This week’s CDT ChinaCast Foreign Correspondents Series features Cindy Sui, a reporter for the Bejing bureau of Agence France-Press who recently left her job to move to Taiwan with her husband (also a reporter). Before she left, Sui was one of the most dedicated chroniclers of the Chinese countryside, quietly chasing some of China’s most difficult stories. She was respected in particular for her work on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Henan Province.
A Chinese-American, Sui is one of the very few foreign journalists in China capable of speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese fluently. She spent six years in Beijing. Prior to that she worked for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and the Stockton Record in California. In this interview Sui talks about the HIV stories, hanging out with Hu Jintao’s aunt, and how looking Chinese is and isn’t an advantage reporting in China.
Listen to the podcast here.
Read some of Sui’s coverage of HIV in Henan here and here. See also “On the SARS Beat” in the American Journalism Review, in which Cui talks about rushing headlong into hospitals during the SARS crisis despite the dangers.
CDT ChinaCast is a podcast series of short and informal conversations with journalists, business people, artists and others doing interesting work in China. For the initial series, China Digital Times bloggers will interview foreign correspondents about their lives and work. The interviews do not aspire to find solutions to the many contradictions and challenges facing China in the 21st century – rather, we hope to offer a personal look at day-to-day life in one of the most complex and dynamic countries on earth. How do foreign reporters go about the business of covering China? What are some of the most unusual stories that have come out of the country in recent years? And what do expat journalists living in Beijing or Shanghai do for fun?
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