Educationally, Xiamen has equally been internationally minded. Xiamen University itself was set up in 1921 by the Malaysian-Chinese, Tan Kah Kee. 93 years later the Xiamen University Malaysia opened, to our knowledge, the first overseas Chinese university (it may be that Shanghai’s Fudan university will be the first Chinese one to open in the EU if the Hungarian Prime Minister Orban has his way). In all the material on the Malaysian initiative, it is stated repeatedly that no money will be repatriated to China.
Perhaps the most enduring physical trace of the city’s international history is the architecture on Gulangyu island (off the island of Xiamen) where 13 foreign consulates set up during the times when Xiamen was a treaty port (after China’s defeat in the First Opium War). It is now a UNESCO Heritage site – and some call it a ‘world architectural museum’, given the variety of building styles, drawn from so many cultures.
The island is another of the homes of the city’s creative industries – as well as a place where foreign artists come to enjoy residencies. It is a common and perfectly reasonable observation by Chinese cultural professionals that there is too often little reciprocity from the countries whose artists enjoy Gulangyu’s hospitality. However complex and increasingly difficult are the relationships between China and many other countries, it remains depressing how unwelcoming countries can be to Chinese culture, either official or unofficial. It is sometimes as if too much of the rest of the world still treats cities like Xiamen as ‘cultural treaty ports’.

By the standards of Guangzhou or Shenzhen, never mind Shanghai, Xiamen is a small city – of around 5 million people. But its cultural offerings do suggest its potential but also its limitations.  Several of our contacts described it as a ‘city of dreams’, a place conducive to imagining a different future – which is too often realised elsewhere, in cities which have the necessary resources.  The late major Chinese artist Huang Yongping may have been born in Xiamen and founded there Xiamen Dada in 1986, but he spent most of his life in France. An even more noteworthy example is President Xi Jinping who spent his early career in Xiamen and now enjoys a rather larger canvas on which to realise his ambition (see the image of the President in Xiamen at the top of this newsletter).
Some compare Xiamen to Seattle – and if Starbucks which began life as a laid-back Seattle enterprise is that city’s totem, Xiamen’s version is Luckin Coffee. The Chinese coffee chain began life in Beijing, has now more outlets in China (all cashless) than Starbucks and survived a major accounting fraud – but along the way it moved its headquarters to Xiamen.
With its substantial university populations, its beaches and boardwalks Xiamen has something in common with Seattle, a laidback identity that seems to attract coffee brands (although this slightly pastoral description of Xiamen was challenged recently during the heightened tension with Taiwan when the young people enjoying the beach found themselves filming tanks on the seashore (see image above).