As Beijing continues to tighten restrictions on foreign media and journalists, getting on the ground in China has become much more difficult. In an exchange with Voice of America, two veteran journalists who have both covered China for more than a decade said that having access to China and understanding Chinese society is still very important today in order to make great China stories.
“It’s become a lot harder to gather information about China, especially from within China,” said David Wertime, executive director of the China desk at technology media outlet Protocol, “in part because of the increased censorship under Xi Jinping further intensified censorship under Xi Jinping’s rule, and a broad societal reluctance to have exchanges with Western journalists and Western institutions.”
Wertime first visited China as a member of the U.S. Peace Corps in 2001 and entered the media field a decade ago to profile and report on China. Based in San Francisco, he now serves as editorial director of the China section of Politico’s website and leads coverage of China for Politico’s new media platform, The Accord.
Another veteran journalist shares Wotem’s feelings about the distress caused by censorship of information in China.
“Journalists are used to working under difficult circumstances. There was a period of 30 years when we [Western journalists] couldn’t get into China,” said David Barboza, founder of the economic magazine Connecting China, referring to the period after the Communist Party’s establishment of power in 1949 until the beginning of the reform and opening up. “We needed to find ways to interview all kinds of people inside and outside of China, using documents and videos and everything else to connect a story.”
He has covered China for more than 16 years and served as director of the New York Times in Shanghai, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism in 2013 for his exposé on the vast amount of personal gain made by the Family of former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the same story that led to the complete blocking of the Times’ English and Chinese websites inside China. He currently lives in Boston.
On-the-ground reporting is the key to writing great journalism
As China has taken on a more influential role on the international stage than ever before, Western media are increasing their focus on China coverage, with more and more journalists joining the effort to cover the country.
“The scope of coverage of China is much greater,” David Zhang recalls, “Back in 2004, China was not a topic of daily coverage.”
On Twitter, some journalists and China watchers who cover China have launched a discussion about whether certain qualifications are needed to talk about China. One view is that not knowing Chinese or having lived in China for an extended period of Time does not qualify one to give an authoritative view on topics related to China. In journalism, “parachute journalists” who fit this description are often criticized for not knowing the region they are assigned to, not speaking the language or understanding the Culture, and leaving after a short period of reporting, so that their stories often do not objectively reflect what is happening. They leave after a short period of reporting, so that their reports often do not objectively reflect the events that took place.
Voltaire believes that knowledge of the language and local daily Life will definitely help journalists do a better job of reporting. “Speaking the local language and understanding the local culture can be a huge help, and so can living in the area. As a journalist, that can reduce your resistance when it comes to understanding what’s really newsworthy. I think it can also make your sources more comfortable when they’re talking to you. You can more easily find information that you might have missed, and you can be less reliant on the middle man.”
None of this, however, is a determining factor in the quality of coverage, according to Voltairem.
“It’s not that you need to have all of the above to produce good reporting on China,” he says.
David Chang holds a similar view.
Let’s be straightforward: “You can’t write an in-depth story if you’ve never lived in China or visited there regularly,” he told Voice of America. But I don’t want to ignore the perspective of people who haven’t lived in China much. Living there and learning Chinese doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be a good or okay journalist.”
Since China opened its doors to the outside world in 1978, more and more talented American journalists have chosen to cover China as their career focus. Nicholas Kristof, now a columnist for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Author and scholar Ian Johnson also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his reporting on the persecution of Falun Gong by Chinese authorities. He continued to cover China until 2020, when his visa was revoked and he was forced to leave. Another person with extensive experience reporting on China is Peter Hessler, whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the South China Morning Post, and National Geographic, among other publications, and who has won the Kiriyama Prize and the MacArthur Genius Award. He is currently a permanent Writer for The New Yorker and lives in Chengdu. John Pomfret, former director of The Washington Post in Beijing, won the 2017 award for The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present) won the 2017 Arthur Ross Book Award. Philip Pan, now editor of The New York Times, won the 2009 Arthur Rose Book Award for his book Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China. Arthur Ross Book Award. Former New Yorker correspondent in Beijing Ou Yiwen won the National Book Award for his 2014 book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.
For years, Western journalists working in China have faced a far from ideal and even harsh environment, and it is not uncommon for them to be harassed and attacked by Chinese security personnel. Since the arrival of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, press control and censorship have been on the rise. President Trump‘s presidency has begun to take countermeasures, and the U.S.-China sparring has reached a fever pitch: the United States has imposed restrictions on the length of visas for official Chinese media reporters in the United States and has classified Xinhua News Agency, China Daily, and China Radio International as “foreign missions”; China has accordingly refused to extend the visas of several major U.S. media outlets in China, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. China has accordingly refused to extend the visas of several major U.S. media outlets in China, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, effectively reducing the number of U.S. media correspondents in China. Prior to this, there were about 100 U.S. journalists working for news organizations in the United States and other countries.
The next phase of China coverage: from surface to point?
Last year, both David Chang and Wotem, who have extensive experience reporting on China, launched their respective media platforms, Connecting China and Protocol, which they edit. Unlike traditional U.S. media, which tend to cover China from a macro and comprehensive perspective, these two platforms have chosen to focus their coverage on only one specific area of China.
For David Chang’s Wired China, reporting on China’s economy and its impact on the world is their top priority.
On its website, Connecticut China writes, “There is a lot of excellent coverage of China, but no English-language media outlet has yet focused specifically on documenting China’s economic rise and the country’s impact on global politics, business, labor, the environment and financial markets.”
Connecting China covers topics such as how Chinese companies are investing overseas, how multinational corporations are operating within China, China’s emerging entrepreneurs and startups, cross-border business agreements, and investments by foreign entities within China.
David Zhang told Voice of America that since its launch in April of last year, Connecting China has had a very good number of subscribers. Top schools, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, have entered into subscription relationships with Connecting China, and his former colleagues at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times have all given positive reviews.
Voltairem’s Accord was launched last November, and the China side of the story centers on technology. He has found that as China’s big tech companies continue to grow in global influence, there aren’t many journalists in the U.S. mainstream media who are well-versed in both China and tech. He hopes the Accord will fill that gap.
“Let’s focus on the technology itself rather than the geopolitical issues hovering 10,000 miles outside the atmosphere,” Wotem said, “and see more of what’s happening on the ground in China: What is the internal culture and internal structure of these companies like? What do the relationships between companies look like? Who are the Chinese authorities favoring? Who are the ones who are not favored? These are interesting stories about ordinary people, about power, about policies that I don’t think get enough coverage,” he said.
From 5G networks, to huawei, to Jitterbug, the focus of the U.S.-China conflict over the past few years has been on technology. Voltairem believes that reading China’s tech panorama is reading China.
“It allows us to see almost everything: how culture is evolving in China; the relationship between government and private enterprise; the U.S.-China relationship. All of that is constantly merging with technology,” he said.
Neither Connecting China nor the Accord currently has a correspondent in China. Both David Chang and Wotem said the current environment has made it very difficult for their reporters to apply to obtain media visas to China.
Maintaining independence remains crucial
Looking back to when he first started covering China a decade ago, Wotem said there were probably only 20,000 people in the U.S. who would regularly follow stories about China. Today that readership is quite large, and the topic of China has entered mainstream public discourse in the United States.
“It’s the best of times and the worst of times for covering China,” David Chang says, “There’s more information available, but in the moment, the topic also often stirs up controversy.”
Is the relationship between the United States and China one of cooperation or competition? Is it coexistence or antagonism? What does the rise of China represent? What impact will it have on the world landscape? What does the future of China look like? A growing number of political forces, observers, scholars, commentators, and politicians in the United States have developed their own set of narratives (narratives) about China.
These various narratives inevitably have an impact on journalists’ news coverage, Wertheim says.
“It’s much easier to appeal to a narrative that’s already there, and the opposite is true for truly original reporting,” he says. He says.
This is not a problem that exists only in the Chinese reporting field. As journalists, David Zhang says, maintaining an independent way of thinking and giving the most comprehensive coverage possible of an event will always be at the heart of journalism.
“We’re not looking for answers for some political gain or to serve sales,” he said.
“In my opinion, our job is to educate ourselves, to ask good, pointed questions, to be fair, to investigate and search for the truth, to be humble and restrained in our writing, and that’s what we should do as independent journalists. I am not a columnist or a commentator. I’m still a journalist, seeking to understand topics and events,” he said.
For Voltairem, one of the keys to covering China is not to see the vast country as a monolithic whole.
“I think our job is to sort out what’s going on in this country, and that means understanding that this country is made up of many different interest groups, different people with different needs and tendencies and different ways of looking at the world.”
Wotem last visited China in late 2019 due to China’s restrictions on foreign journalists and the new crown Epidemic covering the world. He said he misses speaking and practicing Mandarin on the streets of China. He said being away for too long means he sometimes starts speaking about China in the abstract and doesn’t get to update his knowledge base about the country.
“So I think it’s important to be able to actually be in China and observe those details, because that can determine whether your reporting is good or very good,” he said.
David Zhang also misses his time in China, the visits and factories and workers he interviewed, and the Food he tasted. He and his wife left China voluntarily in 2015 due to constant harassment from the Chinese authorities.
“Even with the harassment from the government, I really loved living there,” he says, “It was a special land.”
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