When it comes to China reporting, two of my favorite writers are Peter Hessler and Evan Osnos, both of whom write for The New Yorker. They recently took part in a forum hosted by Asia Society to examine four decades of reporting on China by the magazine. Editor David Remnick moderated the event, and joining the conversation were three other New Yorker writers, Orville Schell, Zha Jianying, and Jiayang Fan.
The good folks at ChinaFile have posted a video of the entire discussion, as well as a full transcript.
The entire discussion is worth watching (or listening to, or reading), but I found Peter Hessler’s comments to be particularly interesting. He reflects on his time teaching English to students in Fuling, a remote city in Sichuan province, and his frustration at the books on American culture they had which only taught them about the “extremes” (violence, racism, etc.). When he began writing about China, he wanted to avoid presenting China in those same contours.
In response to a question of what constitutes bad writing about China, he elaborated on this idea:
I think that it’s the extremes, it’s the same thing as the bad writing about America. Either America is a place of constant crime or a place where everybody’s rich, and it’s like “well this is not it.” You should know something in the middle.
I think it’s the way you write about your local community. I think actually, foreign coverage follows the same patterns as local coverage basically. If you’re living in New York, you can’t just write about average life in New York City like for the New York Times. I mean you can do some, but that’s not really what you’re supposed to do. Because the people who read your paper, who live here, they know what that’s like to some degree. You do have to find the extremes, and the things that are messed up, that have to be fixed. It’s an appropriate point of coverage. I think the problem is, that tradition is very deeply entrenched in American journalism, and then foreign correspondents write on another country and they do the same kind of thing. So they find the most extreme cases in China of things that need to be fixed or that are egregious, but if there’s no context, I think it just kind of confuses Americans, and it doesn’t actually end up fixing the problem anyways.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help thinking that was particularly relevant to those of us who are writing about religious life in China today.
Are we simply focusing on the extremes, or are we trying to help our readers and constituents understand the context?
At ChinaSource, we strive hard for the latter. Hopefully, we are succeeding.
Image credit: China, by Steve Webel, via Flickr
Joann Pittman
Joann Pittman is Vice President of Partnership and China Engagement and editor of ZGBriefs. Prior to joining ChinaSource, Joann spent 28 years working in China, as an English teacher, language student, program director, and cross-cultural trainer for organizations and businesses engaged in China. She has also taught Chinese at the University …View Full Bio
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