Reflections of a Chinese reporter in foreign media

August 21, 2018 5:48 PM

Owen Guo, a Chinese reporter in China working for the Financial Times, writes: "Today, I’m exiting journalism bearing no illusions that press freedom in this country will get any better. The forces that constrained reporting when I entered are as robust as ever."
posted by gen (8 comments total)

Here's a list of Owen's articles at Global Voices (I work there and we're friends IRL).

Here's a funny article he recently wrote for the NYT (he worked in the Times' Beijing bureau until just recently) about body odour.
posted by JamesBay at 7:37 PM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thanks for sharing.

If he was at GV, it's not surprising he has chosen to leave reporting in China.
posted by gen at 9:14 PM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this; I found it a really sobering, thoughtful read. I hope he finds a way to keep writing in some way.
posted by Aravis76 at 12:57 AM on August 22, 2018

also recently: Balding Out...
posted by kliuless at 2:46 AM on August 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Kliuless I had to chuckle at your link: libertarian moves to place with no genuine laws - complains about how no one respects the law.

More broadly, I wish stories like the one in the OP had more amplification. Here in Australia the discourse about China is seriously polarised: its either unvarnished racism and fears of "yellow peril", or quiescent nonsense that has been paid for by the CCP in most cases. It really annoys me as it distorts the real issues with the CCP, which are many.

Naturally it doesn't help that many of the 1%er Chinese that make it over here are almost jaw droppingly ignorant about the reality of their own government and their own country's history.

I had to laugh the other day, on Facebook a Chinese friend of a friend noticed a Mao reference and was like "he was a great man! He is very respected and loved in China!" it's like jesus this country has the memory of a goldfish; for most of the eighties and nineties the his name was all but verboten by the CCP. And also he killed millions of people, but you know not even twenty years ago he was viewed as an embarrassment.
posted by smoke at 2:22 PM on August 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

> Here in Australia the discourse about China is seriously polarised

I think it's safe to say the discourse in the US about China is also equally polarized. Nuance is hard to do these days- it's hard to write, hard to comprehend, doesn't sell papers or ads...
posted by gen at 10:23 PM on August 23, 2018

Buzzfeed's China reporter says she was forced to leave the country - "China-focused reporters and media advocates linked Rajagopalan's situation to her reporting on the situation in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where the government has been accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in 'reeducation camps.'"
posted by kliuless at 6:32 AM on August 24, 2018

America's Elite Universities Are Censoring Themselves on China - "Some academics are too eager to please Beijing or too scared of offending the country. 'You don't want to go out on a limb', said one professor."
posted by kliuless at 11:14 PM on September 6, 2018 [1 favorite]