This week’s edition of CDT ChinaCast’s Foreign Correspondents Series features Jaime Florcruz, the present Beijing bureau chief for CNN. After spending 35 years in the country, Florcruz is one of the godfathers of foreign reporting in China.
In 1980, Florcruz started work as a news assistant with Newsweek in Beijing. He joined Time Magazine in 1982, and served as its Beijing bureau chief from 1990 to 2000. Florcruz has been eyewitness to China’s entire economic and social reform period. Among his first-hand reporting experiences in China, Florcruz reported one of the biggest stories in China: Tiananmen Square in 1989. He followed the students’ movement and co-wrote a book called “Massacre in Beijing.” He said the young students’ passion, idealism , and nationalism was reminiscent of his own history in the 1970s as a young student leader in his home country, the Philippines. Florcruz ended up staying in China for a prolonged time after the former Philippines leadership blacklisted him for his activism. But Florcruz has not regretted this experience, as he says China is the best news beat in the world. In the first part of our podcast, Florcruz will talk about his early experience in China and his observations in Tiananmen Square.
Listen to the interview here.
Stay tuned for the second part of the interview with Jaime Florcruz, which will be posted on CDT next week. In that segment, he’ll analyze changes in China’s media environment over the past two decades and the recent tightening of media control.
Read some of Florcruz’s reports, such as “China’s communist regime is cracking down on those who seek freedom.”
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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