ESSAY: Ching Chang Hanji
A century and a half of Sino-British contention is recapitulated in a Sino-British spat over "rights" to a public piano at St. Pancras station in London.
Listen to this sample of Chinese opera Zha Mei An to get into the mood of the piece of musical contention that follows…and below, a YouTube update from January 26.
When an irresistible force meets an immovable object it’s only natural that sparks will fly. And when Chinese national flags are deployed in London to film a Spring Festival special, can the hand of CCTV be far behind?
A stubborn disagreement over “rights” involving the use of a public piano at St. Pancras Train Station in London on January 19 has gone viral on the internet, with the tabloids in close chase and broadsheets not far behind. It’s being hyped up by partisans on one side as British racism and sexism and mocked by partisans on the other side as communist infiltrators ruining Britain. It’s a veritable Rorschach test of a story, in which it is tempting to see what you want to see, such as the saga of a free country pitted against an unfree one, and the best and worst of it involves an old Chinese opera tune—but more on that later.
To some the kerfuffle represents the existential fight for the values of the free world, but it’s also got strong East-West overtones, and echoes Sino-British historic conflict more specifically. It touches on issues of privacy and public behavior, of rights and wrongs, and it provides a case study in communication breakdown and missed cross-cultural cues. It also involves an upright piano once played on subsequently donated to the station by Elton John as a piano for anyone to play on. At the time of writing, the piano is sadly locked up and off-limits, watched by two guards and cordoned off by “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” tape.
The crux of the matter was a clash between the “rights” of a solo performer to live stream himself on his phone while playing on the public piano versus the “rights” of a small group intent on doing a secret video of themselves at the same location without being filmed by others.
The incident also raises the nagging question of how much privacy can one reasonably demand in a public space with so many phone cameras in play.
At first glance, the stakes were exceedingly low; two parties wanted to use the same piano to record themselves for their own purposes at roughly the same time. Before things started to go downhill, and they go downhill rather quickly, there is a touching moment where the two parties not only share the piano, taking turns, but dance to one another’s music. And then someone noticed a live stream was being made.
On the one side you have Brendon Kavanagh, a Briton born in Ireland of considerable musical talent who has built an online following and fan base playing boogie-woogie style piano in public, broadcast live.
On the other side you have a group of flag-waving Chinese, educated in Britain and working there, who wanted to record a special message for Lunar New Year in a public place, but desired to keep their project secret and under wraps.
The divisive element that elevated the stakes to a point where things went from the personal to the national and veered madly out of control can be definitively traced to the Chinese flags. There are many Chinese in Britain, and many British of Chinese descent, but there’s something tone-deaf, if not politically dubious, about waving the national flag of China in a London train station. It doesn’t make sense in Chinese cultural terms either, because New Years is a family holiday and an ancient annual tradition that transcends the narrow confines of whatever regime happens to be in power at the present time. The lunar New Year is almost universally celebrated in East Asia and the Chinese diaspora.
The red flag was also at odds with the expressed desire on the part of the Chinese cultural group not to be filmed by anyone else in the large hall while they were doing their thing in a public place. It is odd enough for young people to be waving little Chinese flags at a train station in the heart of London that people are going to look and take notice. It’s a public act of self-identification of the sort that begs attention, yet the Chinese flag wavers, who were also dressed up, insisted they didn’t want their pictures taken, and though their initial entreaties were couched in polite language, they were quite unyielding and nasty about it.
The Chinese residents in Britain, mostly recently graduates from the look of it, took the older live-streaming local pianist to task for having set up his phone camera in a way that may or may not have captured their likeness.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a recording. A live stream is ephemeral, a live broadcast. Kavanagh later made a plea on YouTube asking fans who had recorded the live stream to send him a copy.
What immediately becomes clear on the video posted on YouTube is that he did not understand why he was being told not to record himself playing music, when all they had to do was walk away to get out of the shot. When the bullying became more persistent, his resistance became stronger, but he treated it all in an offhand, jokey manner, befitting a musician accustomed to busking curbside, and at no time did he lose his temper or raise his voice. The hypocrisy of the Chinese request became more apparent when it transpired that they had their own little camera set-up and were planning to do something quite similar.
WHO GETS TO RECORD WHAT OF WHOM ON WHOSE TERMS?
Instead of relying on common sense, common courtesy, or amicably seeking a consensus or common ground, those who complained about the British piano player shifted register from polite to outright rude, incensed that he didn’t do as requested they exploded to the point of bullying. Legal action was threatened and non-existent laws were invoked, but they made good on their threat to call the police.
The exact wording of the complaint is unknown, but the station security officer who confronted the piano player said she was responding to accusations of racism and attempting to touch a woman. These are accusations that carry a great deal of weight and have an instant impact in Britain today for a variety of social and political reasons, but there is little evidence in support of either. What emerges instead is an unseemly misuse of the police—a weaponization of racism and sexism—to strengthen a losing argument.
The piano player, now known to millions by his name, Brendan Kavanagh, later told a TV interviewer that it made him bristle at the way they were telling him what to do in his country.
When one of the young women added that she was actually British, Kavanaugh pointed questioningly at the Chinese national flag in her hands. He called it a communist flag, which incensed her and her group. He was chided for being racist and told he “needed to get educated” if he thought the flag of China was the communist flag.
The only male member of the group to talk on camera asked Kavanaugh his name, but wouldn’t give his own name in turn, saying “it wasn’t a question.” When Kavanagh suggested it was good practice to “live in Rome as the Romans do” his self-appointed interrogator got livid, asking if he was Roman.
Things escalated suddenly when the young man trying to take control of the situation leaned into the frame of the camera that the piano player had trained on himself and shouted with shocking force and volume “Do not touch her!”
He repeated this spurious warning several times, attracting attention and escalating tensions sharply, in effect adding an alleged attempt of sexual impropriety to the already dubious charges of alleged racism.
To wit, the well-heeled, self-confident and assertive bilingual youth took exception to the piano player for his smugness and unwillingness to grant them their special requests. When the interaction didn’t go his way, he exploded with the false rage of vigilante nationalist.
The testy volley of words perfectly encapsulated the media tropes of nationalistic propaganda in the PRC in which the Chinese are posited as a proud and superior people who must be on guard against Western humiliation, as they had only recently overcome the indignity of a century’s shame and humiliation, which of course dates to the infamous bullying by Britain of China during the Opium War.
The St. Pancras incident was like 150 years of history packed into half an hour, and not just on the Chinese side. The piano player, Brendan Kavanagh, deployed the cultural tropes of his own background and the rich fount of tropes of being Irish in England and outspoken in his pride of living in a free country, and more generally, seeing himself as part of a larger Anglo-American “free world”
“This is a free country” is a neat encapsulation, if not deliberate weaponization, of a political tradition dating back in the mists to the Magna Carta, the rise of democracy and the fiery oratory of the likes of Winston Churchill. Kavanaugh thus invoked the historical baggage of his own history in an edifying way, standing up to bullying, standing up to being told what to do, rejecting communism and celebrating the freedom to be free.
Overnight he became an Internet sensation with many thousands of fans saying things in the comments section to the effect that at last someone in Britain has the courage to stand up to the communist bullies.
Overall, Kavanagh was shrewd in his responses, taking the high road of making light of it and keeping calm, even if he was slyly playing to his camera and knew the whole while this sort of thing was gold for his live stream business model.
As the event unfolded, Kavanagh was in communion with his fan base, while his accusers, perhaps feeling isolated and out of their element in London despite many years’ residence, lost their tempers and lost all perspective.
The way they acted was as if they were physically in London but psychically in Beijing, trying to produce something that would be a hit back home on CCTV, if it was CCTV they were freelancing for.
Under this self-imposed pressure, they lost their manners and rudely repeated the demands of their undisclosed employer that everything be kept secret until broadcast. It was the secret pact with Beijing that put them on a collision course with the freewheeling, live-streaming pianist in London.
They could have walked away or waited to use the piano if anonymity was their intent, but they were afraid he might already, inadvertently, have something on camera, so instead they took the low road of bullying him to stop filming and apologize and this and that, finally upping the stakes of their baseless allegations by going to the police, and misconstruing the whole incident to their advantage.
They “told” on him for filming himself without a permit, but what permit did they have?
If CCTV was their undisclosed employer, then that the stakes for getting their little scripted video just right were much higher than they were willing to admit. They did mention in passing they were doing something for a Chinese TV station, staging some kind of well-wishing from London for New Years programming.
Indeed, the flag-waving doesn’t make sense at all unless the TV station in question is CCTV, and the program they were gunning for participation in was Chunhui, or Spring Festival, which is probably the most popular and most widely-watched TV program in the CCTV’s broadcast calendar.
That’s high stakes.
It will be interesting to see if the London-based flag waving tribute to the motherland airs as scheduled, if it airs at all.
Meanwhile the contenders for the piano have become world famous, though not in the way they sought. I’ll limit the many nasty comments and unfairly provocative posts that have subsequently gotten massive circulation on the web to this single example:
The man with the red-orange scarf who did the loud, nasty shouting is known as Newton Leng. (Leng Xuenian) He can be seen in this screenshot complaining to the train station police officer.
Newton Leng, singled out as a “Chinese patriot” in this Japanese media report.
Newton Leng, like his comrades (comrades in the apolitical sense) is well-educated, well-dressed, bilingual and an ardent enthusiast for educational exchange. His bio suggests he has consulted for the Financial Times and other British firms in localization practices.
Byron Wan, a freelance writer who did much to make the story public in his tireless posts on X, joins the speculation of those who wondered what empowered Leng to take control of the situation by escalating it. Newton’s brazen attitude brings to mind the meme of privileged brats whose attitude in life seems to be “do you know who my father is?”
The flag-waver to whose defense the ardent young Newton so arrogantly rose, is Adelina Zhang. (Zhang Ning) The hat and outfit she is wearing at the scene has been compared by online commentators as based on a costume in the Hunger Games.
Something of a social butterfly, judging from her social network posts, Adelina Zhang has probably never heard of the “Streisand Effect” —by which trying to fight your detractors only makes you sound worse—but she understands the dynamics of it very well by now because she’s deleting posts and things she said in her own defense. Her photos posing with the rich and famous are a familiar and harmless tic among ambitious Chinese who understand that “guanxi” and knowing the right people, or at least pretending to, opens doors.
The following photo takes on a new significance in light of the still-undisclosed secret film project at St. Pancras. She has done media work with the Chinese embassy in London, including televised promotion of last summer’s Hangzhou Games that were attended by Xi with Bashar al-Assad of Syria as a special guest.
The sweet-looking but somewhat illogical woman who first asked Brendan Kavanagh to stop filming because she had a “non-disclosure agreement” is Liu Mengying. She is trained in AI and worked in banking and at Intel before starting Top Offer Academy, a recruitment company of which she is the CEO.
Liu Mengying seems to have embraced Western life, at least the good life, in a sincere way, and judging from the videos, and the statements released afterwards, she is the “peacemaker” and sees herself as a bridge between east and west. Easily the most voluble member of her video team, she speaks English well and has posted on the incident in both English and Chinese. Not that fluency in a foreign language is always to one’s advantage. She made a big fuss about her “image rights” and “non-disclosure” but never really came clean about what they were doing and why his camera was a problem for her.
Given Liu’s cross-cultural sensitivities, it is all the more surprising that she should make the incendiary claim she makes in her Chinese language address to “her” people that what the St. Pancras incident was really all about was her responsibility of defending the national flag, especially while abroad.
This is as good as a dog whistle for wolf warriors in the audience back home to seize upon any possible insults to Chinese people and pounce on a reputed case of foreign disrespect for the motherland.
It’s utter nonsense, of course, but if anything more needs to be said in Brendan’s defense, he was not assaulting or damaging the sacrosanct red flag as much as he was pushing it gently away as she gesticulated at him with it.
In Liu Mengying’s engaging words, “here comes the truth.”
Even the false accusation of attempted touching on Kavanagh’s part, that was peppered with the implication that it was especially shocking that a man of his age should attempt such a thing, puts paid to the lie that he was trying to disrespect that flag.
Which brings to mind the other most troubling charge made by Liu Mengying, now echoed by not a small number of commentators online, is that Kavanagh is racist.
The reasons given include:
He said they were Japanese but they are Chinese
He called the Chinese flag “communist” which shows his racism
He played racist music to provoke them
The first two insinuations are easy to dismiss. While it is not unknown for Westerners to confuse one East Asian nationality for another, in the same way that people from outside Europe might have trouble distinguishing a Spaniard from an Italian or Austrian, that was not the case with Kavanagh whose videos show him entertaining Chinese passersby on other occasions. A fellow piano player from Britain who can be seen hovering in and out of the live stream, can be heard on video saying there were some Japanese coming by and he had plans to jam with them. When the Chinese New Year agitprop group walked over to the piano to complain, Kavanagh initially thought it was the former and quickly corrected himself when told they were Chinese.
Indeed, it was his recognition and “embrace” of their Chineseness that led him to play a Chinese tune that some see as a racist trope. He was later accused of deliberately insulting the Chinese TV team by playing it, or more likely teasing them, but if that was his intent, it fell on deaf ears because none of them got the reference or reacted to it. It was the viral back and forth on the Internet in the wake of the recorded incident that identified the little ditty he played, and a big deal is now being made of that.
Liu Mengyin cites the provocation seen above of a “very discriminating song” in her summary of what happened after the event, but it is entirely anachronistic because she only learned about it later. It’s interesting that she takes footage from Kavanagh’s stream as evidence, but blocks out his face, as if to demonstrate her sincerity in image rights protection.
And now, on to the music, which, despite being a source of contention, is probably the best thing to come of this storm in a teapot.
“I came for the meme, but stayed for the opera.”
That might sound like a witty, original comment, but it’s actually a meme lifted from the comments section on YouTube and other music hosting sites online which are littered with the phrase.
Probably the best-known use of this Chinese opera being sampled for add-on musical effect in a non-Chinese setting comes in the song “If You Feel My Love” by the Romanian group “Blaxy Girls.”
It’s got an undeniably catchy beat and the fast-spoken word rhythm of the sample might whimsically be construed as a Song Dynasty template for rap music.
But internet memes spread like wildfire and someone put up a popular post that takes an old Tom and Jerry cartoon and repeats the musical sample in question to ridiculous lengths. This is the “racist” version of the song, and citing it has gained traction in the Chinese online commentariat.
Among other things, Ching Chang, sometimes written Ching Cheng, brings to mind the insulting term “Ching-Chong” and with emotions rising to the fore it might be that the two become confused as one.
Meanwhile, it’s difficult to determine where the name Ching Chang Hanji comes from and what it means in the original context. One plausible explanation found on Reddit offers a possible source line for the syllables in question, quoting directly from the original opera 铡美案 (Zha Mei An)
近前看其 詳上寫著 秦香蓮年三十 二歲那狀告當朝
(jìnqián kàn qí xiáng shàng xiězhe Qínxiānglián nián sānshí'èr suì nà zhuàng gào dāng cháo)
The first four words of the Chinese opera lyric cited here are jin-qian-kan-qi sound close, but not precisely the same as Ching Chang Hanji. The opera, an age-old tale about the plaintive lament of a wronged woman 秦香蓮 (Qin Xianglian) also contains a bodyguard character named 韩琪 or Hanqi. That sounds close enough to “Hanji” but it may just be a coincidence that somehow entered the sonic mix.
For more detail on the lyrics, the story and unusual title, check out this post by Derek Wang: https://twitter.com/derekhxw/status/1749813335598719094
But if Ching Chang Hanji is a racist trope and it is anti-Chinese for white people to be going around playing this music, then the man in the clip below is in big trouble with his best bud Xi Jinping.
The limitless Russo-Sino friendship may have found a real limit after all.
You’ve stayed for the meme, now enjoy the opera.
Some extras:
Brendan Kavanagh playing Ching Chang Hanji (cue at 50-second mark)
-If it is true, as rumored. that there are moves afoot to have some of the St. Pancras footage suppressed, copies of the YouTube footage can also be found at the two sites below:
https://rumble.com/v48n6tx-police-called-to-stop-filming-during-piano-livestream-brendan-kavanagh.html
https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1749288724872200503
-The following Daily Mail report misses many of the nuances but it’s probably the most influential newspaper report at the moment.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12994165/Pianist-stop-filming-Chinese-tourists-London-St-Pancras-slams-request.html
One of the earliest Chinese newspaper reports was from Singapore.
https://www.zaobao.com.sg/realtime/china/story20240123-1463797
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/london-piano-youtuber-accosted-by-chinese-group-demanding-he-delete-video-showing-their-faces/news-story/5a78075ebe7d4989fd09d719251df02f
The prolific video poster on Chinese politics below, known only as “Lei” gives a cogent analysis of why the behavior of the Chinese youth in St. Pancras Station reflect CCP-style thinking. I don’t agree with all her speculation about the motivations for the incident, but she makes a good case to look at it as a microcosm for the kind of communication breakdowns that plague UK-China and US-China relations.
Lei also suggests, in concert with growing public sentiment, that the UK and US need to stand up and hold their ground with China just as Brendan did.
She helpfully describes several key characteristics of Chinese propaganda and CCP rules of engagement because she sees these factors are in play in the St. Pancras incident.
-Remain secretive about real intention
-Avoid open communication
-Solve crisis by obtaining control
-Power flows top-down
-Escalate tension to break will
-If nothing else works, play victim
-Repeat over and over
1.24 Update: Piers Morgan talks with Brendan Kavanagh about the incident. The focus of the host is disappointingly shallow, all he wants to hear is along the “we live in a free country, mate” line of defiance, and he challenges Kavanagh to go back and provoke some more. (The piano has been unlocked again)
Their conversation does touch on the odd behavior of the British transport police but doesn’t attempt to consider the awkward situation the Chinese put themselves in by trying to control a public space in London for the purposes of a CCTV cameo clip.
There is mention that YouTube is under some pressure to take the video down.
1.25 update
Today’s China Daily offers a telling cue as to the likely motivation and source of frustration of the St. Pancras agitprop film crew in their somewhat self-defeating attempt to stage a performance at a public piano:
Link to China Daily article:
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202401/25/WS65b1c33da3105f21a507e43a.html
1.26 update. Brendan Kavanagh has more fans than ever but he has fears of YouTube taking some of his videos down and posted a video update in response:
On Friday Brendan Kavanagh returned to the scene of the kerfuffle and talked about his experience with the “wussies” with a mix of humor, defiance and provocation.
Chen Xiaoping and guests discuss the piano player incident (1.26)
VOA Chinese language broadcast about piano player incident
1.27 Kavanagh compilation: After a retreat, he’s back at it again in top comedic form.
Finally, an amusing mash-up of footage done to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”
1.29 update:
A textbook case of the Streisand Effect as Liu Mengying doubles down on dubious claims of “racist” piano player provoking them because he played Ching Chang Hanji.
https://twitter.com/DavisKuma/status/1751734783707632072
And the piano player saying he is still getting criticized for tune Ching Chang Hanji.
2.4 Update
-Brendan posts screenshot from YouTube instructing him to mask certain identities
-Christine Lee, a well-known barrister who has been accused of being a Chinese spy is currently engaged a legal battle with Britain’s M15 security service. Her presence at the piano incident, belatedly confirmed, looms large in several background shots. Though no stranger to publicity, as she has been seen in the company of prime ministers and prominent figures, a person resembling the Hong Kong-born lawyer can be seen advising the group in the St. Pancras footage, though remaining mostly in the background. Lee’s participation was confirmed by Liu Mengying who threatened to sue Brendan Kavanagh on “X”—one of Liu’s last posts before her account was terminated.
WHY DID THE ST PANCRAS INTERACTION GO FROM FRIENDLY POSING BY THE PIANO TO CROSS-CULTURAL COMBAT ON SUCH SHORT NOTICE?
It is not clear if Ms. Lee, who has represented the London China embassy in legal matters, is currently advising the St. Pancras agitprop group on legal matters as well, Kavanagh seems to think she is, having released a post titled “The Spy Who Sued Me” but even if she isn’t, her documented involvement elevates the stakes of the kerfuffle into a genuine international incident.
While the initial “image rights” complaint was most likely spurred by the agitprop group’s realization that Kavanagh was doing a livestream —it clashed with their desire to keep their St. Pancras flag-waving piano skit a secret so it would be a surprise when aired “from London” in conjunction with CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala— the presence of the influential Lee quietly advising in the background might also have served to raise the emotional stakes about control of the footage of the incident.
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