If journalism is the first rough draft of history, this book provides a notable contribution to contemporary historiography as a collective self-portrait of several generations of American correspondents in China from 1945 to the present day. Their reporting, analysis and commentary did much to shape views in the existing global superpower – and beyond – of the rise of the rival across the Pacific. Now, Mike Chinoy, who was the first Beijing bureau chief for CNN from 1987 to 1995 during 24 years as a foreign correspondent for the network, sets out to present them through more than 100 interviews that also formed the basis for a 12-part television documentary. As he writes,
Understanding the people who have reported China and how they have done so, is a crucial step in understanding the news people watch and read… As the United States and the rest of the world struggle to deal with a more authoritarian and assertive China, the story of those who had front-row seats for every twist and turn in its modern history, told in their own words, can add much to our understanding of one of the world's most complicated and important countries. (p. 3)
The book meets that brief well, albeit the fact that, even during periods of relative opening-up for the American press corps, much of China was inaccessible to them and the Communist Party sought to ring-fence their work. By its nature, it is primarily a collection of descriptions of their work by correspondents, and is a unique primary source on its subject that paints a comprehensive picture of specific on-the-ground experiences which may be drawn on for further wider analysis. The interviews not only tell a rich story of how correspondents collected and transmitted news and their dealings with the PRC authorities at both national and local levels, but also deal with the interaction of correspondents with their own editors and the impact of technology.
The interviews are presented verbatim, with brief linking passages from Chinoy that bring in the broader sweep of China–US relations which shaped the context within which the journalists worked. After memories of the civil war from veteran correspondents like Roy Rowan of Life magazine, the text covers the early post-1949 period of China-watching from Hong Kong, coverage of Richard Nixon's visit to the PRC to meet Mao Zedong in 1972 and the establishment of diplomatic relations six years later which led to the admission of American correspondents amid what Richard Bernstein of Time magazine describes as “tremendous hopefulness” in America and “a tremendous wistfulness in the United States for China to be good” (p. 112). “The early eighties theme of China was Deng Xiaoping was on a roll, isn't it great, China opening up, Sino-U.S. love affair – that sort of story,” recalls Melinda Liu of Newsweek, “The Chinese were the good guys because the Russians were the bad guys. Deng Xiaoping was the cuddly Communist” (p. 113).
After the chill of the crushing of the 1989 protests – the book devotes two illuminating chapters to the Beijing Spring and the crackdown – a new era of relative relaxation set in under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, in what Keith Richburg of The Washington Post calls “the golden age of covering China” (p. 255). Yet relations were never easy for the American press corps and, throughout, on-the-ground reporting was difficult, especially if reporters strayed away from what the authorities wanted to them to see. “As a Chinese American, I went in wanting to be very fair to China and feeling that it was being unfairly covered to a certain extent by Western media,” recalls Melissa Chan of Al Jazeera, who went to China in 2007, “[…] But at the end of the day as you start traveling, and we traveled a lot, you start seeing things. The bottom line is that shitty things are happening to people in China and the reason is the government” (p. 295).
One of the questions Chinoy, who is now a non-resident senior fellow at the US–China Institute at the University of Southern California, lists in his introduction looms over the book – “How accurate was the picture of China they presented?” The author's answer is positive, for the journalists – “with the benefit of hindsight, what is surprising is not how much they missed or got wrong but, given the conditions under which they have been forced to work, how much they got right” (p. 9). Even during the more relaxed periods, the Chinese government was, in Chinoy's words, “usually hostile, suspicious and uncooperative” (p. 5). The foreign journalists were always closely watched outsiders, even if helped by Chinese interpreters and fixers, whom Chinoy did not interview for the sake of their own safety (just as he decided not to include Hong Kong and Taiwan because he judged that they “have such distinctive, rich and complex histories that it was simply not possible to do full justice to the story of the journalists who reported these two remarkable societies over so many decades” [p. 4]).
The book ends with the recent expulsion of correspondents from leading American newspapers (or the refusal to issue visas) as the leadership in Beijing appears to have decided that they should be subjected to the broader control over Chinese society that has been a hallmark of the Xi Jinping years. “It fits in with this broader trend of China turning inwards, becoming more insular,” as Alice Su of the Los Angeles Times puts it (p. 446). Or, in the judgment of the long-time New York Times correspondent, Ian Johnson, “They used to accept foreign journalists as part of the cost of doing business in the modern world. You've got to take your lumps. You have to allow those pesky foreign journalists in. You've got to let them write what they want. That's all begun to end. They just began to not accept critical reporting” (p. 448). The result is a reversion to old-style China-watching from outside the PRC. Whatever the skills journalists exercise from Hong Kong, Taiwan or back home in the USA, that can only have a negative effect on the understanding of China in its most important global partner and competitor.
