Footprints

Xu Yanni, a leading technician from a machinery company in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has served as a deputy to the National People's Congress since 2018. Over the years, she has been calling for government support to promote the spirit of craftsmanship in China's manufacturing sector. One of the methods she has proposed is to establish a system for training young workers within companies.

​Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou, now 92 years old, won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, a group of drugs used to combat malaria in the 1970s. Tu once said that artemisinin, having saved millions of lives across the globe, was a gift from China to the world.

​“They’re happening right in front of us: planes flying over, tanks driving by…,” says Niu Zi’An, a Chinese student studying piano in Kyiv, who shares with us his first-hand experience of life in the Ukrainian capital.

Over the past three decades, 50-year-old Lu Yun spent every single Spring Festival providing passenger services in a transportation hub in east China’s Anhui Province. She enjoyed her job so much that a few days after her retirement, she returned to the Hefei South Railway Station and started working as a volunteer to help out with the 2022 Spring Festival travel rush. ​

​Zhao Yingxin, a sport photojournalist, has captured many spectacular shots at the ongoing Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, including Gu Ailing’s historic gold in the women's freeski big air on February 8th. Zhao says she hopes her photographs can, in a way, represent the Beijing Winter Olympics and the new breakthroughs made by the athletes.

​The Dream Land, a winter sports center in Beijing, is the only ice sports complex in the city that houses two Olympic-sized ice rinks in an air-film stadium. Its investor Wang Da proposed its construction because his teenage son is an ice hockey fanatic. In this edition of Footprints, let’s visit the Dream Land and find out how an ambitious working father has been helping his son and many other young athletes realize their winter sports dreams.

​In 2018, stomatologists Yao Na and Zhao Shuangyun signed up for and became members of China’s first ski doctor team, which is a significant component of the medical and rescue system for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. After receiving intensive alpine skiing training for three snow seasons, the doctors can now ski to any corner of the tracks and provide quick responses for athletes requiring medical attention.

​Ye Tao, a 45-year-old Chinese businessman working in the south Pacific country of Tonga, has a first-hand experience of the large undersea eruption on January 15th, 2022 of the country’s Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai Volcano, so powerful that it was recorded around the world.

​Eighty-four year old Fan Jinshi is one of China's most renowned archeologists and researchers of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, a UNESCO world heritage site. Ever since the 1960s, she has devoted her wisdom and efforts to the preservation, research and promotion of the vast numbers of murals, artifacts and other cultural objects at the heritage site.

​Bruce Connolly is a Scottish photographer, freelance writer, radio host and occasionally tour guide living in Beijing. He has been a keen observer of China, travelling by train across the country since the 1980s. Through his lens, he shows the world the life of the Chinese people he has known: diverse, prosperous and most importantly, happy.