Journalist Couple Speak on East Asia

Nicholas D. Kristof '81, the former South East Asia Bureau Chief for The New York Times and foreign correspondent Sheryl WuDunn spoke in the Harvard Crimson Sanctum last night about the difficulties of reporting in China.

The husband/wife pair was stationed in China from 1988 until 1993. Their book chronicling those years, China Wakes, was recently released in paperback.

"Reporters get stir crazy," Kristof said. "You have to live in a compound. You're guarded 24 hours a day."

When reporters do manage to get a story that isn't government-supplied, the difficulties have often just begun, Kristof said.

"There is always going to be some risk. It made all of us a bit too paranoid sometimes," he said. "You're bugged, harassed."

WuDunn told the story of one difficult reporting trip where she was trying to write a story about the plight of the peasant.

"I thought I'd try to interview a really poor peasant," she said. "I got to the capital [of a poor province] and met local officials."

After picking up village officials as well, WuDunn said she was taken to the home of a "peasant", "with a shiny new motorcycle out front of a big house with a lot of space."

The man turned out to be from a wealthier segment of Chinese society, she said. After a half-hour attempt to convince her escort she was too ill to attend the afternoon art show they had planned, she said she gained some time to herself and visited peasants on her own.

"I saw a China I'd never seen before," she said, describing a hut a family shared with a pig and a peasant too poor to clothe his own children.

Retribution for publishing stories often fell not on the reporters themselves, but on their Chinese friends, Kristof said.

He told the story of one journalist who published a story the government found too damaging. "They took his best Chinese friend--who was not his source--and put him in prison for 7 years," he said.

"[As a reporter,] the worst they can do to you is kick you out of the country, which is the Chinese Foreign Ministry award for journalism," he joked.