SEEING

One of China’s most accomplished TV journalists reflects on the reporting that shaped her career.

Chai Jing begins this memoir with a consideration of her rise to prominence in Chinese media at the end of the 20th century and then offers an insider’s perspective on some of the most significant stories she covered during her 14-year career. As she notes of her devotion to her craft, this was “not just a job, but a way to live, to throw myself into this thorny world…experience the principles of journalism with flesh and blood until I was intertwined with people’s destinies like water in water.” Among the profound events the author chronicles are an inexplicable murder by a talented but troubled student and the human toll of catastrophes such as the 2008 earthquake and the SARS outbreak. Lighter fare occasionally appears as well, as in the author’s investigation of apparently fraudulent efforts to prove the existence of South China tigers in a region where they were presumed to be extinct. Throughout this consistently moving book, we get a clear sense of both Chai’s talent for engaging with her interview subjects and encouraging them to speak frankly before the camera and the challenges she faced as a woman reporter. She also memorably relays thee political dynamics of Chinese media—e.g., the role of state oversight and censorship. Occasionally, there is a certain voyeuristic quality in the author’s narration of the most heart-wrenching events and a tendency, notoriously common in contemporary journalism, to bend news toward entertainment. Admirably, however, Chai includes commentary on her own unease at sharing the intimate details of victims’ lives, and she astutely identifies some of the ethical quandaries that confront anyone tasked with exposing individual suffering for the public’s ostensible benefit. Ultimately, readers will agree that these are important stories told with insight and sensitivity.

Poignant and thoughtful considerations of Chinese news stories from behind the scenes.