The Communist Party has long striven to control freedom of speech in China. Websites from around the world are blocked. Major social media cannot be accessed, and advanced software is used to delete “sensitive” entries from the Internet. Domestic journalists who step over the invisible line of what’s permissible face being fired or even arrested, while foreign journalists face various forms of government intimidation. How reporters are trying to work around China's resurgent censorship, 25 years after Tiananmen. Read more
Evan Osnos, who covered China for eight years with the Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker, spoke about the difficulty of covering modern China in the … Read more
As the profitability of traditional Chinese media plummets, journalists are increasingly beginning to transform themselves, with the acceptance of bribes for writing positive stories becoming more and more common among news outlets. Social media have … Read more
RELATED ARTICLES Command and Control By Paul Mooney Moral Hazard By Yang XiaoInternet censorship in China is not simply matter of blocking foreign websites and deleting anything deemed harmful, nor is the … Read more
In October 2013, journalist Chen Yongzhou of the New Express Daily was detained and arrested after he reported alleged corruption at Zoomlion, a state-owned company. His paper’s front-page pleas for his release drew worldwide attention and sympathy from the … Read more
I became a journalist in 1979. Back in those days, two basic skills were required of any journalist: reporting and writing. Three decades later, in an era of dramatic technological changes, these basic skills alone are no longer sufficient. Read more
Watch video of Osnos’s Morris Lecture, from which this essay was adapted In 1948, the Harvard Sinologist John King Fairbank wrote, “China is a journalist’s dream and a statistician’s nightmare.” It was, he explained, a … Read more
In China, May has 35 days. All mention of June 4th, the day in 1989 on which the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, is forbidden. So Chinese journalists and … Read more
Technology development has been reshaping the media industry worldwide. In developed countries like the United States, traditional media companies felt the shock brought on by new technology several years ago. The global financial crisis made their survival even more … Read more
