With over 1.5 million fans on Chinese social media platforms, Rachel labels herself as a German-American vlogger (视频博主) who speaks Chinese.     1    many may not know is that she spent her childhood in Guangdong and     2     (call) China her home since the age of six.

Rachel’s journey as a     3     (create) of digital content began during her time at Xiamen University, when she started sharing videos about her everyday life and hot topics in China.     4     (film) in fluent Mandarin, occasionally with a Cantonese accent, her videos quickly captured the interest of many viewers.

Rachel’s exceptional command of the Chinese language has opened doors     5     exciting job opportunities. In 2022, she became the first regular female guest on a cultural interview program in China     6    features foreigners as the main guests.

Her popularity     7     (boost) further in 2023, thanks to My Guangdong Story,     8     six-episode documentary series that explored the lives of foreigners in Guangdong.

“I am actually a Cantonese, and Guangdong is my home,” Rachel shares     9     (warm).

With her passion, language skills, and genuine love for China, Rachel continues to inspire her vast online community,     10     (bridge) cultures and building connections across borders

4 . As a child, Liu Wenwen disliked the suona, a “loud, high-pitched” traditional Chinese musical instrument, an ancestral heritage of her family that was to become her career.

Her peers at primary school laughed at her, saying her whole family was engaged only in “weddings and funerals.” Indeed, these are the two major occasions where the horn-like wind instrument is played in China’s rural areas. Liu felt ashamed. People admired things that were modern and international. “Suona, in comparison, was considered an art of the hillbilly.” Her father’s family has performed suona for seven generations.

The music is rooted in Liu’s DNA, but it takes time and hard work to become a skilled musician. The instrument was so loud that it annoyed the neighbors when she practiced at home. “So my parents would wake me up at 4 a.m. every day and take me to practice outside in a park.”

While she followed her parents to play the suona as a child, she only fell in love with the instrument at university. She found suona music beautiful for the first time in 2008, when she entered Shanghai Conservatory of Music to learn the instrument more systematically.

On China’s social media platforms, her name is often followed by a video of her live performance at a concert in Sydney, Australia, alongside award-winning composer Tan Dun in 2017. For her debut on the international stage, she was playing Hundreds of Birds Paying Homage to Phoenix, a masterpiece that often represents excellence in suona performance.

Liu promoted the “hillbilly” music to an international audience, thanks to Tan and his team, who recomposed the traditional music and arranged the piece into an orchestra. “It was a smooth dialogue between a Chinese instrument and a Western orchestra, loved by the musicians and audience alike,” she said. “I felt my hard work had paid off. I trained for over 20 years, probably just to win cheers and applause for traditional Chinese music on the international stage.”

5 . Zong Qinghou, a soft drinks giant from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, died of an illness at the age of 79. There has been much mourning at his passing on Feb. 25, 2024 as he was well-known as the founder of a company, headquartered in his hometown in the late 1980s, which later developed into the Wahaha Group, a major soft drinks company.

He is known to the public for three things — his rags-to-riches rise, his long-term frugal (节俭的) lifestyle, and his devotion to promoting China’s national industries. Forbes ranked him, with a wealth of about $5.9 billion, No.53 among Chinese billionaires last year.

Yet besides, it is also worthwhile to think over the question about whether his success in business can be imitated today and what lessons policymakers can learn from his self-made business success as they try to enrich the soil for setting up business.

Before winning a contract (合同) to work as a salesperson of a small school-run factory selling writing materials, iced treats and soft drinks in Hangzhou in 1987, Zong worked as a traveling salesman for nearly a decade after working for 15 years on various posts in local farming communities with Grade-9 education.

His sharp business sense, which he owed to poverty instead of the genes (基因) of the Zhejiang business community, enabled him to recognize business opportunities at a time when the country had just carried out the change from a planned economy to a socialist market one.

The broad space he enjoyed as a sales representative of the factory enabled him to continuously sharpen his sales strategies and enlarge his network of business partners. That not only helped him gather the start-up funds he later used to contract the whole factory, but also influenced his later management style, which he summed up as always trying to make things simpler.

As he told the media, it is the spirit of adventure of his generation and their down-to-earth work style that deserve attention, not his lifestyle, which was a personal choice.

Shen Congwen       1     (bear) in Tuojiang Town, Fenghuang County, Hunan Province. He was     2     great modern Chinese writer as well as a research scholar of historical cultural relics. The Border Town is Shen Congwen’s representative work,     3     centers on Cuicui.

Cuicui is raised by her grandfather. 17 years ago, her mother was pregnant (怀孕的) before marriage and she committed suicide after giving birth to Cuicui by drinking cold water in the river. When Cuicui grows up, her grandfather begins to worry about her     4     (marry), because he doesn’t want Cuicui to have a miserable life like her mother. There is a rich man in the border town, who has two handsome sons that both fall in love with Cuicui. Cuicui likes the younger son while her grandfather misunderstands her feelings and thinks the older son is more suitable for Cuicui.     5     (sad), the older son dies in an accident and the rich man puts the blame on Cuicui’s grandfather.     6     the younger son loves Cuicui, he can’t marry her after the death of his dear brother. Finally, he chooses     7     (leave) the town. Cuicui’s grandfather dies     8     a cold, rainy night, leaving Cuicui alone in the world. However, grief doesn’t break her down. She takes over her grandfather’s work,       9     (wait) for the younger son to come back.

From this simple story of love, family duty, and doubts about what the future might bring, Shen Congwen paints a vivid picture of early 20th Century rural life in China. Recently, this book     10     (become) symbolic to a new generation of Chinese people, providing a fascinating image of life in rural China.