A Reporter Comes in From the Cold – Tom Scocca

In the New York Observer, New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief Joseph Kahn reflects on his years in China:

Scocca-Jkahn1V“I think it’s actually surprisingly easy for Americans to come here and feel like they can fit in,” Joseph Kahn said, sitting in a coffee shop called Sequoia, a block north of the gate of the Jian Guo Men Diplomatic Compound. It was late December, and Mr. Kahn was nearing the end of his Pulitzer-winning tour of duty as The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief. On Dec. 31, The Times named him deputy foreign editor, a job that will require him to relocate to New York.

The dynamic new China, Mr. Kahn said, has on its surface striking similarities to America: “They have roads and they have cars and they have real-estate speculation and they have a stock-market bubble,” he said.

But beneath that, he said, is a country that still confounds American assumptions. Mr. Kahn got a preview of the current Beijing boom in the early 90’s, when The Wall Street Journal sent him to be the first American reporter stationed in Shanghai since the revolution. The city had been designated China’s first financial center, but there were still farmers to interview in the Pudong district; the futuristic skyscrapers that now define the neighborhood were only beginning to move off the drawing board. [Full text]



[Image: Joseph Kahn, via the NY Observer]

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