai, originally from Hong Kong, is a successful businessman based on the Chinese mainland and an avid promoter of youth exchanges between the two sides. Twenty-five years on since the return of Hong Kong to China, Yao says the intense entrepreneurship innate to Hong Kong culture promises the city will continue to succeed in the years to come.

​Twenty-eight year old Yang Jinlong is a professional car painter from eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. In August 2015, the young man made a breakthrough for the country at the WorldSkills Competition in Brazil by winning China’s first gold medal in car painting. How did he achieve this and what has he been doing since becoming a world-class car painter? Join us to find out.

​Chen Jia, 43 years old, is a train technician whose responsibility is to ensure the safety of cross-border railway transportation between Russia and China. An awkward experience in the early stage of her career motivated her to challenge herself to become a sharp-eye train inspector and eventually the head of an all-female train inspecting team.

Guo Yunbo, previously a Peking University-educated scientific researcher, has been devoting himself to the cultivation of a new generation of outstanding technicians at a vocational school in central China’s Henan Province since 2016. As almost 12 million youngsters get ready to take Gaokao—the annual national college entrance examination this week, the educator calls upon them and their parents to rethink the purpose of education and consider vocational training as an alternative path.

​Li Wenjie, a Beijing-based researcher of comparative literature, discovered her interest in Denmark’s literature giant Hans Christian Andersen back in the 2010s. Since then, she has been dedicating herself to the research and promotion of children’s literature in China while tracing how Andersen’s works were introduced to the country.

​Bronze holds a special meaning in Chinese culture. The Bronze Age, starting around 1,700 BC, has had profound impact on the development of the Chinese civilization. Even today, artistic bronzeware still impresses many people, and one particular craftsman of bronze art named Zhu Bingren has been exploring innovative ways to bring new vitality to this ancient craft.

Footprints presents “The Wrong Train”, a radio drama which tells a story of how a young man, who coincidentally got stranded in Wuhan when the city was hit by a COVID outbreak in early 2020, ended up becoming a volunteer worker at a local hospital. The drama was composed based on a real story.

Qin Yi, a legendary actress known in nearly every household in China, passed away on May 9th, 2022 at the age of 100. As a performing artist adored by many, she shaped and brought many roles to life on stage and in films that ingrained a lasting impression on viewers. Her personal life, however, was never free of pain and suffering along with many twists and turns over the decades.

​Chen Jinyuan and Chi Zhaojiu both are veteran mold-making technicians working at the Guangxi Yuchai Machinery Group, a major manufacturing company in China. In the early 2000s, with an unyielding faith in their own ingenuity, they and their fellow workers made a key breakthrough in developing a cost-effective mold for diesel engines. In this episode of Footprints, let's follow these two master technicians to see what their work is like and how they overcame one challenge after another to help their company and the country to gain manufacturing prowess.