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Mike Chinoy is a longtime foreign correspondent and writer who in the 1980s became CNN’s first Beijing bureau chief. A graduate of Yale and Columbia University, Chinoy began his career as a radio and television journalist for CBS News and NBC News. Over the course of 24 years, he chronicled developments in China and even North Korea. For his coverage of China, he has won Emmy, Dupont and Peabody awards. Today, he is a non-resident senior fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. At USC, he produced a documentary series entitled Assignment: China, which has been adapted into a new book, published by Columbia University Press, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic (March 2023).

Q: Can you start by telling me about how you ended up in China and your background as a reporter?

A: I was a product of the Vietnam War generation and, like many at that time, I was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. And the more I tried to understand Vietnam, the more it came back to countering China: so I got interested in trying to understand that. I started studying Chinese and did a Chinese studies major at Yale at a time when it was effectively impossible for Americans to go to China. 

But then Nixon went to China in 1972, an event that I watched in my living room on television. I was very lucky because there was a left-wing publication based in New York called The Guardian — no relationship with the British Guardian — and they were sort of friends of China. After the Nixon trip, they began to organize visits to China, and a friend of mine had connections there. I was able to get on a trip in the summer of 1973 to China, and I spent a month there. It was one of the very early American trips to China. 

That was an absolute eye-opener; it was a revelation to me. It was an extremely interesting time to be in China because we were there when the 10th Party Congress happened, which is when the Gang of Four [a group of hardliners including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing] reached its high point in terms of holding official positions. Of course, no one knew that the Congress was happening until it was over; but it kind of reinforced my interest in China. I later showed up in Hong Kong and became a stringer for CBS News. And just by sheer good luck, I got there in late December ‘75. In January of ‘76 came the first of multiple traumatic, hugely newsworthy events in China that year, which appropriately was the year of the Dragon: the death of [longtime premier] Zhou Enlai, quickly followed by the first Tiananmen Square riot in April ‘76, which led to the second purging of Deng Xiaoping, followed by the Tangshan earthquake, followed by the death of Mao and purging the Gang of Four. 

I was the radio guy for CBS News. At the time, because American journalists couldn’t go to China for broadcast purposes, China was effectively a radio story. It was an amazing first year to follow China and I did so using all the tools of traditional China-watching, because you couldn’t go to China. So you pored through the Chinese press and you swapped theories with diplomats at the U.S. consulate, which had a huge China-watching operation, and tried to talk to the occasional international business person who would go into China or the odd European or Canadian student, and put the pieces together. That was my introduction to covering China. 

I was essentially based in Hong Kong through the end of ‘82. I got to watch, with occasional trips into China, the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping reforms and normalization of relations with the U.S. and so on. And then I became the fourth foreign correspondent hired by CNN and the job was in London as a kind of ‘fireman.’ The foreign editor basically said, when something bad happens in the world, we’re gonna put you on a plane. I went back to China before Ronald Reagan’s trip in 1984 to do a series of event stories, but it was always understood that at whatever point CNN — which was a new fledgling organization — opened a bureau in Beijing, that I would go, and that finally happened in 1987.

Why did you think it was important to tell the stories of American correspondents who have covered China over the years? 

Assignment China actually began as a documentary film project at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. Both the film and the book grew out of a sense that there is a huge disconnect between what consumers read, watch or listen to, and how those stories actually get there. Very few people understand what goes into the reporting and writing and transmitting of news. And yet, as I certainly learned through my own experience, the process decisively shapes what comes out in a news report. The reality is the complicated, messy human process. And I have long felt that it’s very helpful that the more people understand the process that goes into the reporting of news, the more sophisticated consumers of news they’ll be.

The other element here is that how the American media has covered China has had a crucial impact over decades and not only on how the American public and the American political class understand or misunderstand China. Given the clout of the American media, the way the American press has covered China has also had an inordinately large impact on how China has been seen all around the world. So we thought it would be very interesting to try and address questions like, who are the people who covered China? How did they collect and understand and transmit the news? We essentially set out to do a kind of self-portrait of multiple generations of China correspondents. 

Left: Laurie and ABC News crew in Shanghai, March 1979. Right: Jim Laurie from ABC shooting footage in China, 1981. Photos provided by Mike Chinoy.

If there’s one single theme through the whole book, it is the constant struggle of multiple generations of journalists to penetrate the wall of secrecy created by the Chinese Communist Party, which at different periods in the history of the PRC has been very high and very difficult to penetrate, and in other periods has been lower and easier to penetrate. Essentially, the battle between reporters trying to get beyond the facade and dig into the reality of China, and the Communist Party’s reluctance to let them do that and efforts to either prevent or manipulate or shape it. That dynamic runs through the whole book. It’s fascinating to see how that played out in different ways and what tactics journalists had to use to address it and to try and get a sense of what was actually going on. 

If there’s one single theme through the whole book, it is the constant struggle of multiple generations of journalists to penetrate the wall of secrecy created by the Chinese Communist Party…

The folks in this book are a really interesting, colorful group of people. A lot of the names were legendary figures when I was starting out, the towering figures in the profession. I’m struck by how many people in younger generations have never even heard of them. There’s some value to giving people who were trying to cover China a sense of those who came before and who they were, and also the challenges that they faced, because it puts into some context the challenges that reporters face today.

As you said, journalists have faced high barriers to reporting in China before, especially in the early days of the PRC when people like you were ‘China watching’ from Hong Kong. How would you rate the current moment in terms of difficulty for foreign journalists to report compared with other periods?

My sense is it is particularly bad now. You had the 50s and 60s when American journalists were largely shut out of China. So the whole art of China watching developed in the 50s and 60s, because people couldn’t get in and see things. But even then, the likes of Zhou Enlai, in particular, did engage and interact with the media. For example, in Assignment China, there’s this guy Robert Cohen who went to China in 1957 with a left-wing group of young Americans and NBC News gave him a camera and he did a few stories for them. And they met Zhou Enlai. In 1964, Edgar Snow made one of one of his trips and actually got an on-camera interview with Zhou. Now granted, Edgar Snow had special relationships because he had been to Yan’an and the 1930s and so on. In 1970 Snow was invited to China and appeared with Mao on the rostrum of Tiananmen Square, and then Mao did this long interview, which was an early signal that he was open to a rapprochement with Nixon. So even at the time that China was as closed off and in a chaotic state as it was for the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the very top Chinese leaders were interacting with journalists. It’s inconceivable that Xi Jinping is ever going to grant an interview to a foreign journalist. 

Today, you have a different kind of situation because, yes, there are a small number of journalists now in China. But [there are also] the COVID restrictions — I don’t know how the lifting of them is going to play out in terms of the ability of the few remaining journalists, American and others, to get around the country — and what was already happening before then, which is this incredible officially fomented anger and hostility towards the foreign press. There are multiple episodes recounted in Assignment China of journalists being chased, hassled, followed, detained, roughed up, threatened to the point that some left for fear for their own safety. So even though there were certainly no American news organizations that had bureaus in China in the 50s and 60s, even into the late 70s, and there are now, they’re very thinly staffed, and between the lack of personnel and the difficulty of getting around, which COVID has compounded, we’ll have to see how that plays out. 

The kind of coverage you’re getting is either stuff that happens in Beijing or Shanghai, or the high-level policy, international foreign relations, Xi Jinping becoming the ‘Emperor for life’ with his third term, and so on. But what you’re not getting much of at all is what really made the China beat most gratifying: to go somewhere for long enough to really get a sense of the slice of life. For example, John Burns of The New York Times doing this amazing road trip in 1984, trying to essentially follow the route that the Red Army took during the long march and getting into parts of China that hadn’t seen foreigners in decades. Or Kathy Chen from The Wall Street Journal getting on a bus with young women in Sichuan going to Guangdong to take up jobs in the toy factories. Those kinds of things would be very, very hard to do today, because even if the COVID restrictions and so on are lifted, local officials are so paranoid. 

This is another example of the Chinese Communist Party shooting itself in the foot. You’re losing the more nuanced sense of a kind of slice of Chinese life that people who watch and read the news are interested in. That was always my experience at CNN. The stories that resonated most were not the high political scheming and struggling and backstabbing. It was, what is an ordinary Chinese family’s life like? There’s a common humanity that we all have that that kind of journalism can bring out. And that’s being lost to a very large degree by the restrictions. 

It’s also really important to distinguish between coverage of people either who have been in China or whose beat is China, and pundits sounding off about China in Washington.

And then you have this large group of people who are covering China but are not able to go to China. There are tools now that obviously didn’t exist back then, the Chinese internet being the best example, despite the censorship. To some degree, people really do need to kind of dust off the old China-watching tools and try and study the Chinese media. What are the signals it sends? Because that’s how you’re going to be figuring out a lot of the high-level politics and a lot of the policy decisions. 

You mentioned earlier the power of journalists to influence American opinion and policy on China. In recent years there’s been a growing interest in China, but American public opinion of China has gone way down. Do you think this is a result of bad coverage of China, or is it more, as you said, China shooting itself in the foot with restrictions?

It’s bad Chinese behavior. If the Chinese government wasn’t doing what it’s doing in Xinjiang, or what it did in Hong Kong, the way it relates to countries whose behavior it doesn’t like from the bullying of Australia and Lithuania, to the menacing of Taiwan to the wholesale stealing of intellectual property, ultimately, that’s where the negative perceptions of China come from. 

It’s also really important to distinguish between coverage of people either who have been in China or whose beat is China, and pundits sounding off about China in Washington. Most of Assignment China deals with the China correspondents. And most of them don’t particularly have an agenda. Like most journalists, one tends to be cynical about authority, cynical about official statements, motivated by the traditional role of the journalist in Western society which is to hold the powerful to account, be a voice for the voiceless and shine a light into darker corners of the society that the powers that be don’t particularly want illuminated. Some of the people who are sympathetic to China don’t like the coverage, and who claim bias, don’t appreciate that, but that’s just what journalists do. 

The way in which journalists have been treated by Chinese society, by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in more recent years, if you are constantly being monitored, followed, arrested, blocked everywhere you go, it’s not surprising that people come away with less than glowing feelings about the system that’s doing that for them. But most professional journalists who covered China are able to put that aside and just do their job. 

And so the negative perceptions of China are largely the result of China’s own actions. But again, if you were to sort of examine a large chunk of coverage over a period of time, in recent years, you would find a shrinking amount of coverage of China as a society, which helps to humanize China and makes China less alien and more accessible. If that is cut off, largely through decisions of the Chinese Communist Party, which has been the case, then the balance shifts even more towards the stuff that is going to generate a more antagonistic response.

I also wanted to ask about the role of Chinese news assistants. How important have they been in this coverage?

There’s no question that the translators, the drivers, and the news assistants over the years have been absolutely crucial to the way journalists function in China. Many of them have been reporters in every respect, except you can’t call them that: that’s partly why they have come under intense pressure from the authorities and quite a lot of them have either quit or been forced to leave, threatened, and so on. That’s one reason why I made a conscious decision not to try and seek out folks like that for the book because it’s just too risky for them. 

Most journalists will acknowledge that they’re hugely important. And they function as your eyes and ears in ways that you as a foreigner, even if you have very good Chinese, can’t. And they are in a very vulnerable position. The Communist Party has always been suspicious of the press, but there have been moments in China where the receptivity to foreign journalists has been more positive. But now, for the last decade or so, foreign journalists have been increasingly portrayed as enemies. So Chinese citizens who choose to do that job are taking a big risk and putting themselves in a very uncomfortable position and often pay a big price for it.

In 1989 in Tiananmen, I had a driver who did heroic work helping us. And my news assistant was the most crucial informant because he was so plugged in. So they were really on our side. But it’s a terrible position to be in in the environment now. It’s just much more difficult, much more stressful for those folks.

Could the U.S. government be doing more to advocate for American journalists who are in China now, or for those who have been forced out?

My understanding is that trying to get more journalists back into China has been something the Biden administration is working on. And it is interesting that a number of news organizations that had most of their people kicked out, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, have gotten accreditations for new correspondents to go there. None of the people who were ordered out have been allowed back, but new people have been allowed in. 

Part of the dynamic of the expulsions was that the Trump administration targeted several dozen Chinese journalists working for state and Chinese media in the U.S. and so that gave Beijing an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway, just kick a lot of people out. 

The whole argument about reciprocity is a very complicated one. Because on the one hand, that’s the language China understands. On the other hand, if the United States is supposed to be the place where the press is valued and is a more open society, there’s an argument to be made that the U.S. should be more receptive to Chinese journalists. In return that gives you ammunition to say to China, well, we’re letting 20 of yours back in so you should let 20 more of ours back in. But in the current highly suspicious climate about China, in the States, and given the fact that there’s no question that a good number of people who work for Chinese state-run media are in fact intelligence operatives, it’s gonna be a very hard sell. 

I suspect that quiet backchannel lobbying is more likely to get results than pounding the podium and making a big fuss about it publicly. If there’s some interest by the Chinese to slightly tone down the hostile downward spiral with the U.S., letting additional journalists in is a relatively easy concession for them to make. Because as we’ve seen, if you’re based in Beijing, you are very limited in where you can travel and you’re very limited in who you can talk to. What does China lose by that? 

Absent those boots on the ground, what does the future of China watching look like?

It’s interesting here in Taiwan, a lot of people who either had been in China or wanted to go to China are now trying to cover China from Taiwan, which is immensely challenging. You can sit there and patrol the Chinese internet and make phone calls. I always come back to Father Laszlo Ladany, a Hungarian Jesuit priest who was in China in the 40s. And when he had to leave, he went to Hong Kong, and he published something called the China News Analysis. This was a weekly sort of newsletter, and it was based entirely on his reading of what was in the Chinese press. He could look at the Guangzhou Ribao article on, you know, grain production in western Guangdong and figure out from the way in which they wrote it, what they really meant. That is going to become increasingly important. 

There’s something that a couple of guys in Hong Kong set up, it’s called Five Things on China Leaders’ Minds, in which they use software that analyzes content for keywords or sectors or individuals, and every day they collect articles from over 100 Chinese newspapers that are online. And what this does is it shows what priorities are for internal communication, what the government wants officials and decision-makers to think about. These kinds of tools are a modern-day throwback to the art of China watching, supplemented by the internet. And so it’s going to be a highly unsatisfying mixture of this stuff, lacking one of the most crucial things which are getting a pulse of the society which is reasonably difficult to get, but that for the time being seems to be what we’re stuck with.

What was the most important or memorable story that you got to tell while you were in China? 

I was based in China when we opened the CNN bureau in the September of the Tiananmen Square crisis. 

That was the one that had the greatest impact as a journalist; it was a moment that offered profound insights about China and a moment that kind of put CNN on the map. If the first Gulf War in 1991 was the moment that the whole world came to know of CNN, I always think Tiananmen was like the overture, because of its unprecedented live coverage. As a personal experience, as a China hand, as a journalistic experience, it was an incredible story, and it was also a groundbreaking moment in terms of the way it was covered live and in a fashion that had not ever been done from a society as closed and distant to the rest of the world as China at that time was.

Is there anything that we can learn from what happened at Tiananmen in 1989 that is relevant to the recent anti-COVID lockdown protests in China in November? 

It’s very hard to judge not being there. These protests were significant because they appear to have been spontaneous in many different places. The main participants seem to have largely been the Chinese urban, emerging middle class. Although when you see the protests at Foxconn, that’s a different thing. But it is fascinating because it suggests that despite the extraordinarily tight controls that are now in place in China, augmented by the use of technology as a tool in a way that never existed in 1989, when people are pushed to a certain point, they will act. 

One thing I’ve learned after decades of following China is that predicting what’s going to happen is very, very risky. And one is often wrong.

More broadly, this is a really important political moment in China because it undoes so much of the Communist Party’s narrative about its success. Certainly, given the way Xi Jinping has accumulated so much power and made himself the number one guy in charge of everything, it’s very hard for him to now avoid being pegged as the number one guy responsible for this colossal screw-up. Is it another 1989? It’s very hard to say. One thing I’ve learned after decades of following China is that predicting what’s going to happen is very, very risky. And one is often wrong.

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