The gift

On Christmas Eve 1940, soon after my tenth birthday, my grandmother gave me a small wooden box with a lock and key. There was nothing inside it, and as far as I can remember she didn’t explain it. I’d been expecting a book: that was what she always gave to me and my brothers and sisters, and our cousins. I still have a later gift: Wilkie Collins’ classic detective story The Moonstone, given when I was 14.

From earliest childhood I remember her reading to me from Kipling’s Just So Stories and laughing so much at the Elephant Child’s persistent questions that she had to stop for breath. Books mattered to her; she could think of nothing better for her many grandchildren than the gift of words. Even when she couldn’t afford the expense, she bought a five-shilling book, usually an Everyman Classic, for each of us who was old enough to read. But the empty box: why then, and why to me?

I knew about the box, though I was too young to understand its meaning. I knew that it was part

of the story of my grandmother’s arrival in Australia in 1888. She was just 19, and she had made the long voyage by sailing ship from her home in Liverpool with her older sister and brother, Minnie and Joe. She was Agnes Jane, known as Aggie, the fifth of the 11 children of Irish-born John and Jane Maguire. Like hundreds of thousands of others in Liverpool, John and Jane had been part of the great wave of Irish emigration in the 1840s, the decade of the Great Hunger. A million starved, and those who could find the fare left Ireland for England, the United States or Australia. The New World offered more hope, but Liverpool was cheaper by far.

After some years of struggle John Maguire prospered in Liverpool, and he married and brought up his family there. By the time the three young Maguires set sail for Australia, the family had moved beyond its refugee origins and was well on its way on an extraordinary rags-to-riches journey. Aggie, who was well educated and wanted to earn her own living as a teacher, came to Australia in a spirit of hope and adventure, not the desperation of her parents’ generation. The main reason for leaving Liverpool was concern about the health of the second son, Joe, who was nearly 21. He was said to have a “weak chest”. This phrase usually meant tuberculosis or the fear of it. Leaving damp, smoggy Liverpool for sunny Australia would give Joe a chance.

The Maguires embarked on May 22, 1888. Aggie never said much about the voyage out. An ordeal for anyone, it would have been a searing experience for a teenager who was leaving home for the first time. The Trafalgar was a cargo ship – quite small at just over 1400 tons – that carried 24 passengers on this particular voyage. It wouldn’t have been especially comfortable, and there were none of the diversions that passenger ships could offer.

While his sisters amused themselves – Minnie had brought her paints and Aggie had as many books as she could fit in her trunk – Joe learnt the elements of carpentry. That’s when he made the box for Aggie. On the long days when the ship was becalmed, he worked on the project. The box, which was made of Australian cedar, shows that Joe was new to the craft. The wood was nothing special, probably oddments from the carpenter’s shop; the dovetailing on one side is uneven, and the hinged lid looks like a second attempt.

Not long after finishing the box, Joe collapsed. He had developed peritonitis, a complication of the tuberculosis. There was a doctor on board, and the captain was a kind man who “gave good care” but there was nothing they could do to save Joe. He died, painfully, five days later, one day before his 21st birthday. The ship was then about 30 days out at sea, not even halfway to Sydney. And now his grieving sisters faced another ordeal.

In The Long Farewell, Don Charlwood describes the ritual of sea burial: [The coffin] was placed on a grating at the bulwarks on the main deck and covered with a Union Jack. Often the ship’s bell was tolled… a clergyman or the captain read the service; the grating was tilted and the body was launched into the sea. One splash, and the ship moved on.

Joe’s coffin would have been made by his friend, the ship’s carpenter. His gift to his younger sister became poignant. Aggie would always think of the coffin and the box as linked to one another – one in the sea’s depths, the other for her “to keep things in” as she did almost to the end of her life. It became her memory box. Part of her private self she kept locked inside it.

The Trafalgar arrived in Sydney on August 23 after 90 days at sea. Late in this unhappy voyage there were two more deaths: an invalid and a newborn. Somehow the two young Maguire women endured the 60 days after Joe’s death. Living among strangers in cramped quarters, with no privacy, must have been an ordeal. Perhaps that’s when Aggie taught herself to meet grief with silence. Just a few months before Grandmother gave Joe’s box to me, her flat had been burgled and the box wrenched open. Papers were scattered and some jewellery was taken. At the time, she was away from home. The burglary was reported to my mother, who went to check the damage. She was distressed about the broken box, and took it to be repaired. She didn’t make the mistake of giving it a new look; a few fine scratches on the base and some worn edges still showed its age, as they do today. With a new lock and key, smaller than the originals, it seemed as strong as ever, but Grandmother never used it again. A few months later she pasted a Christmas card with my name on it inside the lid and let me make what I could of this puzzling, remarkable gift.

Now, after 75 years in my possession, I’ve turned my mind to the box as it was in 1888, to that long sea journey, and to the young woman who went teaching in a one-room bush school in Burramine, northern Victoria, and fell in love with a Riverina grazier, Richard Gorman.

If Aggie had personal papers in the box, they were lost long ago. I depend on public records, places and people for details of her life. My own memories are limited. My mother’s papers, which include a family memoir, go back only to her childhood in the early years of the 20th century. In her closely written pages, I see Aggie as a young widow, mother of seven, enduring loneliness at Galtee Park, the property left for her to manage when her husband Richard died. Choosing to put her children first, she did her best to give them a happy childhood. She made the same choice for her many grandchildren, creating a warm and lively family centre for them in Melbourne during their boarding-school years. It wasn’t a small matter. There were often half a dozen teenagers visiting at the same time, most of them missing home. Whether they came from outback NSW, Deniliquin or Bendigo, they were all hungry for her attention as well as her cooking and one another’s company. As one of the city grandchildren, I enjoyed the exuberant space she created for us all.

In one of her few plaintive moments, Aggie

said: “All my life I’ve wanted to live in a house by the sea where I could look out of the window and watch the boats coming in.” That longing was expressed in one of her small treasures: a brown and white conch shell that she kept on the windowsill beside her armchair. All her grandchildren loved the shell. “Can you hear the sea?” Aggie would say, as each child held it and heard, miraculously, the sound of waves.

In old age, she could have had her ocean view. She could have lived well within her limited means in a little house at Point Lonsdale or Queenscliff. Instead she chose a small, charmless flat in suburban Kew. The country boarders were her first concern. She knew about loneliness and displacement.

I thought at first that only those relatives aged over 80 would have much to offer me in my search for Aggie’s story. In fact, some who were very small children when Grandmother died in 1953 have retrieved surprisingly vivid memories. To this day, her grandchildren can recite the names of her Liverpool family: Annie, Minnie, Johnnie, Joe, Aggie, Edie, Bob, Dick, Bert, Percy, Clara. There’s a nice rhythm in it, like a nursery rhyme. I learnt it from my mother, Aggie’s younger daughter. My cousin Pam, living in Canberra, beautiful as always in her 90th year, sends me an email: “I loved her and I wanted to be like her.” Pam used to brush Grandmother’s hair at bedtime. Worn in an unbecoming bun by day, it was “soft and shining silver”, almost waist-length. Pam’s vignette stirs a memory of my own. I was recovering from a bout of asthma for which, in my childhood, there was no relief except adrenalin injections, which made me sick. As I began to feel better, I became imperious. “Sing to me, Grandmother,” I ordered. She never sang in company, but we were alone, and she gave in. I must have had this command performance more than once because I can still remember all the words of Silver Threads Among the Gold. This 19th-century favourite begins: “Darling, I am growing old / Silver threads among the gold / Shine upon my brow today.” Then the refrain: “Yet, my darling, you will be / Always young and fair to me.” She sang softly but with the feeling that has held it in my memory.

I feel the prick of tears when I think of her singing and I wonder what moved her to choose Silver Threads. She was only 39, with no silver threads in her dark hair, when Richard died aged 43 in November 1908. He had contracted actinomycosis, a rare bacterial disease, and endured a long, painful decline. No one else remembers Grandmother singing, though she taught music before her marriage. Come to that, no one remembers much of what she said. A quiet woman, they all agree. Silent even. But her laughter is remembered. An engaging chuckle, says her grandson Adrian. Margaret, then aged about six, recalls being sent to fetch an extra chair to the sitting room. She finds a commode and, not knowing what it is, drags it in. There are visitors, but “Grandmother laughed and laughed”.

I go back to my own early memories. I realise that Christmas 1940, when she gave me Joe’s box, was a traumatic time for her. The war in Europe still seemed a remote event to many Australians. Life in Aggie’s quiet street in Kew went on without much visible change. But Aggie must have known her family in England was facing immediate danger. The bombing of Liverpool that Christmas meant the obliteration of places she knew well.

From 1939 to 1942 she took me to the city, where the Athenaeum cinema showed British films, most of them wartime morale-raisers. I see these movies now as her way of connecting with her homeland. She wouldn’t have wanted to go on her own: women didn’t sit alone in cinemas. Because of my intermittent bouts of asthma, I was allowed to miss school almost as often as I liked, and was always available and eager for an outing. At 10, I was old enough to enjoy the films, and I looked forward to the milkshake at Hillier’s on Collins Street afterwards. I didn’t know enough to guess at my grandmother’s feelings. A reserved woman, she wouldn’t have wanted sympathy or intrusive questions. She always held my hand on these excursions, which wasn’t really necessary; there was very little traffic and I was used to taking the tram to school on my own. Was it a comfort to have a small child to hold on to? I loved those excursions with Grandmother, but I cannot remember much of what we talked about.

The sessions always began with a Gaumont British newsreel. “Don’t look, dear,” Grandmother would say, covering my eyes whenever an image of destruction came on the screen. The newsreels we watched together would have brought devastating sights. Second only to London in strategic importance, Liverpool was a prime target for the Luftwaffe. High explosives demolished much of the dockland areas where the Maguires had lived in their early days. Fires burned day and night around Merseyside. The Christmas Blitz, between December 20 and 22, 1940, killed 365 people in Liverpool and injured many more. Grandmother would have known that the newsreels were censored to limit civilian fears, and that the reality was much worse.

The timing of her gift to me of Joe’s box, after our first wartime movie excursions, now seems significant. We always went early to the cinema so as not to miss the newsreels. We saw film clips and heard Churchill’s voice praising the brave people of Liverpool. Except for her sister Minnie, Aggie had no one who understood how it felt to be so far away, no one else to talk to about the city’s devastation. Letters from home came “Passed by Censor”. I hope that the company of a happily oblivious 10-year-old was better than nothing.

Perhaps, in emptying Joe’s box in this time of destruction, Aggie was closing down her past. Perhaps she thought the box should be tabula rasa, a space for me to inscribe new experiences in a country to which she never quite belonged. Edited extract from Can You Hear the Sea? By Brenda Niall (Text Publishing, $29.99), out October 30.

Interview

Tegan and Sara look back: What a difference a decade makes.

When a band seems to embody the zeitgeist perfectly, it’s impossible to parse where culture’s influence on the band ends and where its influence on culture begins; it looks symbiotic and inevitable. Only, that’s hardly ever the case. Like with raising a child (or electing a president), all sorts of factors combine over time to create artists who seem perfectly of the moment. It’s only in retrospect that you can see how it all happened.

Take Tegan and Sara. While it seems obvious now that the world needs a pair of queer twins playing ’80s-inspired synth pop, shockingly that wasn’t always the case.

The Canadian wonder twins of pop are looking back over their career as this year marks the 10th anniversary of The

Con, an album that kind of sits at the fulcrum between their early career and the beginning of their new one. It’s apparent how the sisters have reflected on, and responded to, culture over the years. “To be queer back when we started—in the 1990s—you were fucked. Most people were just like ‘Say hello to the underground because that’s all you’ll ever have,’” Sara Quin tells me. “I think we’ve lived through that and we’ve seen ourselves break onto the pop charts and we’ve been to the Oscars and we’ve had lots of mainstream success.” But that mainstream success wasn’t an accident. The sisters consciously changed up their sound in a way that both required and encouraged the critical reappraisal of pop music. Tegan and Sara couldn’t have happened at any other time, and these times couldn’t have happened without Tegan and Sara. We chatted with Sara about how they got there—but first we talked about caffeine. »

Sounds like you’re making tea.

“I’m actually pouring myself a cup of coffee.”

Coffee, eh? I’m about to drink a Coca-Cola Zero.

“I got off Coca-Cola in my early 20s, and I’ve never gone back.”

Tell me more—this is important.

“It’s very important. It’s a part of my addiction trajectory. In our family, drinking Coca-Cola was like drinking water. It was not uncommon to run into someone from the family at the refrigerator in the middle of the night drinking directly from a two-litre Coke bottle. When I moved out after high school, I remember the woman I was dating was a dancer and a yoga teacher and whatever, and she was not shaming but she’d say ‘You’re drinking poison. Please, can you find something else to drink?’ So I got off it and I’ve never gone back. Just coffee and alcohol.”

I’m actually addicted to energy drinks. Most people are upset by the amount of caffeine I ingest.

“What do you do with all that caffeine? I’m just thinking about it because I only got onto coffee when I was 28, and it completely restructured my day. I was keeping a more stereotypical musician’s lifestyle. Then, when I started drinking coffee, it was like my whole body changed or something. I started getting up super-early, I wanted to go to bed early and then I became more of an active worker during the day. I like to work on music and write songs during daylight hours so I totally ride the caffeine wave in the morning now.”

It’s like you grew up.

[Laughs] “I did grow up—I mean, sort of. At the time, it felt like I was making an adjustment for the better. I know some people really hate astrological stuff. I find it all a bit ridiculous, but, unfortunately, as a Virgo, I do feel like what is said about Virgos is really true: We’re anal-retentive and structured and disciplined and organized. It’s like I’m only allowed to have one vice at a time—I can’t mix and match. When I did drugs, I did drugs. When I drank, I drank. I was never really all over the place. And now, for the most part, I feel like I’m pretty well behaved. But I need to have something I’m always worrying I’m doing too much of.”

I think that’s really important, actually. What’s one little vice?

“Watch how I tie this into something that is relevant. It’s interesting as I get older, too. I realize that there are these preconceived ideas about what it means to work in the arts. I always sort of envied my friends who were creative types who gave in to their darkest impulses: slept all day, did drugs and drank, didn’t have a home, didn’t have a moral compass. That’s probably what people imagine I’m like, so maybe I should try a year where I just give in to all that. But it goes against the grain. My life more closely resembles my friends who are teachers than my friends who are musicians.”

I like the idea of a structured year of rebellion.

“That’s another very Virgo thing. I can’t just let go and get out of control. I have to schedule it all.”

I’m half joking when I say this, but, while I always had my suspicions, the first time I knew my sister was queer was when we were on a road trip listening to Tegan and Sara and she seemingly knew everything about each song. You’ve become a kind of signifier. And I feel like that’s a good thing.

[Laughs] “I think it’s interesting. I’ve had different feelings about it during the past 20 years of being in the music industry. When we first started, we had to push back so hard against the natural instinct to label us or label our audiences or sort of put us in a box and make us unattractive to anyone but queer people. It was brutal. I send people articles that I can practically remember word for word, and they’re horrifying. Not just ‘Whoopsies, here’s a little bit of homophobia’—they’re full-on misogyny and homophobia and, in some cases, vaguely threatening. But there were lots of years when we really pushed back against this idea that our sexuality was relevant and that our music had some kind of categorization because of our sexuality. What I started to realize, while [we were] becoming a more popular mainstream band and seeing our audiences diversify, is that I really want to honour that element. As we started to see more dudes in our crowds, or gaggles of straight girls at a bachelorette party, I found myself wanting to be like ‘No! We’re a queer band. Look at all our cool queer fans.’ So I think there have definitely been different cycles. You know, for most of our career, Tegan and I weren’t just queer women; we were queer women who rejected the notion that we were hot lesbians. We didn’t wear makeup, we had weird haircuts, we didn’t seem to bother with attracting the male gaze—and I think that really pushed people away. It made us even more marginalized in a lot of ways. People always talk about how things have changed and how we’re so much more accepted, but there’s not queer women on the pop charts and there’s not queer women on rock radio and there’s not really any queer women breaking that glass ceiling that I think exists when you’re not something to be objectified by men and women. One of my favourite things about our band is that we can always count on the queer community. Where it once felt somewhat burdensome, I actually think it’s been a total gift and it’s why we continue to make music.”

This is the 10th anniversary of The Con. One of the things I noticed when reading old interviews is that you always mention what a hard time you had when you released the album. What does that mean? What made it hard?

“I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot, because obviously we’re revisiting that time right now, too. We did feel like that was a hard time, but what’s interesting to me is that it’s not that the times have become less hard. At some point in your adult life—or, if you’re really unlucky, earlier—people start to get sick or die or relationships break up or the reality of life hits you for the first time. When we put out The Con, I was going through my first major separation. I had been partnered with someone—we owned a house, the whole thing—and it was really like a divorce. I remember it was when we had started to have a little bit of financial success in our lives—certainly compared to our earlier records. So, all of a sudden there was this weight of death and taxes. It was just like ‘Holy shit! This is life?’ I remember feeling an oppressive weight, wondering what this is all for. We’d already put out multiple records, and it was sort of the same cities, the same clubs, the same days, the same nights. And I remember everything sort of hitting me around that time. We were 27, and I think a lot of people talk about that being the first moment of realizing that’s just the rest of your life. And then you figure out how to deal with it. Nothing has really changed. I still have a lot of those same conflicts and struggles and existential worries, but I’ve learned how to cope with them.”

If you could go back, knowing what you know now, would those problems still seem as large or have you learned to deal with them?

“The one thing I wish I could change about that time—and it’s still something Tegan and I grapple with—is that we were ‘yes people.’ I don’t mean that in a martyrish way; it’s just the way we always were. Our parents had incredibly high expectations of us, and we embody that even as adults. I think we had this paralyzing fear that if we admitted to having a threshold, we would fail or lose momentum and disappear. We were running on that fear for a long time, and The Con was a climactic moment for us because we took on too much and started cracking under that pressure. It really jeopardized the band and my relationship with Tegan. There was a lot of conflict and fighting—physical fighting. We were just miserable. I really wish I could go back and tend to that person a little bit differently.”

You have always seemed very rational about your career and the degree of success you want. That’s surprising for rock stars.

“It goes back to the whole idea that we’re Virgos. A lot of our friends who are artists don’t want to talk about the business— especially if they came out of the ’90s, when everyone still worried about the idea of selling out. Tegan and I came out of that scene. But early on, we became business people. At 20 years old, we would sit down and say ‘What are our goals? What do we want to do? Where do we want to be?’ And that wasn’t cool back then. I think it’s cooler now to be a business person, but I think back then .... We were talking about how much of what we were earning we would put into savings, how much we would reinvest, how much we would put into our RSPs. Those are the kinds of conversations we were having, and it was an alien language to most of our peers.”

WHY YOU SHOULD WASH YOUR FRUIT AND VEGETABLES

FRUIT and vegetables should be washed in baking powder solution to get rid of up to 13 potentially harmful pesticides, a study found.

The traditional raising agent, usually added to flour for cakes and sponges, beat both water and weak bleach at removing traces of the chemicals in trials.

Pesticides can help increase crop yields but concerns over their effects on health have been raised in recent years.

Last month it was revealed that the fruit and veg handed out to children by schools in a Government scheme carried even more pesticide traces than standard supermarket produce.

In the latest study, scientists put two common pesticides – the fungicide thiabendazole, which is absorbed through apple skin, and the insecticide phosmet – on to organic Gala apples.

They then washed them with three different liquids – tap water, a bleach solution and one per cent baking powder mixed with water.

Baking powder proved to be the most effective but it took up to 15 minutes of gentle cleaning to get rid of all the lingering chemicals, scientists found.

Peeling apples was the only way to remove pesticides that had been absorbed.

Research leader Dr Lili He, of the department of food science at Massachusetts University, in the US, said: “The use of pesticides in agriculture has led to an increase in farm productivity.

“However, pesticide residues may remain on agricultural produce where they contribute to the total dietary intake of pesticides.

“Concerns about potential hazards of pesticides to food safety and human health have increased and therefore it is desirable to reduce these residues.

“The standard post-harvest method with bleach solution and a two-minute wash did not effectively remove these pesticides.”

She added: “For apples, the peel can easily be removed.

“However, important nutrients such as polyphenolic compounds, fibres, pigments, vitamins and minerals will also be lost.”

In September, analysis by Pesticide Action Network UK (PAN UK) found British schoolchildren are being exposed to pesticides. Millions of portions of fruit and vegetables are given to 2.3 million children aged four to six under a £40million-a-year scheme funded by the Department of Health.

Samples of fruit and veg handed out included apples that had traces of 11 chemicals.

One sample of raisins imported from Turkey contained residue of 13 pesticides. A pear imported from Portugal bore traces of nine.

PAN UK said more of these carry pesticide traces than regular supermarket fruit and veg.

A digital hunt for love

The concept of the personal brand has spilled over from the work world into dating. Courtney Shea explores the pros and cons of approaching romance with the determination of a job hunt

Personal branding has spilled over from the work world into dating. If that strikes you as a little unromantic, you’re not alone, Courtney Shea writes, but you’re also kind of kidding yourself.

Two years ago, Julie Bogdanowicz was in her late 30s, with a rewarding career as an architect, an active social life and a passion for urban cycling. But her love life felt as promising as the first five minutes of an Adam Sandler comedy. She had been on various dating apps, but half-heartedly and without much luck.

Feeling a sense of urgency around her desire to find a partner and start a family, Bogdanowicz made a decision to prioritize, scaling back on professional responsibility and time with friends to focus on her search for love as it if were a job. She overhauled her generic Tinder profile, fine-tuning it with specific interests and uploading pictures of herself in urban settings, to reflect her passion for buildings and cities. She even made reference to her perpetual helmet hair in her bio section – shorthand for the role that biking plays in her life.

“I wasn’t consciously thinking about it in terms of personal branding,” she recalled of her profile revamp, speaking last month at a marketing event in downtown Toronto. But that’s what it was. Based on her targeted and (spoiler alert) successful search for love online, Bogdanowicz was invited to appear as a panelist at the event titled “Kim Kardashian is My Copilot,” where the program promised “a deep dive into the inescapable role personal branding plays in both our professional and personal lives.”

It’s a cold, hard truth around dating in the digital age: Branding is everything. And if that strikes you as a little unromantic, you’re not alone. But you’re also kind of kidding yourself. That perfectly wornin Sonic Youth T-shirt you wore on your first date with your future husband, the one you thought made you look like the quintessential “cool girl”? Personal branding.

The way he pronounced the name of the fancy wine he ordered in a flawless French accent? Ditto.Personal branding – as a concept, if not an annoying buzz term – has been around since Adam met Eve. (What, you think she ate the apple because she was hungry?) What’s changed in recent years is the extent to which looking for love has become a digital pursuit.

In many ways, that has made romance easier. From the comfort of pretty much anywhere with WiFi, a person seeking companionship can scroll and click and swipe their way through hundreds, even thousands, of potential partners. On the flip side, the competition can be fierce, which is why a growing community of consultants, coaches and even ghostwriters are helping would-be daters to hone their personal brands.

“When the supply is so huge, it’s important to distinguish yourself,” says Katryna Klepacki, Toronto spokeswoman for the social and dating app Bumble, who was also on stage at the Pilot panel. Everyone “loves to travel,” she says: To stick out, list some specific places you have recently visited. Rather than saying you’re a foodie, mention favourite restaurants. Don’t say you “love music” – share the last concert you went to. The goal isn’t necessarily finding someone who shares your taste in travel destinations, food or tunes, but “giving the other person something they can ask you about,” Klepacki explains. “And it makes you seem authentic. Authenticity is so important.”

But is there such a thing as too real? What if your current passions include watching television in your track pants, while eating chips out of the bag? “Authentic doesn’t always go hand in hand with the notion of branding, which is essentially applying a gloss,” says Anne Marshall, founder of Junia Matchmaking Services in Guelph, Ont.

Creating and updating her clients’ dating profiles is a huge part of Marshall’s business. “I guess it’s trying to make reality sound as palatable as possible,” she says of massaging the lifestyle of a chip-loving couch potato, into a “culture vulture” whose favourite show is Sherlock. “One term that I sometimes use is ‘great indoorsman,’ ” Marshall says.

After all, humour is the No. 1 thing that online daters respond to, although that, too, is a matter of brand calibration. Self-deprecating humour, for example, is often a turn off – “unless the person is extremely good looking and successful,” says Marshall, in which case a little light self-slander can help them seem more approachable.

Personal-branding strategist Cher Jones mostly works with people looking to leverage their personal brand in a professional context. Lately, though, clients have been asking her about their dating profiles as well. “We are seeing more and more intersectionality between personal and professional lives,” says Jones, noting the recent launch of Bizz, networking mode on Bumble that lets users swipe left or right on potential professional contacts.

She calls it “a 360 view of our personal brand”: when profiles on multiple platforms (Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, LinkedIn, OkCupid, Match.com etc. etc. etc.) allow users to present viewers with slightly different vantage points. Still, while it’s perfectly logical to be more playful on Snapchat than a networking platform, it’s important that the overall picture be cohesive.

That means making sure Tinder photos wouldn’t be off-putting to a potential client or employer, but also that your LinkedIn page doesn’t make you look like a personalityfree robot. (“People are so worried about doing something that will ‘break’ the internet, when really they should be worried about boring it,” Jones says.)

Toronto copywriter Kennedy Ryan recently quit Tinder after she got tired of continually getting matched with different versions of the same person, who she calls “the Frank and Oak guy”: bearded, modern-metro types who favoured the same hip cocktail bars and distressed denim. She thinks one downside of personal branding is that everything has become “so curated.”

Having seen advertising buys move from broad to microtargeted, Ryan says “I guess it makes sense that the same thing is happening with dating.” She believes her ability to distill a lot of information into a few concise and catchy phrases gave her an edge in online dating, but she wonders whether this sort of slick, surface communication is conducive to forming a meaningful connection.

“Real people are messy,” Ryan says. “You have to wonder if something is being lost.” Critics posit that datingapp culture has turned people into commodities, that true intimacy is dying as our attention spans shorten and that our standards are growing increasingly unrealistic.

Still, if “What’s your brand?” has replaced “What’s your sign?” as the world’s most nauseating pick-up line, there are times when effective self-marketing works exactly as it’s supposed to.

Torontonian Gloria Arsenal found herself frustrated that the guys she attracted on Tinder were missing the importance she placed on social activism. “I guess they weren’t reading my profile,” she says. That changed after she switched her lead picture to one of her wearing a pink pussy hat at the Women’s March last January. “The quantity of individuals has dropped,” she says, “but the quality has improved.”

And then there’s Julie Bogdanowicz, who recently returned home from her honeymoon – a cycling and architectural exploration of Pittsburgh. Maybe that doesn’t meet everyone’s definition of the ultimate romantic getaway, but for Bogdanowicz and her urban-cycling husband, it’s exactly on brand.

Google of Africa

Wanting to be “the Google of Africa” would be a farfetched dream for most, but for Abel Masai, this aspiration is attainable.

Abel is the founder and CEO of Kocela, a Kenyan company specialising in mobile solutions.

The company’s open-concept space has all the typical characteristics of a startup: colourful post-it notes displayed along the wall, coffee and tea available all day, and a team of 14 bright minds, all under 30 years.

As a student at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Abel had intended to work in computer repairs and maintenance, but in 2011, he attended a workshop on smartphone app development and was immediately hooked.

“I decided to abandon computer maintenance and instead focus on software development,” he says.

Two years later, he founded Kocela.

Since its formation in 2013, Kocela has worked with numerous high-profile clients, including Radio Africa, Standard Media Group, Spire Bank, and Credit Bank.

But what Kocela is most wellknown for is its work with Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB). In 2015, Kocela released the KCB mobile app, a “one-stop shop” that allows customers to not only pay school fees and utility bills, but also helps them to customise their budgets and

There aren’t many companies from Africa competing at a global stage in setting the trends in tech. We want to be that company.”

Fine dining with new look, taste and feel

When it comes to fine dining in Beijing, white tablecloths are often the calling card. Think of those traditional, formal French and Italian restaurants in five-star hotels in which the cuisine on offer is classic European fare. You can’t really complain about that, even if sometimes it can seem a little humdrum.

Katie Li, a Chinese Australian restaurateur, reckons fine dining in Beijing is developing very slowly, particularly when compared with what is happening in Shanghai, and lags far behind Western countries.

“White tablecloths? That really is old hat,” says Li, owner of the Tiago restaurant group, reflecting on a recent gourmet trip she made visiting some of the top fine dining restaurants in the world.

“Most of the tables were bare. In fine dining the trend is for fewer formalities and frills but more novelties and innovations.”

Li is striving to have a role in redefining fine dining with the group’s newly established restaurant that has been having a soft opening in COFCO Plaza in Jianguomen.

In Beijing, restaurants are still trying to produce so-called authentic Western food, but in the West more and more fine dining establishments have evolved into an eclectic blend of cuisines with an oriental twist, be it Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese, Li says.

For her new restaurant, Combal by Tiago, Li says she wants to incorporate oriental cultural elements that are “decorous, mysterious and elegant” into fine dining.

At Combal, what you eat is European, yet what you feel is a Zen-style dining environment, with a decor that exudes oriental charm.

Tea is “a good representation of Chinese culture”, Li says, and that is manifested in a decorative wall of shelves filled with various kinds of tea barrels, in the tea-infused cocktails on the menu — each name being a single Chinese character taken from archaic Chinese drinking terminology — and in the tableware with sauces presented in beautiful teacups and desserts coming in antique-furniture drawers.

The welcome snacks are presented on a plate mounted with pebbles, simulating a Chinese pond. The dish as a whole is like a miniature tranquil Chinese garden with garnishes with all the appearance of rockery and leaves.

“A city like Beijing has such a profound culture heritage, and we ought to have integrated more of our cultural elements into fine dining,” Li says.

At Combal by Tiago, an innovative approach has been taken with each dish, some bold and some with a nuanced twist, but overall there has been a solid attempt to break away from old-style conventional fine dining.

The restaurant’s name, Combal, a whimsical concoction evoking the idea of combining things, perfectly reflects the establishment’s ethos, Li says.

As a stomach warmer there is a dish whose offbeat name tells you that you are about to be served something very unusual: egg in eggs. It is presented in a transparent tea bowl with a lid.

The style has echoes of the Japanese hot appetizer chawan-mushi (egg custard), but the contents are different: the base consists of scrambled Japanese eggs, then goes up to light potato sabayon, and then to whipped egg yolks, salmon roe and caviar on the surface. It is so soft that it is eaten with a spoon, and it is best to scoop out from the end to the surface. In one spoonful you will taste the different layers, mixing and melting on the tongue.

Then there is paccheri, a cylindrical pasta similar to rigatoni, but wider in diameter. Combal by Tiago may well be the only place in Beijing you can try this. It was a first for me, and it set me off yet again on a search for various types of pasta, in its many varied shapes and dimensions, and their names.

“Paccheri is very rare in Beijing,” Li says. “It’s made of whole wheat flour, and we import this dry paccheri from Italy.”

The wide and thick hollow pasta holds the heavy sauce well, in this case a fresh tomato sauce essential in Italian cooking that Combal executes admirably.

With the rich sauce that balances sweet and sour, the pasta is mildly chewy but does not stick to my teeth.

In another pasta dish, fried homemade taglioni with New Zealand scampi and lettuce sauce, there is a little more innovation. The salty-sweet, moist scampi flesh is wrapped in long, flat ribbons of pasta that are deep fried. As I bite it, the flaky texture reminds me of the deep-fried rhombus-shaped flour crust my mother used to make when I was a girl.

For a meat dish at a fine dining place, beef should top the list. In Combal’s version, tough cuts of Australian black Angus filet come on a cast iron mini-grill. The fired herbs — thyme and rosemary — underneath give a smoky and piney taste to the filet, which is already superbly cooked sous-vide. This is served on a petite cast iron grill whose exterior is inscribed with Japanese script – but it is what sits on top of the grill that is worthy of the loudest fanfare: meat wrapped in a shell made of breadcrumbs and chamomile, crispy and crunchy outside, and pink and juicy on the inside.

Sometimes a simple garnish can give a dish that extra something, as does the next meat dish by Combal, a cassia bark that sits directly on the side of the plate doing the work. Once extinguished, aromatics and flame from the flaring cinnamon bark suffuse the foie gras, pigeon leg and breast, enjoyed in an ambience not unlike that of carnivores around a campfire after hunting in the jungle.

One shortcoming is that the so-called spicy pigeon breast seems to have been marinated for much too short a time, at the cost of a lot of flavor. But for a restaurant that strives to innovate and dares to be different, and is still in its soft opening, these kinds of drawbacks give it the opportunity to learn and grow.

Combal is akin to a new adventurous gourmet playground for the Tiago restaurant group.

“Fine dining is about an experience, something new, and something you will not forget,” Li says.

In the past three years the Tiago group has opened five outlets under four brands: Tiago Home Kitchen, a causal family-style Italian restaurant; Casa Talia by Tiago featuring Spanish cuisine, Tiago Select focusing on Mediterranean cuisine, and Combal by Tiago, a fine-dining Italian restaurant.

Li says a steakhouse brand that is part of the Tiago family will make its debut next year, focusing on a niche market of steaks at a medium price.

“We see expensive steakhouses at five-star hotels, and we see casual butcher shops with grill chefs on duty, but there should be something young and vibrant in between.”

The South African who is almost Shanghainese

One thing that is charming about the city is although we have the high rises and it’s very modern, you can still walk downstairs and find something very local very quickly.” David Preston, chairman and chief executive officer of Boehringer Ingelheim in China

Editor’s note: The Honorable Citizen of Shanghai Award is the highest tier in the Magnolia Awards which are presented to foreigners who have made significant contributions to the city’s development. Named after the city’s flower, the Shanghai Magnolia Awards have been given out annually since 1989 and is among the highest honors a foreigner can receive in the city.

After living in Shanghai for 21 years, David Preston can now consider himself to be more of a Shanghainese than an expatriate.

On Sept 30, the South African was conferred the Honorable Citizen of Shanghai Award, the highest tier in the prestigious Magnolia Award that the local government can present to foreigners in recognition of their contributions to the city’s social and economic development.

The Magnolia Awards have been presented annually since 1989. There are three categories: Magnolia Silver, Magnolia Gold and Honorable Citizen of Shanghai.

Preston, who is the chairman and chief executive officer of Boehringer Ingelheim in China, had previously won the Silver and Gold awards in 2013 and 2015 respectively.

Like many expatriates, Preston came to China for business. He ended up falling in love with a Chinese woman and starting a family with her. The couple have two daughters, Caitlin, 6, and Charlotte, 2.

Before taking the helm of Boehringer Ingelheim’s China operations in 2009, Preston worked for Xian-Janssen, the US-headquartered pharmaceutical maker’s China joint venture, and French-based Sanofi-Aventis.

He lived in Xi’an, Shaanxi province and Beijing before settling down in Shanghai in 1996 when Sanofi allowed him to choose a city to set up its China office. Preston said he chose Shanghai largely because of the city’s pool of quality local talent that comprised many returnees who studied overseas.

Born to two English parents in Cape Town in South Africa, Preston said he had always desired to be in an industry where he could work in foreign countries and be exposed to different cultures. After graduating with a degree in business and commerce, he joined the pharmaceutical industry as he believed it would provide him with the opportunity to see the world.

Preston was right. He was posted to Belgium not long after he started his career and worked in that country till 1992 when an opportunity in China came up.

“China was opening-up and I thought that it would become extremely open one day. I knew it was the right time to go to China,” he recalled.

More than two decades later, Preston said that he is still intrigued at how his adopted country is still in its “golden phase”.

“You always feel that there’s something new and exciting that’s happening. And when it happens, it is so quick,” said Preston, snapping his fingers as he cited examples of innovation such as Mobike, the world’s first dockless and cash-free bike sharing platform.

“I don’t know if there was ever a time in this country when I thought: ‘Okay, it’s slow enough for me. I need to go find another country where I could perhaps get that same feeling of exhilaration, that same feeling of satisfaction,’” he added.

Preston first lived in Shanghai in 1993, following his stint in Xi’an that lasted a few months. Being an adventurous person, he ventured beyond the restaurants in the Hilton Hotel on Huashan Road where he stayed and would explore the local dining scene.

He even had lunch with a local family in a tiny apartment.

“We would go there at lunchtime and sit on the bed,” he chuckled. “But it was charming.”

He also remembers how the Pudong area then was in its initial phase of development.

“People said Pudong was a big rice field. That was a lie,” he said, while referring to a photo he took in 1993 that shows a half-completed Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower from across the Bund.

As head of Boehringer Ingelheim China, Preston has managed the company’s rapid expansion through projects including a biotech manufacturing and production facility in Pudong and an animal vaccine plant in Taizhou, Jiangsu province. As one of the leading projects in the city’s innovation drive, the biotech manufacturing facility is aiming to become the first global provider of biopharmaceutical contract manufacturing solutions in China.

Preston is very proud of the project, which represented an investment of at least 100 million euros when it was launched in 2013. He pointed out that there was no regulatory pathway to guarantee that the plant would receive a license after being constructed during that time. Nevertheless, he managed to convince the company’s headquarters in Germany to go ahead with the project because he “had faith in the Chinese government”.

“That faith in government has stood me in a good place for many years,” Preston said, adding that mutual commitment is the key for multinationals to survive and thrive in China.

When asked about his retirement plans, the seasoned businessman said he hopes to become a mentor for Chinese startups, which he said is the best way he could give back to the local community. Preston added that he does not plan on ever leaving Shanghai, which he admits still captivates him till today.

“One thing that is charming about the city is although we have the highrises and it’s very modern, you can still walk downstairs and find something very local very quickly,” he said.

Preston also has a piece of advice for foreigners who are new to the city: “Never see something as wrong or right, but rather different. Embrace the Shanghainese of this city instead of being against them. As a foreigner, you have to fit in. You have to be part of it.”

New era on the road to 2050

Iwitnessed history sitting in the Great Hall of the People during the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. I listened raptly to Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, when he delivered his new-era-defining report. I heard the amendment to the Party Constitution that enshrined “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”. I watched members of the new Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee walk out on stage. I was awed by the presence of the leadership, past and present. And I was overawed by Xi’s grand vision for China and the country’s increasing, radiating confidence. Most of all, I marveled at the remarkable and historic transformation of China, which means so much to the Chinese people and which in this new era will mean so much to the rest of the world.

Having departed the Great Hall of the People, I reflected how I, an American, found myself caught up in the welling Chinese patriotism of the 19th CPC National Congress. Certainly, I was experiencing firsthand this inflection point in Chinese history, when China envisions itself becoming a fully modernized country and taking proactive part in international affairs, and regaining its leading seat at the high table of great nations.

What have I just witnessed? Following are some personal observations.

A general consensus describes four primary outcomes of the 19th Party Congress: Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; a new “contradiction” that defines China’s principal social challenge; a China that takes “center stage in the world”; and the Party enhancing its leadership of society, including maintaining, indeed intensifying, its anti-corruption campaign.

To me, however, a highlight was the specificity of Xi’s vision of China, not only establishing policies for the next five years, but also framing the agenda and setting the strategies for the next 30 years. This congress, Xi said, is the “confluence” of the “Two Centenary Goals”: a moderately prosperous society by 2020 (2021 being the 100th anniversary of the CPC), which will likely be fulfilled within the term of the 19th Party Congress, and a great, modern, socialist country by 2050 (2049 being the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China), which is being planned by the 19th Party Congress.

In a multi-meaning refinement, the path to mid-century is now designed in two stages. In the first stage, from 2020 to 2035, the Party states it will build on the foundation of the moderately prosperous society such that, after “15 years of hard work”, the country will basically realize “socialist modernization”.

In the second stage, from 2035 to 2050, the CPC states it will build on a basically achieved modernization, “work hard for a further 15 years” and “develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful”. China portrays its mid-century self as a global leader in every area of human consequence: economics and trade, science and technology, military and defense, culture and governance.

But Chinese leaders, and officials in general, seem to have a different highlight. While the “Two Centenary Goals” are certainly vital, especially with new stages and specificity, they focus on the amendment to the Party Constitution: “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”.

“The (Xi’s) thought is the biggest highlight of the 19th National Congress of the CPC and a historic contribution to the Party’s development,” said Zhang Dejiang, the third-ranking member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee. Liu Yunshan, the fifth-ranking member, said the elevation of Xi’s thought to the Party’s guiding principle is of great political, theoretical and practical significance.

I take a closer look at Xi’s thought: first by examining each of its elements, then by considering its unified significance.

“Xi Jinping” is the “core” of the CPC Central Committee and of the whole Party, and he thereby at the top level provides the “centralism” of the Party’s cardinal principle of democratic centralism.

The “Thought” is the totality of Xi’s fundamental principles. I see four broad categories: people orientation, national rejuvenation, comprehensive development, and Party leadership.

In his report, Xi listed 14 categories: Party leadership over all aspects of society; people-centered policies; deepening reform comprehensively; new concept of development (innovation, coordination, green, open, and sharing); people as masters of the country; adherence to rule of law, comprehensively governing the country by law; socialist value system and cultural confidence; protecting and improving people’s livelihoods; harmonious coexistence of man and nature (ecological civilization); national security; the Party’s absolute leadership over the military; “one country, two systems” and promoting reunification with Taiwan; international community of a shared future for all humanity; and comprehensive and strict Party governance.

The term “thought” in Chinese has special meaning because before this it had been associated only with Mao Zedong — “Mao Zedong Thought”.

“Socialism” is a set of political ideas with a complex history, unified by public or common ownership of the means of production and concern for the masses.

“Chinese characteristics” is the phrase, originating with Deng Xiaoping, that adapts Marxism to China’s special conditions — the Sinicization of Marxism in modern China — which includes the market playing a decisive role in the allocation of resources and the encouragement of non-public, for-profit businesses, while at the same time State-owned enterprises still playing a dominant role.

“New Era” is a new idea in the constitutional amendment, and it is designed to profoundly transform the essence of socialism with Chinese characteristics into the vision, concepts and strategies that compose Xi’s way of thinking.

The more I reflect, the more I see “New Era” as a conceptual lens with which to view the 19th Party Congress. Semi-official Party analysts say the new era answers five questions.

What “road” to take? Socialism with Chinese characteristics under new historical conditions.

What kind of country to build? First, a moderately prosperous society and then a modernized socialist country.

What development to realize? Better life and common prosperity for all.

What goal to achieve? The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

What contribution to make? Facilitate world peace and prosperity (exemplified by the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructure in developing countries).

Thus, Xi Jinping joins only Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in having his name affixed to a political philosophy in the Party Constitution, a blazing sign lost on no one. It then would follow that the “New Era” into which China is now entering is the third era of the CPC and by extension of the People’s Republic of China.

A seemingly subtle but significant change is the Party’s judgment of what constitutes the fundamental “contradiction” in Chinese society. (“Contradiction” is a Marxist term expressing a particular way of political thinking — dialectical materialism — which identifies “dynamic opposing forces” in society and seeks to resolve the resulting tensions).

The principal contradiction has evolved from one between the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people and backward social production to that between “unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life,” Xi said. The needs for the people to live a better life are increasingly broad and have to be met. Not only have their material and cultural needs grown; their demands for democracy, rule of law, fairness and justice, security, and a better environment are increasing.

This “New-Era” contradiction, replacing quantitative GDP growth with qualitative improvement of life, is what will drive China’s policy.

The mission of a CPC congress is to review and assess achievements of the previous five years, and to forecast challenges and set targets for the subsequent five years (and beyond). Overall, for the 19th Party Congress, the ambition of the goals and the comprehensiveness of the categories were clear, amplified by the commitment to deepen reform. Here, by category, are what stood out.

The Party and the fight against corruption. Confidence in socialism and the increasing role of the Party in managing all aspects of the country is unequivocal, and the increasingly strict governance of the Party, by reforming and purifying itself, is unambiguous. Moreover, the anti-corruption campaign not only continues but also will be enhanced.

Economy. After more than three decades of rapid growth, China’s economy has been transitioning to slower but higher-quality growth. Supply-side structural reform has been written into the Constitution. No GDP growth targets are set. The country focuses on the real economy (as opposed to speculation, such as in the real estate sector). China is not backing away from State-owned enterprises, rather it will support State capital in “becoming stronger, doing better, and growing bigger, thereby turning Chinese enterprises into world-class, globally competitive firms”.

Consumption is fundamental in driving economic growth. The framework of regulations must be improved, prudent macroeconomic and monetary policy maintained, and interest and exchange rates made more market-based. For economic development, innovation leads, especially in science and technology.

Poverty alleviation. Xi has made the elimination of extreme poverty in China by 2020 a cornerstone of his domestic policy. After all, how could China claim to have achieved a moderately prosperous society by 2020 if millions of its citizens would be still living in extreme poverty?

Opening-up. China reasserts its commitment to become more open, including easing market access and protecting the rights and interests of foreign investors. China’s economists see foreign competition as upgrading the quality and cost efficiency of Chinese companies, thus better serving Chinese consumers.

Rule of Law. Strengthening and institutionalizing the rule of law, and weakening arbitrary rule of officials, is a priority. Reflecting Xi’s commitment, the Party is setting up a central leading group for advancing law-based governance in all areas, coordinating the activities of judicial organs. The goal is to complete the transformation of China’s legal system by 2035 with theoretical foundations and practical enforcement.

Ecology. Beautiful China is one of the country’s main descriptions for its second centenary goal by the middle of the century. This modernization is characterized by harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature (such as nature parks) and it requires substantial bolstering of regulatory agencies and their enforcement powers.

Armed forces. China’s goal is to transform the People’s Liberation Army into a world-class military by mid-century, basically completing military reform and modernization by 2035, with information technology/cyber applications and strategic capabilities prioritized.

Especially significant for Xi’s mission are the two “anti’s” — anti-corruption and antipoverty — the former to support the Party’s continuing leadership, the latter as a prime example of what the Party has delivered.

Xi does not downplay a realistic appraisal of problems, including social imbalances, industrial overcapacities, financial system risks, endemic pollution. “Achieving national rejuvenation will be no walk in the park,” Xi said, an example of his plainspoken candor. “It will take more than drum-beating and gong-clanging to get there.”

The speculations of China watchers, and the focus of the international media, have been on the new Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. Because everything in China reports to a standing committee member, composition and balance determine the vision, strategies and policies that will shape China.

This remains true today, but less true today. It is hard to overstate the significance of Xi Jinping’s name written into the Party Constitution. Xi is now, officially, the originating designator and overarching arbiter of “Thought” as it relates to “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, which is the guiding political theory of China and encompasses, essentially, everything in China. For Xi to be named in the CPC Constitution is the ultimate in authority, surpassing even “core” (which already had superseded all other leaders), thus setting into perpetuity Xi’s predominant status and assuring his preeminence in the country’s political life.

That said, to know China is to know the members of the Standing Committee. They are a highly competent, highly experienced group: six of the seven have run provinces or province-level municipalities, many of which, in terms of population and GDP, are the equivalent of major nations.

Traditional norms of balance and age are respected. It’s a diverse group — by geography, education and political career. They have worked together, in various combinations, for years. With much now being written about each member, I’ll just offer some personal reflections.

First, of course, is Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, whose prior experience included governor of Fujian province and Party secretary of Zhejiang province and Shanghai.

In 2005, I was advised to study the “Zhejiang model”, which promotes entrepreneurship to generate economic development. I met Xi, who was then Zhejiang provincial Party secretary, and he recommended that I study China both “horizontally” across diverse regions and “vertically” through the history of its development.

“To understand our dedication to revitalize the country, one has to appreciate the pride that Chinese people take in our glorious ancient civilization,” Xi said. “This is the historical driving force inspiring people today to build the nation. The Chinese people made great contributions to world civilization and enjoyed long-term prosperity,” he said. “Then we suffered over a century of national weakness, oppression and humiliation. So, we have a deep self-motivation to build our country. Our commitment and determination is rooted in our patriotism and pride.”

But he cautioned that pride in China’s recent achievements should not engender complacency.

Second, premier of the State Council, is Li Keqiang, who was Party secretary of Henan and Liaoning provinces. When I visited Li in Liaoning, he explained the complex challenges of revitalizing State-owned enterprises while creating a fertile environment for private businesses. Li shared the same experience of Xi as educated youths in the countryside in the 1970s. The experience gave them the chance to know better rural China and the lives of rural people and thus fostered their people-orientation. The following members are new: Li Zhanshu, who was governor of Heilongjiang province and Party secretary of Guizhou province, has been director of the general office of the CPC Central Committee since 2012.

Wang Yang, vice-premier, is former Party secretary of Chongqing municipality and Guangdong province. At the height of the global financial crisis in early 2009, he argued it was imperative to restructure Guangdong’s economy, so that it can move up the ladder of industrialization and promote more knowledge-based, high-tech, lowpolluting businesses.

Wang Huning, secretariat, is director of the Policy Research Office of the CPC Central Committee. Wang is well known for providing intellectual vision and sophistication in support of practical strategies and policies, ranging from political philosophy to international relations.

Zhao Leji, new chairman of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has served as head of the CPC Organization Department, and before that, as Party secretary of Qinghai and Shaanxi provinces. In addition to his responsibilities for Party and government officials, Zhao provided strong support for the poverty-alleviation mission.

Han Zheng is Party secretary of Shanghai. Under his leadership, Shanghai has become a recognized leader in trade, logistics and finance.

What is the impact of all this on China’s international relations?

There is no need to speculate. Xi himself, in his report, openly and boldly tells all who will listen. China, he says, “has become a great power in the world”. China’s global engagement is proactive, confident and growing. Economics and trade drive China’s power, exemplified by the much-needed Belt and Road Initiative, but diplomacy, the soft power of culture and media, and the hard power of a blue-water navy projecting power, are developing rapidly.

As Xi said, the new era sees “China moving closer to center stage and making greater contributions to mankind”. The country is now offering “Chinese wisdom” and “Chinese solutions” to the international community — the experiences and lessons of China’s remarkable development, especially to developing countries.

Regarding Taiwan, which exemplifies Chinese sovereignty, Xi painted a bright red line. “We will resolutely uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity and will never tolerate a repeat of the historical tragedy of a divided country,” Xi emphasized. “We have firm will, full confidence, and sufficient capability to defeat any form of Taiwan independence secession plot.”

China has asserted again that it is no threat to any country. No matter how powerful China becomes, China’s leaders say it will never seek hegemony or pursue expansionism. Nonetheless, some foreigners remain suspicious, wary of China’s long-term ambitions. Who knows future circumstances, they worry? Who knows how China may change? Although I fear self-fulfilling prophecy, I am encouraged that China appreciates such sensitivities and works to build confidence.

The 19th Party Congress, especially Xi’s report, is an epic narrative of what China has accomplished, what China has yet to achieve, and what China envisages as necessary to be a great nation. Xi, now, carries the authority; he also bears the burden.

Setting that new target date of 2035 for China to achieve basic modernization, Xi sees China as standing at a new historic starting point and socialism with Chinese characteristics as exploring new horizons. China has entered a new era and the road ahead leads, apparently, to great nation status by 2050.

The author is a public intellectual, international corporate strategist, and China expert/ commentator. He is co-creator (with Adam Zhu) and the host of China Global Television Network’s Closer to China with R.L.Kuhn.