Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Mike Chinoy.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Returning this week as co-host is Jin Yumi, also known as Jeremy Goldkorn, who has rebounded quickly from his initial disappointment after failing to secure the Nashville City Council endorsement for state legislature, where he was hoping to replace the ousted Justin Jones as the representative of District 52. Unfortunately, Nashville City Council voted unanimously to send Mr. Jones back instead. And Jeremy, really sorry about that and better luck next time. And please note that I really admire the way that you can just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and join me here on the podcast. But for now, Jeremy, would you greet the people?
Jeremy Goldkorn: Thanks very much. I mean, until last week, Nashville was kind of slightly famous for country music. And since last week, we’re famous for mass shootings and for being the capital of a state that wants to send us back to the Confederacy. But anyway, enough of that, I live in it. I’m just going to go ahead and introduce our guest for the week.
I imagine that Mike Chinoy is somebody known to all of our listeners. Mike had a 24 year career as a foreign correspondent for CNN, and served as the first bureau chief in Beijing. I, myself, first saw him on TV sometime during, or after the first Gulf War, 1990 to ‘91, when South Africa’s previously highly censored state TV station started broadcasting the live CNN feed from Iraq and more and more CNN footage followed.
And I met Mike more than a decade ago in Beijing when he was working on the project we’re about to talk about. Mike has lived much of his life in East Asia and won basically every TV news award that’s out there, the Emmy, the duPont, the Peabody, and he’s now a non-resident senior fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California.
Kaiser: Yeah, and in addition to having mentored my beloved sister, Mimi, back in the ‘90s when she was at CNN, Mike is the creator of an amazing documentary series and its accompanying book, which has only recently published, called Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in The People’s Republic. I urge you all to watch the series, which you can find on YouTube which was produced with Clay Dube. And read the book, which I think just brings it right up to the very, very near present. It’s just an astonishingly rich, admirably self-aware piece of, I just call it meta journalism. It is a fantastic recounting of major historical events in recent Chinese history by the people who reported them. And it’s going to be, I think for years and years to come, an extremely valuable resource for students who want to understand not only many of these major events that shaped China over the last seven plus decades, but also to glean insight into how those events were covered and how that coverage in turn shaped events. Mike Chinoy, welcome to Sinica.
Mike Chinoy: It’s great to be here with two very old friends.
Kaiser: Yeah, fantastic.
Jeremy: Mike, perhaps you could first talk about the genesis of the whole project. As I mentioned, I remember talking to you about it. Must have been maybe 15 years ago in my apartment in Qijiayuan in Beijing, so I know it’s been a long time in the making. How did you get the idea to undertake something as ambitious as this, involving so many hundreds of interviews? And what did you set out to accomplish?
Mike: We started this project at the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California I think in late 2008. We didn’t initially have as ambitious plan as it turned out to be. But the premise underlying what we tried to do in the 12 documentary films, and also in the book, is pretty similar. And that is that basically most Americans know what they know about China from what they have read or seen or heard in the media. Moreover, given the cloud of American media organizations like the New York Times, CNN, and the other broadcast networks, the Wire services, American media coverage has had a kind of disproportionate impact on shaping perceptions of China all around the world. And yet, as anybody who’s been around journalists knows, most people don’t really have a sense of how the news is reported and the process by which journalists go out and cover the news, where they go, who they talk to, how they decide what to write up, how they transmit it, what their interactions are with the Chinese authorities, the people they’re trying to cover, their bosses, the American government, the impact of technological changes on the way in which news is gathered.
All of that has a huge impact in shaping the final project, but people don’t have any idea what that is like. So, we began this project by interviewing people who had sort of opened the first U.S. news bureaus in China in 1979 after normalization. And as we continued, it just became clear there were so many interesting stories, we just carried on and carried on. And in the end, we did 12 episodes, which started with people who, at the time we interviewed them, they were elderly, but they were still around who’d covered the Chinese Civil War in late 1940s. People like Roy Rowan, who was the Life Magazine correspondent in Shanghai when the Red Army was about to march in, or Seymour Topping who covered the Chinese Civil War for the Associated Press and was in Nanjing when the Red Army took the city — people like that.
And it ended up going up through about 2015, the final episode of the series was based on interviews with David Barboza and Michael Forsythe about their groundbreaking investigative journalism about the dubious relatives of Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao and all the millions they’d accumulated in questionable and largely hidden businesses. But as it happens when you do a film, a great deal ends up on the cutting room floor. And so, I thought it would be interesting to try and do a book version both to include a lot of material that wasn’t in the film series, and also to make it accessible in a book form. Because I think for anybody who’s interested in China or in journalism, how reporters work can be a useful tool for journalism education, for China’s studies, and for anybody who’s curious about the life of correspondence. And so, I then did the two dozen additional interviews that effectively bring the story up to date. And it is basically, the old saying is journalists write the first rough draft of history. The idea here is to have the people who wrote that first draft, over multiple decades, tell us what it was like to do so. I think, in doing that, you get a much better sense of how journalists work and how the China stories that have impacted so many people and so many places for so long were actually assembled by the people who assembled them.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Yeah, I wanted to give our listeners just a sense of how the documentary series relates to the book. The last seven chapters of the book cover topic scene. So, after the documentary called “Follow the Money,” and there’s a corresponding chapter in the book, which is about, like you said, David Barboza and Mike Forsythe and people like that who were working on ferreting out the nefarious financial dealings of China’s very senior Party elite. But the last seven chapters of the book cover topics that the book just doesn’t. And with some exceptions, there’s pretty good overlap when it comes to everything before. Like you said, there’s stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor that you reintroduced into the book. For somebody who’s neither read nor watched it, what would you recommend when it comes to that first 370 pages or so? Would you say watch the series first, read the text first?
Mike: I think it just depends. If you like watching videos, what the films have that the book obviously doesn’t, is you can hear the people’s voices. You can see what they look like, and you can see images of the events that they covered. For example, there’s an episode on the Tiananmen Square.
Kaiser: We’ll be talking a lot about that one. Yeah.
Mike: In the film and the book, you hear from the photographer who took the famous photograph of the man in front of the tank about his experiences at taking that picture and as well as the CNN cameraman who took the video of it. In the film, obviously you can see the video, and it’s interesting to sort of hear the person who took the video talking about how they did it, how they framed up the shot, what was going on around them, and so on. I think they’re both equally valuable. It just depends on people’s preferences.
Kaiser: Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. I suppose the obvious question is, were all of the interviews that are in the book’s last seven chapters, “Surveillance State” and ”Emperor for Life,” and the Xinjiang chapters, the epidemic, the expulsion, all that — were all those videotaped, and can we can expect anything-?
Mike: No, no, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the video part of it ends in 2015. So, these were just interviews that I conducted for the purposes of the book. We simply didn’t have the… Doing a film is expensive. This costs a lot of money to do all the interviews and to get all the archival footage and so on. So, these were just research interviews for purposes of putting them in the book. I wish we could do a half-dozen more episodes, but it wasn’t possible.
Jeremy: And on that subject, just how many interviews did you conduct in total, including the ones that just made it into the book, and how many people?
Mike: I would say there’s about 125 or 130 interviews.
Kaiser: Wow.
Mike: There are plenty of people I wished I had been able to interview, but just because of time constraints and logistical constraints. And the original draft of the book, I had to, when I presented the manuscript to Columbia University Press, I had to cut about 60,000 words as is.
Kaiser: Oh no.
Jeremy: What did you cut? How did you select the topics for the book?
Mike: It was just very painful, but the editors made a valid point that very few people were going to buy a 750-page book about journalists in China, and so we had to cut it down. It ended up still being 500 pages. But my point is that what I think we do have is a fairly representative cross-section, and we don’t have everybody, and as I say, there are people I wished we’d been able to get. But you have, for each of the sort of periods that essentially there’s the Civil War, there’s the two and a half, three decades of China watching, mostly based out of Hong Kong. There’s the opening up, this sort of early post-normal coverage, Tiananmen, the rise of China the last half-dozen years. We have, I think, a pretty representative cross-section of people from newspapers, magazines, wire services, radio, television, even with Megha Rajagopalan of Buzzfeed News, a purely online publication. So, I think it’s a reasonably fair cross section of people, although it’s not as complete as I would like.
Kaiser: So, some of the events that I thought might have maybe merited more coverage weren’t. I mean, it turns out discussed all that much. I mean, something that comes to mind was the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May of 1999.
Jeremy: A favorite topic of yours, Kaiser-
Kaiser: Well, yeah, I mean, it changed my life, obviously, but I think it was, it was pretty impactful for you too, right, Jeremy?
Jeremy: Not really. I was a South African citizen, and I wore a t-shirt with a my national flag on when I was walking around Beijing.
Kaiser: But I mean, no, there are other events that I think-
Jeremy: No, I’m kidding. I’m facetious, but yeah, it was an important event. Sure.
Kaiser: There were other events that you covered, though, Mike, that the angle seems to be more on the media than on the event itself, which is in the spirit of the book, but something like the Lhasa Riots in 2008, in March of 2008, which struck me was much more in the book about the coverage or the reaction to media coverage, the nationalist backlash and the creation of Anti-CNN.com rather than the events themselves. Was this a deliberate choice to focus on how reporters experienced?
Mike: Yes, yes. This is not a history of modern China. There are plenty of others. This is the journalists who covered these events talking about how they covered. And the focus is really on how they covered them and what their experiences were like. And the text that I wrote that goes along with the interviews is essentially to give a kind of basic background and context so that the reader has an idea of what is going on. But this is in no way an attempt to depict a sort of comprehensive retelling of what happened in the Lhasa Riots in 2008 or in the Lhasa Riots of 1987, which happened right after I moved to Beijing to open the CNN Bureau. But it’s the experiences of the journalists. So, you’re not going to get the complete history of China in the last 80 years in this book, but what you do get is a kind of a different lens to look at these events, which is the lens of the perspective of the people who were there.
On the Belgrade bombing, we do in fact have a couple of pages on that with a couple of journalists talking about their own experiences being targeted previously in these rather angry protests outside the U.S. Embassy. It’s hard to… If you want to write a 2,000-page book with… it’s a different sort of thing. But this is designed to essentially pick out what seemed to me to be the most interesting developments and the major news developments that the journals had something interesting to say about. As I say, I don’t make any claims that this is a sweeping, comprehensive, everything you ever wanted to know about China from 1945 to the present day. But it does, I think, give you a pretty good snapshot of what it was like if you were the New York Times correspondent in Beijing, and the Belgrade Embassy is bombed, and you have to go out to the U.S. Embassy and try and report what people who are trying to beat you up as one example. And there are others. It’s just you have to make tradeoffs, I think.
Kaiser: Yeah, for sure. And I think it very much succeeds in what it sets out to do.
Jeremy: It is a very comprehensive history of the first drafts of history, right?
Mike: Yes, I think that’s fair. It’s a very comprehensive history of the people who wrote the first draft of history.
Jeremy: Right.
Kaiser: Right. What I guess am really most interested in is what you learned after shepherding this massive project through to fruition, what your big lessons are as you step back and you look at the endeavor of covering this country that is just so fast changing, so complex, so large, and so unfamiliar to the audiences back home in America. And you focus on, actually it’s exclusively, journalists who work for American media organizations. So, there’s some non-Americans in it like Chris Buckley, but he works for an American media outlet just so that we’re clear. This is not just all-English language media. This is specifically American.
Anyway, I mean, we will definitely zoom in, in the course of this next hour, and look at some of the trees, especially since some of them are just so consequential, like Tiananmen. But let’s talk about the forest first, which is what this book does such a fantastic job on.
Are there contours to this whole period that kind of reveal themselves to you, contours in the coverage of this period that reveal themselves to you only after you sort of step back and look at it in aggregate? Any new thoughts on maybe what some of the important inflection points were or that sort of thing?
Mike: Well, there are a couple of things. I guess one big theme that runs through the whole book is that really from the beginning, there has this been this kind of constant battle between the American press trying to penetrate beyond the limits set by the Chinese Communist Party in terms of information and access. And the parties equally determine efforts to control the narrative about China. And that’s a tension that has been there from the very beginning. It has ebbed and flowed. There have been periods when, because I think the treatment of the American press has been a kind of a very useful barometer in terms of the broader relationship, and relations have been better. There’s been greater press access and better treatment of journalists, and relations have deteriorated — there’s been worse. So, one central theme is that that battle has been never ending and continues to this day.
A second thing is that in the course of doing all these interviews, I went back and looked at a lot of coverage over the years. And actually, it’s quite fun to sort of go back and dig up articles from the late ‘40s or the early ‘60s, or the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen and so on, and looked them over, and look over broad broadcast and so on. What was striking to me is, the sense I came away with is, given all of the obstacles that the press have faced in terms of limits on access, restrictions on where they could go, who they could talk to, the pressures they faced, the political pressures at various points coming from Washington and their head offices, especially during the heyday of the Cold War, the way the Chinese Communist Party has always sought to manipulate events, and so on, what’s striking to me was that for all of the things that the journalists got wrong, on balance, particularly in terms of sort of the power struggle, elite politics side, it’s striking to me how much they got proportionally more right than wrong.
I mean, if you go back and read the coverage from the Cultural Revolution, for example, or the run up to, and the period during and right after the death of Mao, and so on, the broad brush strokes of kind of how the political struggles were depicted, we’re surprisingly accurate.
Kaiser: Yeah. Considering how little access, yeah.
Mike: Considering how little access. And so the clues, I mean, there’s a wonderful anecdote from Henry Bradsher who worked for the now-defunct Washington Star, and whose son is Keith Bradsher, who’s currently in China for the New York Times. And Henry Bradsher talks about sitting in Hong Kong in 1971 reading some Xinhua News Agency report about a Chinese delegation going to Hanoi. First, there’s a welcoming banquet, and Xinhua says that the guests all raised a toast to Chairman Mao and his close comrade at arms, Marshal Lin Biao. And then about a week later, there’s another banquet, and the Xinhua report says the guest raised their glasses in a toast to Chairman Mao — full stop. And Bradsher talks about a light bulb went off in his head, something’s happened to Lin Biao. And that was the week that Lin Biao’s supposed attempted coup happened, and he fled, and his plane crashed and he died.
So, that kind of detective work, despite the many things that folks got wrong, on the broad picture, I think they got it right more than wrong. Although, I would just say today, in reflecting how much things have changed in China, I think that we know so little about the very, very elite dynamics that I’m not sure, we won’t know for a few years whether people are getting it right or wrong now because it’s so much more closed in some ways than it’s almost ever been. But over the decades, I think journalists, I was surprised to discover that they seem to get a lot more right than they got wrong.
Kaiser: Do we have a Father Laszlo Ladany today, the Hungarian Jesuit who was… the doyen of the Hong Kong-based China Watchers back then? Do we have somebody like that today who can interpret the, y’know…?
Mike: I think history will be the judge. I wish we did. Ladany, I remember him from my early years at Hong Kong.
Kaiser: Oh wow.
Mike: I was too young to realize I should have spent a lot more time at his feet learning from him. But I do remember meeting him and talking to him, and he was this legendary figure. And he just perfected the art of perusing the official Chinese press and read transcripts of radio broadcast, and learning to figure out what the real meaning is of how they phrased things. I think people are having to dust off a lot of those skills today, because so much of the coverage now, as being done outside China in the wake of the expulsions of nearly two dozen journalists in 2020, and the limitations on… I mean, the press corps has really been decimated from what it was, and those who are there have a very rough time getting around and seeing stuff. So, it’s a big challenge.
Kaiser: Mike, just now you talked about how there’s a relationship between the way that the journalists are treated and the coverage of China, how positive or how negative it is. Do you think that’s causal? And do you think it goes in both directions, there’s some sort of cycle?
Mike: I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure it’s so much positive or negative as much as access and non-access, but…
Kaiser: Okay. Yeah.
Mike: Essentially, almost no journalist were allowed to go until the Nixon trip. And then between the Nixon trip and normalization, a small group of journals were given greater access. For example, in 1973, NBC, ABC, and CBS were all given permission to send teams to China for a couple of months to do documentaries. And the booking has very interesting reminiscences from the people who worked on the CBS documentary and the ABC documentary. But it was only after normalization that bureaus were allowed. And it was sort of in the ‘90s and early 2000s that the headcount for the bureaus really began to expand as the Chinese economy took off, and as the U.S.-China relationship kind of evened out, and there was this huge influx of American investment and in the run up to the Olympics. But the Chinese authorities have always used giving blue cards that 记者证 Jìzhě zhèng , the press cards, as a tool to, when the relationship was better, they were more willing to do that.
And in fact, after the expulsions of 2020, getting journalists visas has been one of the issues on the agenda. And quietly, a few more visas have been granted in the last year or 18 months. And my impression is that had Secretary of State blinking gone to China on the trip that was aborted by the balloon episode, that getting some additional journalist visas was an item on the agenda. It’s kind of an easy give for the Chinese, and they can sort of do it as part of the diplomatic dance. But in terms of whether it affects the coverage, I think that depends, frankly, on what’s going on. The coverage is going to be more positive when positive things are happening.
Jeremy: On a related question, one of the fascinating stories that you mentioned in your talk that I attended at Vanderbilt University recently was the amazing coincidence of CNN being given permission to bring in and set up satellite gear to transmit a live feed from Beijing, from the Tiananmen rostrum itself to cover the visit of Gorbachev to Beijing in May, 1989. Of course, the Communist Party had not counted on there being enormous student demonstrations on the square that just grew in size from the first CNN broadcast on, I believe, April the 17th. And John Sheahan of CBS talked about how they had 57 people from outside of China because of the visas that had been given for the Gorbachev visit. So, the question is, did the contingency, the random chance, end up making the Tiananmen protests and the crackdown simply much more impactful and enduring, at least in the American mind, than they may otherwise have been?
Mike: I think there’s no question that it was an accident of history that made the Tiananmen crackdown the lead story around the world in everybody’s living room. A year before the government of then Burma had conducted, I think, arguably a more brutal crackdown in Rangoon in 1988, thousands of people were killed and arrested. And there were almost no journalists there, and there was certainly no live coverage there. And so, it was a blip on the news barometer, and that’s it. But the Chinese really, Chinese Communist Party really wanted extensive coverage of the Gorbachev trip. It was going to be the crowning diplomatic achievement of Deng Xiaoping’s career, having normalized relations with the U.S. Now, he was going to put an end to the Sino-Soviet dispute. And they were astonishingly open when I went as CNN Bureau Chief with a producer.
And ironically, the producer who… special events team, advanced group arrived in Beijing the morning after we filed the first report for American Television about the protests, which was the Monday, April 17th. We were up all night watching the first group of students who marched from Beijing University into Tiananmen Square. We filmed that. I did a standup in which I said, “How much longer will the Chinese Communist Party wait to crush this challenge to its authority?” Which showed, I think, I was suitably pessimistic about the outcome. But then I went off to meetings that day with Chinese officials who were very open. They took us to the Beijing Hotel. They went up to the roof of the Beijing Hotel. We looked at live shot locations where we could put a satellite dish. In the end, as the protests got a little bigger, they got cold feet about the Beijing Hotel. So, we ended up having to put our satellite dish and transmission facilities in the garden of the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel.
But CNN also, Bernard Shaw, the late great CNN anchor came in, and other reporters came in, producers, editors, camera teams. The guy who took the video of the man in front of the tank was not the Beijing-based cameraman. Jonathan Schaer was based in Atlanta, and he was just one of the people who came in. So, it was absolutely an accident of history, because had these protests not happened when the press was there on mass with the transmission capability, you would’ve never had the live coverage. Because the way it used to work was when you did a story, normally, for television, you’d shoot the story on these big clunky three-quarter inch videotapes.
You’d take it back to your office, you’d use the large clumsy editing machines. You’d edit a story together. Then the network would have to book a satellite feed from China’s Central Television, which would cost about $2000 or $2,500. And sometimes, if it was a big enough story, the network would share a feed. And CNN was really cheap, and they never liked to pay for unilateral feeds. And on that first protest, it was just me and Cynde Strand and Mitch Farkas, so the camerawoman and soundman. I convinced them they had to pay for a unilateral feed. And so, we went to the CCTV at five o’clock in the morning and sent the story. And that’s how you would send a same day video. And there was no live capability, but because of all this… The satellite dish was three meters high.
It was a huge piece of equipment. And then the other interesting sort of technical twist is the, or the engineers brought in microwave links. And so, on the morning of Gorbachev’s arrival, we’d gotten permission to do a live broadcast from the Tiananmen rostrum, where Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic and greeted the red guards during the Cultural Revolution. So there I was standing with my colleagues and the camera crew, and we had a microwave link on the rostrum that beamed the signal down Chang’an Street to CCT V, which then beamed it back to the CNN workstation, I think Sheraton Hotel, which beamed it up to the satellite, which beamed it down to CNN headquarters, put it out on there. And this all happened instantaneously. So, when we turned the camera on what we saw were tens of thousands of protestors in the Square, Gorbachev wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
At the end of that day, we were told, “You can’t go back to the rostrum anymore.” And so the question was, how could we keep this live coverage up? And one of the engineers found a location at the northern edge of Tiananmen Square, where you had line of sight down Chang’an Street to the CCTV office, and we set the microwave, which is like this pole over the thing on top of it. And we were able to keep the live transmission going. And because the leadership was so divided and so preoccupied, and so kind of unaware of these things, they let this continue until Martial Law was declared. And we kept thinking every minute, when are they going to come pull the plug? But day after day, night after night, so you had this, like five days of extraordinary wall-to-wall live coverage from Tiananmen Square of the protests.
And Gorbachev was kind of an afterthought. And then on the Friday night of that week, Li Peng declared Martial Law. And on the Saturday morning, in this famous episode, which is recounted in detail by the people who were in there in Assignment China, two Chinese officials marched into the workspace at the CNN at the Great Wall Sheraton, and said, “You have to stop your live transmissions.” And somehow a camera was rigged up. And so, this confrontation with these Chinese officials was broadcast live. It’s a very interesting lesson in how to negotiate with Chinese officials. And for almost an hour, producer, Alec Miran, went back and forth and back and forth, trying to stall. Finally, he said, “If you give it to us in writing, we’ll do it.”
And so they, they wrote down on a piece of paper, “Gorbachev has left China. You are ordered to stop your transmissions.” And then they allowed Bernard Shaw and me and the other two correspondents to say one or two words, and then the screen went black. And after that, we couldn’t do any live video broadcast from Beijing. So, on the night of the crackdown, for example, I was live on the phone all night, but the videotapes were taken out by hand to Hong Kong on the first flight on the next morning. And that only then did the videos of the night of two, third, and fourth actually make it to air.
Kaiser: Astonishing. My God. This is sort of an amazing illustration of the observer effect, right? I mean, this interplay between foreign media coverage and the actual events. Jim Baker, who was George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of State, says that Tiananmen was the first example of the power of the media to drive policy. I’ve heard it also said before that Tiananmen really was what created CNN and what made CNN, I think, if I’m not remembering incorrectly, that you had only gone to 24 hour news format not too long before that. Is that correct?
Mike: Yeah. CNN started in June of 1980. And I joined in the beginning of ‘83. I was the fourth foreign correspondent hired by CNN. And back then, it was kind of a joke to the other networks. They used to call it Chicken Noodle News.
Kaiser: Oh my God.
Mike: And they had no budget, and everything was… it was just kind of scrounging and sort of the little engine that could quality to CNN. And I think Tiananmen was arguably the moment when the world noticed CNN. I would say Tiananmen was the overture, and the first Gulf War was the full symphony. Because the first Gulf War with Peter Arnett and other colleagues going live from Baghdad and so on, grabbed the world even more profoundly. But CNN, that was the moment when people kind of woke up and said, “Whoa, look at this little network that we don’t know much about. And suddenly they’re on the air all the time doing stuff that the big three aren’t doing.” And much to the resentment of the big three, I must say at the time, which was very satisfying, from a competitive point of view.
It was the beginning of what people call “the CNN effect” where… And what I think Baker meant by that, there was a specific incident, which was mentioned in Assignment China, where on the afternoon of Saturday, June 3rd in Washington, which is the wee hours of the morning on June 4th in Beijing, Baker had been previously booked to be on a CNN weekend talk show.
And so he shows up, and it’s about two o’clock in the morning in Beijing. And so they begin the broadcast by coming to me, and I’m standing on a balcony of the Beijing Hotel looking down at the square. And they say, “Tell us what’s going on.” So I say, “Well, I see tracer bullets, and there’s gunshots, and there’s an armored vehicle, and da, da, da, da, bodies being brought out on the back of bicycle courts and stuff.” And the Charles Bierbauer, the host, turns to Baker and says, “Mr. Baker, what’s the U.S. policy on this?”
Kaiser: Wow. Wow.
Mike: And Baker talks in the book, when I interviewed him about, he said, “Oh my God, this was still ongoing. There hadn’t been time for a report from the embassy, a meeting, a craft of policy.” He was having to make up policy in live, in real time in response to events being televised live in real time. And now that’s just a feature of political life, but this was really the first time it happened.
Jeremy: Twitter has made it worse, hasn’t it?
Kaiser: Yeah. I was going to say.
Mike: It’s interesting to imagine what 1989 would’ve been like had Twitter been around.
Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. Terrifying.
Mike: Interesting and a little terrifying.
Jeremy: One of the very interesting details in the book is John Pomfret’s comment about how he took the student activist, Wu’er Kaixi, student leader, Wu’er Kaixi, out for beef noodles at a nice hotel during the so-called hunger strike, and John Pomfret’s decision not to report this at the time. And it recalled for me a story Kaiser told me about how a group of Tibetan monks were in the Square on the anniversary of May the 4th, and how they got shouted down and had their Tibetan flags taken and trampled by student protestors if I’m remembering right, Kaiser.
Kaiser: No, that’s right.
Jeremy: There was an American news crew looking on, I think you said.
Kaiser: There was. And I actually turned to them and I said, “Hey, why aren’t you shooting this?” And they all kind of looked at me like I was totally naive.
Jeremy: Mike, how should we look at this? And can you think of other examples where the arc events or details don’t fit the sort of prevailing, I hate the word narrative, but I’m going to use it, the prevailing Western media narrative where journalists make decisions like that? Because it kind of complicates things in a way that makes it too difficult.
Mike: Well, I mean, I think, overall, the portrayal of the journalists in Assignment China is pretty sympathetic. And I think, on balance, most journalists did an honest job. But I think one of the things that comes through is a situation where, for a variety of factors, people make decisions In the moment. Pomfret’s view was…
Kaiser: He was a source.
Mike: He was one of the central student leaders. Pomfret obviously had good guanxi and developed a relationship. This guy would tell him stuff that was going on. If you go out and do a story that says, one student leader decided in the middle of the hunger strike to have noodles, A, you burn your relationship with somebody who was obviously giving him valuable information. And two, yes, does it show that not everybody is perfect? Absolutely. Does it mean… I can’t speak for John, but I don’t know whether he made these calculations, if you do this, will this discredit a student movement with whose goals…. I think most of the journalists, at some visceral, at some core level, were broadly sympathetic to as were many Chinese people, or whether it was just a crude calculation — I need this guy’s going to help me in so many ways and who cares if one guy got a bowl of noodles? I don’t know. But people make these tradeoffs all the time. It’s not black and white. There’s always multiple shades of gray. Often the decisions are not necessarily made out of sort of conscious political calculation. I wasn’t aware of the Tibetans on May 4th, and I have no idea which crew it would’ve been. So, it’s conceivable-
Kaiser: I think I know. I’m just not going to say, but I-
Mike: Yeah. I mean, sometimes it overcomplicates the narrative, or if you know you’re only going to get two minutes and 15 seconds to tell the story, are you going to devote 45 seconds of that to the fact that a bunch of Han students hassled a bunch of Tibetans when that’s not the bigger story? I mean, there are all these calculations. And the main point I would make about them is it’s messy and complicated and human, rather than this notion of media bias. Because I think-
Jeremy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I can’t believe John would’ve been thinking that I’m going to lie to the readers in order to preserve a certain opinion.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, I have too much respect for John, but it’s not an unreasonable calculation, in the heat of the moment, by going to have noodles with this guy you’re developing a special relationship, with a source that other journalists would not have, who will tell you chapter in verse on what’s going on in the inner councils of the student group driving the whole protests, is it worth destroying your relationship to tell the world in one line of a 800-word AP story that he had a bold noodles? That’s probably the calculation. But people make these tradeoffs all the time. And as I said, the one thing I would push back on is there are a lot of people who criticize the media. And in China, you hear from the government and ordinary people that the American media is biased. It says this.
And I just think if you look at, particularly at the people in the field reporting, and that’s what Assignment China does, is I’m not dealing with the people who wrote the headlines, I’m not dealing with the pundits in Washington, pontificating — I’m dealing with people on the ground. And the choices people make are not always with the benefit of hindsight. And right, and there are lots and are often debatable and so on. But I think one of the values of Assignment China is you can sort of get a sense if you put yourself in their shoes. If you had to do this, and you were always thinking at the end of the… It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and in 90 minutes, I have to have a script written and narrated in time for the editor to cut a piece, in time to make a seven o’clock feed so it can make the morning news in the States, what are you going to do in that split second moment?
And you’re doing it. You slept two hours a night for the last four nights, and all your competitors are running around, and it’s this huge overwhelming tidal wave of an event which you’re struggling to get a handle on. So, it’s like life, it’s messy. And in a messy situation, stuff happens. But I think it’s the stuff happens rather than the conspiracy, it’s being ordered, it’s conscious political calculation and so on. I think that carries much less weight than people realize.
Kaiser: Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, so many of the talks that I’ve given over the last six or seven years are sort of themed around this idea that, look, there isn’t some nefarious conspiracy to smear China and make it look bad. It is extremely messy. Most of these journalists, all the ones that I know certainly, they’re acting in good faith. They’re doing their job in difficult conditions to the best of their abilities. And yet there are structural problems that create distortions. So, they’re accurate and correct, but that doesn’t add up to a realistic picture of what it is that you’re trying to describe. So, I’m constantly enjoining people to try to understand the optical properties of the lens through which so many of us view China.
And your book goes so far toward helping people to get an idea of what that is. Pete Hessler, who is also in your book and in the documentary, he says, I think some really, really wise things. And he talks about these structural issues all the time. Recently, we were… If you’re interested in this, I was in a conversation with him that the ACLS, the American Council of Learned Societies put on where their president, Joy Connolly, had Peter and I on the show to talk about these things. And what’s interesting is that he said he sort of came to an awareness of these structural problems when he encountered Chinese reporting about the United States, which predictably was about mass incarceration and gun violence and stuff like that. All these highly negative things that that are real, are accurate, and yet not fully representative, right? And so, he thought surely the same thing is happening in the way that we write about China.
And he, of course, has the luxury of being able to write thousands of words and report over a long period of time. And he also has both the instincts and the ability to be able to do it. He talks about this in the book as well, this sort of longitudinal approach, this sociologist longitudinal approach that look at groups of people over long periods of time, and to focus on quite ordinary people. And so he’s an exemplary, but, unfortunately, not particularly common type of a reporter. I wonder if in carrying out this whole project, in undertaking this whole thing, you have some thoughts about how we can come… whether you’ve come to understand something about how the media lens affects our views of China and what we can do to give people better idea of reality in a very complex and quite remote country.
Mike: Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I agree with you about Peter Hessler. I mean, his reporting is quite exceptional, and it is a sad reflection of the Chinese government’s attitude towards the press that even Peter Hessler, who was teaching in China, did not get his visa renewed and had to leave the country. And so somebody who is as distant, who’s more able to sort of dig into the complexity and the humanity of Chinese society just because of his background, his experience, the kind of outlet that he’s able to write for is no longer afforded that opportunity because the Chinese system today won’t allow it. And I think that’s a sad commentary on how difficult it’s become.
Kaiser: I mean, just in fairness, he talks about this quite a bit. He’s talked about it on our show before. He did understand that he was there and that writing, reporting was going to be in violation of the agreement.
Mike: Right.
Jeremy: But that’s a dumb agreement, Kaiser. I mean, that’s an unreasonable agreement from a repressive government.
Kaiser: Oh, I mean, he was a professor. Right, yeah. He didn’t have a press credential.
Mike: Right. No, fair enough. But I say it’s that the Chinese system could not see away… I mean, there are plenty of people who’ve written the odd thing on a non-journalist visa.
Kaiser: Sure. No, I totally agree. Yeah.
Mike: And here’s somebody who work carries a great deal of weight, who is fundamentally sympathetically disposed to ordinary Chinese people who sees multiple shades of gray and nuance rather than black and white. And the Chinese system couldn’t find it within itself to enable him to stay on in China, knowing, for whatever combination of reasons. I just think it’s a reflection of the rigidity of the Chinese system and a way in which it is a sort of self-defeating way I think the Chinese system operates. And I think, more generally, one of the consequences of the large-scale expulsions and the dramatic shrinking of the American press corps is that most news organizations have a much smaller number of people, I think the New York Times has two people now.
You’re trapped in a daily diet, and you can’t not cover the everyday wolf warrior fulmination from the foreign ministry press briefing and what the Chinese are saying about Ukraine or Taiwan or whatever. That can take up all your time. One result of that is the pressures to cover that kind of stuff, and the shrinking number of people, mean that it’s really not possible for a reporter to sort of go off to a farm in Hubei for 10 days and then come back with three really well reported, well-crafted pieces about what life is like in the countryside.
Kaiser: Exactly. This is exactly what I mean when I say it’s a structural issue. Yeah.
Mike: The Chinese government complains about journalists don’t tell a story fairly, but they create conditions in which, just by the nature of the beast, in a sense, the smaller number of journalists are locked into doing this kind of daily diet. I mean, the stuff that I always liked most in China was getting out of Beijing and sort of just soaking up what the rest of China was like It’s extremely hard to do now. And even if you can do it, the prevailing attitude about the press is that local officials will more often than not be obstructive. And local people having absorbed the diet for several years in the official state media of “journalists are spies, don’t trust them, they’re bad guys,” are going to be openly hostile more often than not anyway.
In Assignment China, there’s a wonderful story, Kathy Chen of the Wall Street Journal in the early ‘90s wanted to do a piece about the migration of people from the countryside to work in the factories and the joint venture factories on the coast.
And she got the foreign affairs office of Sichuan Province to help her find a village where a bunch of young girls were going to go to Dongguan, I think, to start work in a Mattel doll factory. And Kathy got on a bus with them and spent five days, and then none of these girls had ever left their village. And she rode on this bus. And then because she looked local, she was actually able to get into the factory and look around and get into their dormitory. She wrote absolutely wonderful piece that humanized this, instead of millions of people moving, it’s like these five girls are from this village, and you get a sense of who they are and what their fears were, what their hopes were, what the experience was. It would be next to impossible to do that today. You’d be very hard-pressed to find a foreign affairs office anywhere who felt there was any political advantage in being seen to help an American journalist. And you’d probably find very few people who would be willing to allow themselves to be reported in that way. So, the net effect of this is that it adds to an increasingly one-dimensional picture of China.
Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: And the coverage is driven by Sino-American tensions, the trade disputes, Chinese policy towards Ukraine, Taiwan issues, all of which are absolutely valid and need to be covered, but it’s not balanced in any way by reporting, getting at the kind of texture of Chinese’s society. I think news consumers lose, journalists lose, and China loses because it further accentuates this one-dimensional portrayal because people can’t get at what would make it multidimensional because the Chinese government doesn’t allow enough of them there, and the working conditions on the ground make it difficult. And in terms of the, what can we do, the only thing I would say is the more people can become sophisticated consumers of news, the more they understand the process, the better they can judge for themselves what it is they’re watching or reading or listening to.
And my hope is that Assignment China will make a contribution there, because I think somebody who reads Assignment China will come away with a better appreciation of what goes into being a foreign correspondent in China, what the experience is like, what people think about how they do their jobs, so that when you watch the news or read an article, you’ll be able to do things like, “Oh, what was the lead? What quotes did they use? Where’s the byline? Is it from China or is it from out Inside China or outside China? Who are the experts they cited? Where does the data come from?” I mean, essentially, if people want to get beyond just absorbing and emotionally reacting to what is in the news, they have to proactively get a better understanding of news. And this doesn’t mean saying, buying into conspiracy theories or any of that nonsense. It just means…
Kaiser: Acquiring media literacy. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. Media literacy, I think, is one of the few things that is in everyone’s power to do if they are willing to make a little bit of an effort to do it.
Jeremy: Unfortunately, they’re reading Elon Musk on Twitter. But on a related question is, where the reporters are actually can determine what the story is to some extent. CNN being at Tiananmen in 1989 was one example.
Mike: And not being in Chengdu, for instance, which also had protests that got zero coverage at the time.
Jeremy: Right, exactly. And so nobody even thinks of Chengdu when they think of 1989.
Mike: Right.
Jeremy: Right now at The China project, we are publishing some of our best stories out of Taiwan because our freelancers and reporters can work there unimpeded, and they actually have access to friendly government officials. We just published a story on a bunch of Taiwanese bands that sing in Hokkien and have very sort of pro-independence views. And there are more people writing those kind of stories than writing similar stories about bands in China right now. You, yourself, are in Taipei, and many of the excellent journalists who once covered China, having been unceremoniously booted out, are now also in Taiwan. So, how are you seeing this change the coverage of China? And do you think that the number, just the sheer number of reporters, of American reporters in Taiwan has anything to do with the increased interest in Taiwan in among the American political and chattering classes?
Mike: Well, there are two sort of separate issues, one is China coverage and one is Taiwan coverage. Taiwan has become one of, but by no means the only sort of place that people who want to cover China, but can’t get into China or get back into China are going. There’s Taipei, there’s Seoul, which is where a number of major media organizations have relocated regional headquarters that used to be in Hong Kong, most notably the New York Times, I think the Washington Post also. And Washington as well, and North Carolina and Nashville.
Kaiser: Of course.
Mike: Hong Kong, to some extent. But Hong Kong is problematic, even though there are lots of journals there because of this national security law, which can be interpreted however the authorities want to interpret it. And while they haven’t gone after any international journalists yet, they’ve certainly emasculated the once free Hong Kong press. And I think one thing I do hear from journalists friends is that people in Hong Kong are very reluctant to talk to journalists because they might get into trouble. So, Hong Kong, even though it’s got lots of information, and there’s a lot more back and forth across the border to the mainland than from Taiwan, although there’s still a good bit from Taiwan, is kind of a pale shadow of what it used to be in terms of the center of China watching.
But the problem is that, in all these places, you’re not on the ground in China. So, to some extent, people are doing the same thing, which is they’re reading, they’re trawling the Chinese internet. They’re looking at the official media. They’re talking to whoever they can in China who they’re able to… People who have been there before, have friends and contacts, can have some contact with them, but it’s fraught. And the surveillance state apparatus in China means that it’d be very tricky to have a frank phone conversation on a sensitive issue with somebody in China because someone else will be listening. Taiwan is obviously, ethnically, it’s very Chinese, and people speak Chinese. There’s a orientation towards the mainland. Although, there are not that many obvious go-to Taiwan-based China experts who really have a great handle on China.
But it’s a natural kind of place if you want to be in a sort of Chinese environment, cultural environment, linguistic environment where people are oriented towards China. But there’s a whole industry in Washington of people following China. But not being on the ground just fundamentally changes it. And I worry that we are missing all sorts of important trends percolating through Chinese society that may or may not have a important, broader impact on the direction China goes, or in Chinese politics, that we simply don’t know about. It’s too big a country, and there are too few people there. So, who the hell knows what’s going on in Ningxia or Anhui, or whatever. It was hard enough before. It’s next to impossible now.
Kaiser: Well, we’ve been trying to do, of course, is using social media is some kind of a proxy for it, and it doesn’t always capture everything. I mean, we talked quite a bit about how technology has changed, and changed coverage of China. This is a conversation that Jeremy and I had with Ian Johnson in a live show we did in New York. We talked about social media,the heavy reliance on that. But aside from social media, there’s also all this satellite imagery that we’re using to report and data. There’s different reporting methodologies that are being developed for better and for worse. What have we lost and what have we gained as we increasingly rely on this stuff rather than, as you say, just being on the ground and soaking it in and talking to people face to face?
Mike: Well, I mean, to me, being there is the essential foundation of journalism. And so, if you’re not there, you lose something really crucial which is the ability of a experienced, competent, responsible reporter to see what they can see themselves and talk to people and smell it and touch it and feel it. And you can’t replace that by looking at a satellite image or reading the People’s Daily online or somebody’s Weibo or WeChat moments or whatever. So, we’re losing something really, really important. Unlike in the days of Father Ladany when he just literally read the Chinese press and read transcripts of Chinese radio broadcasts, the internet does provide all kinds of amazing stuff because it’s not just the online versions of the People’s Daily, but police departments put out on the internet procurement bids for equipment. And if you know where to look, you can learn that such and such a police department want is bidding for somebody to build the poles on which to mount surveillance cameras, which tells you something about what’s going on in that city.
The satellite imagery is really important. I mean, it was crucial in the Xinjiang story. I mean, people used satellite, I mean, Megha Rajagopalan in Buzzfeed won a Pulitzer Prize for using satellite imagery to identify the camps. People have used satellite imagery to show large numbers of cars outside crematoriums near Beijing at the end of December that weren’t there at the beginning of December, which was a very dramatic illustration of the death toll caused by the end of zero Covid. There’s another great example, which I’ve been using in a lot of the talks I’ve been giving. The New York Times, they found obituaries on the websites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and one other sort of science and technology website. And they just counted up how many, every month since 2019, and it was like usually three or four a month, and then starting in December, it was like dozens, and so-
But that’s different than going to the hospital, talking to the family, driving out to the crematorium yourself and interviewing persons showing up and stuff like that. So, you just lose that. And I think what we lose in that, as I said, is this sort of sense of China’s a living, breathing society of real people with real feelings and real issues and hopes and dreams and challenges and so on. And it just feeds this one-dimensional picture that I think, unfortunately, given the direction of the relationship between U.S. and China. And it’s not in any way to minimize the issues, which are huge and real and need to be covered, but you don’t get a sense of the broader dynamics in the society in the way that I think it’s really important to understand the place.
Kaiser: Absolutely. So well said.
Jeremy: And you don’t get a sense of who is going to hurt when we start bombing is perhaps the worst possible outcome. On that rather grim note, let me ask the last question, because we could talk to you for hours, Mike, but our listeners probably have lives too, so…
Kaiser: Oh, come on. They don’t.
Mike: Right. Yes. You can cut this easily into a 30 second sound bite.
Jeremy: Can you talk a little bit about what has gone wrong with TV news in recent years? And not just talking about China, and I’m asking this question based partly on our conversation, Nashville, a few weeks ago.
Mike: Right. Well, you probably need another couple of hours just to discuss that.
Jeremy: Go.
Mike: I mean, there are lots of different factors here. One is that this, what is considered fashionable in, in TV news has shifted very much. In the early days at CNN, for example, most of the work involved going out with a camera crew, shooting video, and then writing and editing a carefully crafted package. And then the anchor would say, “Here’s Mike Chinoy in Southern China with a story on X.” But as the technology has made it possible to go live, the focus has increasingly shifted towards live, and sometimes just live for live’s sake. And this is not just an observation related to CNN, it’s across the board at all the big networks. That given a choice between a reporter live shot at location X, or a carefully reported, beautifully written, well-edited package, more often than not, the live shot takes precedence over the package, which to me is kind of a waste of the medium.
The live shot is good to show you’re on the scene, but you get situations, particularly with the old news networks, it’s not just CNN, where hour after hour it’s live, and sometimes reporters complain, they’re prisoners of live. They can’t go out and actually do any journalism because they got to just do live shots. So, that’s one trend that I think we are seeing. Another trend is that the reporter is more part of the story, and that, particularly in television, you see the reporters in a lot more shots, the reporters’ experiences/adventures. Sometimes it’s part of the story, but maybe I’m old-fashioned because I started out at CBS News in the heyday of Walter Cronkite in the mid-1970s, but I always felt that the reporter’s job is to tell the viewer what they have seen, and share using the camera what they’ve seen, and offer some insights and context.
And that the goal of a standup, on camera standup was to show you we’re there and/or to talk about something for which you didn’t have video. But you look at the way TV packages are constructed, often you see the reporter in multiple shots, and the story doesn’t become Israel invaded Southern Lebanon. It is famous reporter X is in Northern Israel, and it’s marketed that way. Again, at CNN in the early days, the line was, we don’t have any stars. The news is the star. And that’s completely changed. And that’s partly the economics of the fight for ratings. And then, of course, Fox News came in and has politicized the television because by defining itself the way in which they did, merely to not be Fox News pegged you as a certain political category no matter how hard news organizations tried not to be. Just by not being Fox, you were automatically distinct from Fox, and therefore, on the other side of the political spectrum.
And then the dramatic changes in the news business where people don’t watch cable TV anymore, everything is done online. There’s this constant pressure for ratings. TV organizations are part of parent companies that are looking at the bottom line. So, there’s tremendous tumult and pressure and shifting values. So I often find on TV that I don’t see nearly as much of what I most liked TV for, which was a great reporter goes to an interesting, important place with an excellent cameraman who takes beautiful images, which are edited together with a script that done right, is almost like poetry, and leaves you powerfully moved by what you’ve seen. And you can’t do that if it’s just live shot after live shot, after live shot by celebrity correspondent, by celebrity correspondent, by celebrity correspondent. So, I find that troubling, frankly.
Kaiser: Oh boy, my God. Let’s bring that back. I mean, I would love to see those — the return of the package.
Mike: There was a guy named Richard Blystone, who was a great mm-hmm. Great correspondent for CNN who died a few years ago, Dick Blystone.
Kaiser: I remember.
Mike: And when he died, my old friend and longtime colleague, Christiane Amanpour, described him as the ”poet laureate television news,” because he could write, his stories were like poetry. And you just don’t find people like that anywhere. Bob Simon, the late Bob Simon at CBS was someone, the same kind of person. If you can find packages online of Richard Blystone or Bob Simon, you’ll see what I mean by beautifully written, beautifully shot television at its finest. And we don’t see as much of that anymore, which I think is unfortunate for journalists and unfortunate for consumers of news who are missing something very valuable.
Jeremy: The poets have been replaced by models.
Kaiser: I was going to say, I mean, Christiane Amanpour may be not the best person to invoke when we’re railing against the cult of the celebrity journalist.
Mike: Although, in fairness to Christiane, yes, she’s a big, big celebrity, but she really earned her spurs in the trenches.
Kaiser: No, she did. Yeah.
Mike: And she’s a very serious journalist who happens to exist in that world.
Kaiser: Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, the book is called Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in The People’s Republic. And it is just a phenomenal document that I think anyone who is interested in contemporary China would do very, very well to read. Please watch the documentary series too, because one of the things that you really do get in that is the body language of these correspondents. It just doesn’t show up necessarily on the written page, but it’s just fantastic. So, congratulations on that, Mike. It’s just such a great contribution to the field.
Mike: Great. Well, thanks so much. And thanks for having me. It’s great to have this-
Kaiser: Yeah. Well, don’t go away yet. We still have recommendations to do.
Mike: Oh, you wanted a recommendation?
Kaiser: Yeah. Let’s get to that section.
Mike (1:08:41):
Okay. All right. Well, I’m moving away from China. There is a wonderful book, it’s called Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. And it’s written by an Israeli author named Matti Friedman. And it documents the largely unknown presence of the great singer. Leonard Cohen, who everybody knows from, even young people know his song, “Hallelujah.” But for those of us of a certain age, he was part of our growing up. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel, when Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria and almost lost, the darkest days of Israel’s history, Leonard Cohen, who was living on an island off Greece, took himself without his guitar to Israel for… He was kind of having a kind of a identity crisis, a musical creative crisis, and he fell in with a group of Israeli musicians who were going to the front lines to sing for the troops.
Kaiser: Wow.
Mike: And this book documents, no publicity, no cameras along, it was just him, and somebody lent him a guitar. And it is a beautifully written meditation on music, culture, war, Israel, Judaism. It’s an absolutely wonderful book called Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Kaiser: Oh, fantastic. That sounds great.
Mike: It’s a great book.
Kaiser: I’d love to read that. Oh, great recommendation. Jeremy, you got your place usurped. You usually go first, but let’s go to you now.
Jeremy: All right. I’d want to quickly point to the Ultimate China Bookshelf by Paul French. And it’s a weekly column. And our latest, his latest piece is relevant to our discussion today. It’s about Jack Belden’s coverage of the Chinese Civil War, which Paul says, offers enduring lessons in China reporting. But my main recommendation sticks with the Jewish theme. It’s a book called From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories of the early 20th-century modernist Yiddish language writer Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan Finkin and a friend of mine here in Nashville, Allison Schachter. It’s a really wonderful little volume of stories from a writer who has almost been forgotten, very sadly.
Kaiser: Fantastic. I’m going to go from Jews to Jesuits. Well, first quickly, we mentioned Father Laszlo Ladany the Hungarian Jesuit. I was just intrigued and went down a rabbit hole and started reading about him. And I came across a list, I think it was just on the Wikipedia article about him, of 10 maxims, I guess, that he suggests. He wrote this in 1982 about how to cover China. Look that up. Check it out. It’s pretty amazing. These are so incredibly relevant today for anybody who’s interested in writing about, or thinking about, or talking about China. And the other recommendation I have is just all the fun I’ve been having with ChatGPT 4… We have experienced a step change. Just play with ChatGPT 4, spend the money, spend the 20 bucks to upgrade. It’s just mind-blowing. So anyway, thank you so much, Mike. That was just fantastic. Really enjoyable to talk to you, and congrats once again on the fantastic book.
Jeremy: Thank you, Mike.
Mike: Yeah. Thanks so much.
Kaiser: Jeremy, good to see you, man.
Jeremy: Likewise.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
