Reporting from China, With Jane Perlez

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is reporting from China.
With me to discuss the decline of foreign reporting from China and its consequences for U.S.-China relations is Jane Perlez. Jane is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and was a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993 for her reporting on famine in Somalia and a member of the New York Times team that was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the war on Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Jane reported for the New York Times from China starting in 2012, leaving as the Times' Beijing Bureau Chief in 2019. She currently hosts the podcast Face-Off: the U.S. vs China, which recently featured an episode on the decline in the number of journalists reporting from China for U.S. media outlets.
Jane, congratulations on Face-Off and thank you for joining me on the President's Inbox.

PERLEZ:
Thank you, Jim. Very good to speak to a fellow podcaster.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm honored to be able to speak to someone who's reporting I have avidly consumed for a number of years. You're one of the best at the trade, so again, thank you for taking the time to chat with me.
And I want to just begin with something I was struck by listening to a recent episode of Face-Off. This was your episode on journalists in China, and you noted that today there are only about twenty journalists in China reporting for U.S. media outlets. Tell me some more about that.

PERLEZ:
Well, the first thing I can say is that it's obviously way too few journalists for covering America's strategic rival, most important strategic rival. And I might add for covering a country of 1.4 billion people. And it is much less, much fewer than when I left. Even when I left in 2019, there were many more.
Why did it become this way? Quite simple. In Trump one, the administration then decided to expel a number of Chinese journalists who were based in Washington. They said that some of them were spies. Now, I have little doubt that some of them were writing notes of probably not much consequence I'm betting, but who knows, to the Ministry of State Security. So those journalists were expelled and the Trump people knew full well there'd be retaliation against us, American journalists in China. And sure enough, it came. I had left just a few months earlier, but in 2020, a number of American journalists were indeed expelled. So that means, what does that mean? Wall Street Journal has three Western reporters on its team in Beijing. The New York Times has two. We had ten when I left in 2019. And the Washington Post has a big fat zero.

LINDSAY:
So help me understand what the consequences are of not having people on the ground. And maybe I should ask a clarification before that. Are we talking about people who aren't based there or is the restriction extended to a Times or a Post or a Wall Street Journal reporter basically parachuting in for a couple of weeks?

PERLEZ:
Oh, you definitely can't parachute in. No way you can do that. That's another problem.

LINDSAY:
So there's no walking down buying a ticket on United Airlines and flying to Shanghai and taking out your reporter's notebook and asking questions?

PERLEZ:
That's a very-

LINDSAY:
But that's the way it was in the old days, wasn't it?

PERLEZ:
Pretty much. I mean, the contrast in our episode on journalists is that during Tiananmen, which was the biggest news event in China since the communists took over in 1989, each television network had a hundred journalists, camera people, fixers, you name it. So that means there were hundreds and hundreds of journalists, we don't know how many exactly, but after that things clamped down and now there are very tight negotiations on getting any kind of, one more journalist for one more newspaper. There hasn't been any success in that in the last three or four years that I know of.

LINDSAY:
So during the time that you were in China writing for the Times and eventually became the Times Bureau Chief in Beijing, was your ability to cover the news significantly compromised?

PERLEZ:
I wouldn't use the word compromised. I would use the word, we were monitored a lot, but we took that as part of the bargain. I mean, this is a super surveillanced state, and the surveillance has become more and more as the techniques have become more and more sophisticated.
So yes, there are huge limitations on what you can do even if you are on the ground and inside China. But I would argue, that is far better than reporting it from either Washington or Taiwan, where many China journalists are, and where I might add journalists do an amazing feat of covering China without being there. And today's tech tools allow you to do that. We can get into that in a little while, but I argue there's nothing like being on the ground to get a sense of what is the economy really like? How is it really affecting people on the ground? What is this housing slump doing? What is happening to all those apartments? A friend of mine, German friend of mine says there are enough empty apartments, half-finished apartments in China to populate the number of people in Germany. I mean, it's just astonishing. So there are many things that you need to be able to do to cover China, I think, in a full, full picture.

LINDSAY:
So Jane, help me understand the realities of reporting from China as compared to, let's say, being a journalist here in Washington D.C. covering news. My sense is, from what I can tell, if you're a journalist here in Washington D.C., you're recruiting sources. In many cases, there are people in government who reach out to share information with you as either they're trying to push the government's policy or position of a party on Capitol Hill or trying to engage in some intramural fighting with other people in the administration. Is it the same way in China or is China in some sense, Chinese government officials, much more buttoned up?

PERLEZ:
Well, they are more buttoned up, but in many ways the techniques are the same. You know you try to discover and find sources in a variety of places, both in government, in private industry, among families, among ordinary people, in universities, for example. Lots of places where you can find potentially people to talk to. It has become increasingly difficult though. Even when I left in 2019, it was becoming increasingly difficult for people to talk with any candor, and certainly not on the record. So it is a monumental problem I grant.
But there are ways, and in particular in some subjects I would say, the economy. I think Keith Bradsher of the New York Times who's there does an amazing job in covering the new economy in China. What do I mean by new economy? I mean EVs, solar panels, the manufacturing prowess of China. Now, that's something that the Chinese like us to know about. So I'm not saying that's easy, but it's something that they're going to be less concerned about than if you're trying to delve into the latest missive of the seven men standing committee and what they're deciding, which is, of course, an impossible thing to get to.

LINDSAY:
Do you have a sense, Jane, how much freedom someone like Keith might have to leave Beijing or leave Shanghai and go into other parts of China? Because I would imagine there's obviously a lot of news made in Shanghai, a lot of news made in Beijing, but if you're trying to understand sort of the vibe or the sentiment in a country, it probably helps to get outside of the largest cities.

PERLEZ:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think Keith travels widely. I don't really want to speak for him, but he's always a very, very good colleague. But you'll see that he has datelines from various places in China, particularly where there are factories. So I imagine that is quite controlled how he lands up at the factory. He just doesn't wander in and make charming comments to the front door. I mean, it's all highly arranged. But even so, he gets a good picture of where they're going, for example, in battery technology, or he gets inside universities where they're studying battery technology. That's very useful and we should be able to do things in other areas.
Although I have to say, on the social front, I think it's very hard to talk about how people really feel about the housing slump, about the slowing economy. I mean, I have a friend in Beijing who owns a bunch of restaurants and he just said the other day, we're going to have to close two of them because people are not opening their wallets. They're disobeying Xi Jinping who's told them to open their wallets, but they're not opening their wallets. So that would be something that would be really interesting to see how the consumer is really reacting to this downturn in the economy. How far they're tightening their belts.

LINDSAY:
I take your point, that if you had more Keith Bradshers or perhaps better, if Keith had more colleagues in the Beijing Bureau, you could obviously cover more stories and probably they'll cover some stories more deeply than you're allowed to right now. But I'm curious about this issue of how news business is adapting to the inability to get journalists into China. You've alluded to doing reporting from outside of China, perhaps being based in Taipei to try to track things. How are journalists trying to get at stories when it's a lot harder to be on the ground talking to the people you want to talk to?

PERLEZ:
Well, I'll give you what I think is really an ingenious example, which talks to the state of the economy. The New York Times and other media organizations now have rafts and rafts of really technologically able journalists. And a couple of New York Times tech journalists based in Seoul actually, came up with this great idea to basically wire up a delivery woman in Shanghai. So they kitted her out with a video camera, and she went on her day's rounds from 6:00 AM to about 6:00 PM. She did twelve hours of work. The video camera recorded everywhere she went. She talked about how much she earned on that trip, each particular trip. And it turned out that for twelve hours work, she earned $17.83. So that is, I think, if we are not allowed to be on the ground, at least tech is enabling us to get a better picture.

LINDSAY:
To what extent are journalists able to use social media or private communication channels, encrypted ones, to be able to get at stories? Is that a good workaround?

PERLEZ:
Yes, it is a workaround, and China's social media itself is an absolute well of information. So for example, if you're doing a story about the rise of feminism in China under Xi Jinping, who's not being very helpful to women, I might say, you know urging them not to divorce, for example. On social media a little while ago, a woman in her, I guess I'm not sure how old she was, she was in her fifties, maybe even her early sixties, and she made comments on her chat channel with video of the problem she was having divorcing her husband. Her husband wouldn't go through with the divorce, and she would file these conversations she had with her husband and you could hear him yelling at her as she was taping. And she put these up, I think it was on WeChat, and she got a huge following. And then after she'd successfully divorced him, she continued by going on the road and she became known as Auntie Su Min Lee. She was really a great illustration of how you can get your message out.

LINDSAY:
So I have to ask, you've reported from all over the world, some of the places include Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. I know you've been in Central Europe and in the Balkans. How did reporting from China and how does reporting from China compare to reporting elsewhere? Obviously there are differences in terms of where you might be able to go, the degree of a surveillance state, and obviously you've reported from some war zones, so that has a sort of different kind of complication, but in terms of just trying to get the story, to what extent is China other places, to what extent is it different?

PERLEZ:
Well, before we get to how you get the story, I think there's something particularly exciting and thrilling about reporting from China. Why? Because China's really important. It's a really big country, and there are so many different kinds of people, so many different kinds of issues, and many of these issues impact on our lives in the United States.
Actually my beat when I was in Beijing was actually China and the world. So I reported inside China, but I also went outside China to the South China Sea. I went to Laos, I went to Myanmar, I went to various places. I went up to the North Korean border because North Korea is very, it was a dynamite issue in 2018. So it's the importance of China that I think attracts a lot of people. It certainly attracted me. And also it is a changing state. In this instance, it's getting more strict, it's getting more surveillance, which is in our way going the wrong way. But it's pretty interesting to be under that if you like.
I'll give you one example. I went up to the North Korean border in about, I think it was just about a year before I left. I was very interested, we were very interested in what China was doing to help keep the North Korean state alive. So we went up there. I went with, I don't speak Chinese, I'll be totally frank, so I always traveled with a news assistant from the New York Times Bureau who are invaluable and great people for us. We couldn't do this reporting without them. I went up with our news assistant and we followed the tracks of a woman who was part of a conglomerate, perfectly legal, making clothes in Pyongyang. Because Pyongyang, it was even cheaper to make the clothes in Pyongyang than it was in China.
And we were followed everywhere we went in the city of Dandong on the North Korean border. We were followed everywhere by MSS agents in cars, on foot, wherever. But it just made it more of a challenge and for whatever reason, they didn't interfere with us. And in the end, we got our story because we found a factory manager who had traveled from Dandong to Pyongyang every month with a hundred thousand bucks in cash, in her knapsack, to pay the North Korean workers.

LINDSAY:
Wow. I have to ask, when you are being followed by, I take it, state security agents, are you trying to lose them like in an action film?

PERLEZ:
Of course. Well, I wouldn't say quite an action film, Jim, but you do try to lose them. And you know to get this information about the hundred thousand bucks in the knapsack, we did have to lose them and we lost them, would you believe it, in a mundane place. In a shopping mall.

LINDSAY:
Okay, well, that's right out of action film. That's one of the ways they try to lose whoever's tracking them. Go into a crowded place and count on the crowd screening people out.

PERLEZ:
Well, we succeeded on that one, which was actually pretty funny. But everybody's very conscious of being surveilled. And in particular, our news assistants were employed actually, directly by an arm of the Chinese state. That happens with all foreign, big media companies. If they're going to employ news assistants, it has to go through the Chinese bureaucracy. And the news assistants have to meet every month or so with someone from this bureaucracy to tell them what they're doing, which is, you know, total invasion. But I always used to say to our news assistants, "Just tell them what you're doing because you're not doing anything wrong." And for the most part, there were a couple of instances where it got very hairy, but for the most part we were able to survive it.

LINDSAY:
Jane, were there any stories that you really wanted to report on that for whatever reason you weren't able to do?

PERLEZ:
Oh, there are tons of stories. I mean, one of the most important stories I think for the U.S.-China relationship is the buildup of the nuclear arsenal. I mean, Xi Jinping had been in power just for nineteen days, and he made a speech in the confines of the Communist Party to a group of higher-ups saying, we are going to replenish our nuclear arsenal. Now, to be able to do that in person and talk to anybody, you cannot. To go to Xinjiang and see where they are building the extra capacity to launch this missile arsenal, you cannot. So many, many things that you cannot do that you would really like to be able to do. That's just one example, of course.
We'd love to be able to go to a shipyard and see how they're producing so many more ships at a faster rate than the United States. The Chinese Navy, we're always writing, has more ships than the American Navy. Well, how do they do it? It would be very interesting to see it. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a state secret. It would just be really interesting to talk to Chinese naval architects.

LINDSAY:
Well, given that one of the ships they recently launched turtled right away, there may be a reason why the Chinese don't want foreign journalists at their shipyards.

PERLEZ:
Probably.

LINDSAY:
I'm curious, Jane, you think back about covering China and now you're here in the United States. What do you think it is that Americans don't really understand about China that they should?

PERLEZ:
Again, I just say that I think the ignorance about China, it really flummoxes me. It really does flummox me. I think maybe because it's far away, it's a different culture, but you could say that of the Soviet Union, but I guess it doesn't seem to be so much ignorance about Russia. I mean, for example, at the dinner table in New York at a small party I had a few weeks ago, someone who knows everything about the entire world said, "Oh, and does China have nuclear weapons?"

LINDSAY:
Well, that's a big omission in one's knowledge.

PERLEZ:
Exactly.

LINDSAY:
They've had them since 1964.

PERLEZ:
Exactly. With a big argument with the Soviet Union about whether they'd help or not.
It flummoxes me as to why, in part, because I think that Chinese historically have been very reluctant to have outside journalists. I mean, in the Mao era, there were no American journalists and everybody was stuck in Hong Kong, peering in, which was sort of the old way of doing it. Your ear would be glued to the Chinese national radio to find out what the state government press was saying, but you could never find the private thoughts of Chinese. So there was a big gap then. Then gradually there became more and more journalists after 1979 when there was official recognition.
But it was always a big battle to get journalists into China. It hasn't changed in that way. There was some loosening up, I guess, in the late nineties, and then coming to the Olympics in 2008, there was some loosening up. And when I got there in 2012, it wasn't too bad. But I like to say that my experience in China of covering China went from a period of a lot of smiles to no smiles.

LINDSAY:
So I have to ask you, what's the difference between being a correspondent for the Times in Beijing and being the bureau chief?

PERLEZ:
I'll just give you one example. There's really no difference, or I guess, I mean, if you're a bureau chief, you write stories like everybody else, but sometimes something happens like the government wants to speak to the New York Times. They really want to speak to the New York Times, they speak to the executive editor in New York. But if they want to speak to the New York Times faster and on something in particular, they call the bureau chief.
So I'll give you an example. Chris Buckley, who's absolutely the best China correspondent ever, was in the bureau when I was there. He was the Chief China correspondent. He wrote a story about how Xi Jinping maneuvered to get the political system to agree for him to be emperor forever and to change the constitution from two terms to no terms. So Chris wrote this story saying that Xi Jinping had maneuvered to do this with speed, something, and stealth. He used three words, and stealth was the one that really got in their craw.

LINDSAY:
Why is that?

PERLEZ:
I have no idea. Well, I'll tell you in a minute. So eight o'clock that morning, my phone goes. Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On the dot, you must come to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at 10:00 AM. So Chris and I go in there and there's this big lobby. In those days, it was sort of interesting, they seemed to have fake palm trees at one end that made it look like a little Miami. And then there'd be series of little doors where there'd be big couches, or big chairs, I should say, and you go in and you wait for your person who you're going to meet.
Well, Chris and I went in and we sat in the chairs. No tea. There's usually tea is served. We were not served any tea. After a few minutes, four guys come in. One of them was carrying a big sheet of paper, and they read from this piece of paper as though it was a secret document, as though it was a manifesto that should have been knocked on the, you know nailed on the door. Blah, blah, blah, blah, stealth, stealth, stealth, no good, no good, no good. And so when they'd finished, Chris and I looked at each other and we started to ask some questions. They said, "No questions. You must leave." So we left. So when there are complaints, the bureau chief has to go and deal with it in a minor way, but the big issues, they call New York. Or they make the consulate in New York, call New York.

LINDSAY:
I asked you about what Americans don't understand about China. I'd also be curious to hear from you what you think it is that the Chinese people or Chinese officials really don't understand about the United States or about America?

PERLEZ:
Well, I could give a sort of maybe a trite answer in the sense that when last month when TikTok was in trouble, and a lot of people, a lot of so-called refugees went to the Chinese website, RedNote, and a lot of American TikTok followers were telling their Chinese colleagues about conditions in the United States, the cost of food and the cost of rent, for example. And the Chinese RedNote followers were just shocked at the price of living. Now, that's on a very simple level.
I think that the Chinese propaganda is very successful. It paints the United States as a power that wants to stop China's rise, that it wants to stop China from being reborn again into the great civilization. And I think that in some respects, some Chinese people do see the United States as sort of the suffocating enemy, if you like. On the other hand, there are many Chinese who have come to the United States as students. I mean, there are two-hundred and seventy-seven thousand Chinese students in the United States at the moment, and I think for the most part they go back with a positive attitude.

LINDSAY:
So Jane, where do you think U.S.-China relations are headed? I take it from the title of your podcast Face-Off: U.S. vs China that you're greatly concerned about the level of tensions in the bilateral relationship. Do you see us headed almost inevitably toward greater conflict, or do you think with the change of administrations here in the United States that we may go in a different direction?

PERLEZ:
Oh, I think in the longer term, I don't think conflict is inevitable, but I think it will take a lot of diplomacy and a lot of hard work to lower the tensions and I'm not very optimistic about that. I mean, it could happen, conflict could happen, of various degrees could happen in various situations. I mean, maybe Taiwan won't be first. I mean, maybe the South China Sea will be first.
In our first season of our podcast, we described the incredible situation in 2001 when an American spy plane was hit by a Chinese fighter jet. That thing was resolved peacefully and quite brilliantly thanks to, we had a very brilliant Chinese ambassador in Beijing, and the Chinese were quite reasonable, and they didn't want to get into a mess at that time. But if that happened today, and there are, last week, there were near misses between a Philippine aircraft and a Chinese aircraft, then there was another near miss between, I think, an Australian aircraft and a Chinese aircraft.
Thankfully, none of them were American. But if there is another repeat of a collision over the South China Sea, do you know what people think will happen? The Americans will be reluctant to land on Chinese territory as they did last time. The American plane will go into the sea, all crew on board will be killed, and then there will be a race by the Chinese and the Americans to get to the crash site. And the Chinese have more vessels than we do, and so who knows what's going to happen? I mean, there's that flashpoint. And then there is of course, the tried and true problem of Taiwan.

LINDSAY:
I should just note for people who aren't familiar with the incident in, I think it was April of 2001, that the Chinese fighter jet crashed and the American spy plane was damaged, but was able to land at Hainan Island, which is, getting back to your point, the concern that an American crew would not attempt the same thing this time around because that plane was kept by the Chinese and it had obviously lots of valuable electronic equipment.

PERLEZ:
Not to mention the twenty-six crew members who were essentially kept hostage for the days that they were there, but no one wanted to say they were a hostage because they didn't want to inflame the situation. I don't think there'd be such calm iteration another.

LINDSAY:
I mean, given the differential in power of China in 2001 versus China in 2025 I agree with you. It's hard to imagine Xi Jinping being content with just getting a letter with a couple of sorries that it has happened back in 2001. Do you think that Xi Jinping is preparing for war?

PERLEZ:
I can't say about that.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm asking you because I listen to your podcast and you asked a guest that question.

PERLEZ:
Well, thank you for listening, Jim. I'm really happy that you listened.

LINDSAY:
All the way to the end.

PERLEZ:
I'm very, very flattered that you did. Yes, there are some people who think that he is totally focused on making the Chinese economy self-sufficient. I think you listened to Lingling Wei, who was on our episode about journalists. And Lingling is a great Chinese born journalist who worked for the Wall Street Journal until 2020 in Beijing, and then she was one of the correspondents who was expelled. And she tells in the episode of our podcast how at least they gave her the dignity of a little longer time than the others who were being expelled because she was basically being sent into exile.
But she made the point, I think, that there are some people who think that Xi Jinping is anxious to make China totally self-sufficient. Maybe that's the motivation also for encouraging the increasingly successful tech industry as we see with the launch of DeepSeek at the frontier of AI.

LINDSAY:
And Lingling Wei did stress that Xi Jinping gave a speech in which he talked about how China had to prepare for the "extreme scenario," which I think she took as the potential for outbreak of conflict with the United States.

PERLEZ:
Oh, yes, of course. There's a great debate in American military circles about when he's going to decide to live up to his desire to have Taiwan and how he's going to do that, and when and if he'll use the military to do so.

LINDSAY:
Obviously presenting any American administration with a very big decision to make.

PERLEZ:
Huge decision. I would think in particular, I don't know if you agree, Jim, but I think also in the face of what I understand to be a number of war games in the Pentagon and other places that show that it's very hard for the United States to win in that conflict.

LINDSAY:
Obviously, it depends upon how you think the conflict begins. Whether it's going to begin with an invasion or rather we sort of tiptoe up to it with so-called gray area activities in which China increasingly, essentially acts like a boa constrictor around Taiwan.

PERLEZ:
But I think it's also interesting to note, Jim, that speaking to someone who is involved with Pew polls recently, and this person said that their polls show that eight percent of Americans are in favor of sending U.S. troops to Taiwan. That's a pretty sobering figure.

LINDSAY:
I think it's fair to say the American public is not focused on China as a military security threat the way people in the U.S. Defense Department may be.
Jane, I want to close by asking you a question, which you can decline to answer, but I hope you will. And it's do you have any advice for any person who's listening to this podcast who wants to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent? Is it worth doing?

PERLEZ:
Oh, that's not hard. That's easy. You gave me such a sweet question to close on. Absolutely. I think it's a career of a lifetime. If you're curious, if you're interested in history, I think you do need some sense of history to understand, to be able to put things into context, and if you're interested in where the world is going, there's nothing like it. You travel to the most interesting, unknown places, you have to learn about them. You go there, you talk to interesting people, you come back and you write about it, or you make a podcast out of it, or you make a radio show out of it. What's not to like?

LINDSAY:
With that bit of career advice and enthusiasm for being a foreign correspondent, I will close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Jane Perlez, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, and a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Jane, again, thank you very much for joining me here on The President's Inbox.

PERLEZ:
Thank you, Jim. Great pleasure.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster with recording engineer Elijah Gonzalez and director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.