Beijing
Dinners between Beijingers
Most types of Chinese meals are almost impossible to enjoy alone. Rather than serving single portions Chinese food is prepared and served to make big dishes to share and eating with others is an important part of Beijing life. On any given evening people of a variety of ages, incomes, and dialects may gather round the same table. The close culture of family, the legacies of Communism, and the scale of migration, means that dinnertime in Beijing may play host to a wonderful variety of life experience.
However during fast paced change, Beijingers are noticing that social divisions are widening, trust is fragile and making a new acquaintance may seem a practical, rather than a personal act.
Beijing Muse dinners aim to bring people together from business, academia, the arts, young and old, entrepreneurs and unemployed to understand one another as individuals and to refresh their own perspectives of themselves.
Beijing Muse Dinner Feedback:
"In our fast paced world change is constant and we can lose sight of what really matters. Inside each of us is someone who wants to be heard and understood but the hectic lifestyles of modern urbanites, we often lack the opportunity to talk and listen to what really counts. Why is it that even our "good friends" may not really know that much about us? Perhaps we don't ask the right questions. Strangely, through Muse I have found that it's not just because we are too busy. Maybe we forget which are the important issues in our lives. Muse is a great way to discover who we are, where we are at in our lives and also what is going on inside the people we meet and care about. Real conversations and honest answers to sometimes difficult questions." Eddie Law
“Muse is undressing yourself in public without feeling naked”. Bai Maoshan
If you would like to attend or host a Beijing Muse dinner email: info@oxfordmuse.com
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Beijing Portraits
For the first time in decades people from around the world have a chance to get to know China: its history, philosophies and customs, through interactions with people in China on their own terms.
In Beijing a team of writers are making portraits through conversations with Beijingers. These portraits will soon be put on the website in Chinese and translated into English.
Our immediate aim is to make a collection of individual self-portraits of up to 500 inhabitants of Beijing, to be published on the web and in book form, so that the Olympic visitors and TV spectators the world over can form a more intimate and accurate picture of the city.
If you would like to take part in Beijing portrait-making, email: info@oxfordmuse.com
Beijing Business connections
The Muse works to improve business relationships between China and the rest of the world by giving both sides a better understanding of each other’s aspirations and through more opportunities for informal personal contact.
Beijing Muse conversation dinners are bringing together business people from within China and from the outside world: employers and employees; innovators, experts and decision makers across different fields.
Our one day MCA (Master of Communication Arts) course trains managers in multinational, foreign and domestic Chinese companies to understand how they can make their own job and their life at work more interesting, rewarding and productive.
To find out more about the one day MCA or Muse business dinners, email: info@oxfordmuse.com
A Global Conversation through Beijing
China is a laboratory for experimenting with ways that the world can work together at high speed, interdependently. Many things and people have been uprooted, China’s space for innovation provides an opportunity for individuals to re-think how they want to live, work and cooperate. The atmosphere of re-invention excites many first time visitors to China. But behind the great achievements, China is struggling with many of the same problems that other countries faced, are facing or will face during industrialisation.
China is also an ancient civilisation whose culture contains many aspects of universal appeal. We aim to reveal what the world can learn from China, and China from other parts of the world.
A global conversation from Beijing will enhance thinking and cooperation on life and world changing issues. The more conversations we can have between Beijing and the outside world, the more solutions to global and personal challenges we may find.
If you would like to take part in a global conversation email: info@oxfordmuse.com
Beyond Beijing
Coming soon…