Reporting for China

While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. The Chinese government is financing most of this growth, hoping to strengthen its influence and improve its public image. But do these reporters willingly serve formulated agendas or do they follow their own interests? And are they changing Chinese citizens’ views of the world?Based on interviews and informal conversations with over seventy current and former correspondents, Reporting for China documents a diverse group of professionals who hold political views from nationalist to liberal, but are constrained in their ability to report on the world by China’s media control, audience tastes, and the declining market for traditional media.

Reporting for China is a fascinating and imaginatively conceived study of Chinese correspondents who work abroad. . . . Readers beleaguered by recent US sparring over fake news and alternative facts will find in this study a refreshingly concrete exploration of the tension, unblinkingly relayed by Nyíri. . . . The book offers, in a very accessible style, a nuanced and vivid account of a domain that has long been subject to overly facile assumptions about what freedom of speech actually entails and how it comes to be curtailed., As the pioneering work in this field, Nyiri’s vibrant and important book opens up a lot of new questions about China’s global media expansion and soft power attempts. It spearheads an exciting new direction in the analysis of Chinese media and cultural studies., The first extensive, systematic study of Chinese journalists who work as foreign correspondents for Chinese audiences. . . . A must-read for those interested in the machinations of Chinese politics and the Chinese state. . . . A fine example of how anthropologists study the media . . . valuable not just for anthropologists but also for scholars and students in the fields of media, communications, and journalism., This is an original, nuanced, and informative study that deserves a wide audience., Reporting for China: How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World is a fascinating account of the expanding ways the Chinese are engaging with the world. . . . [and] is successful not only in revealing the hidden dynamics and tensions that compel Chinese foreign correspondents to report the way they do, but also in shedding light on the Chinese government’s intentions and influence as these pertain to the news media.

Pál Nyíri is professor of global history from an anthropological perspective at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He is the author of Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority; coauthor of Seeing Culture Everywhere: From Genocide to Consumer Habits; and coeditor of Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia: How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing a Region.