Seeing

March 1, 2023

News anchor Chai Jing began working at CCTV (China's official state news channel) in 2001 and came to prominence covering the SARS epidemic in 2003. Here she chronicles her career, folding in stories about SARS quarantine wards, a teenage suicide cult, domestic violence, industrial pollution, workplace sexism, and censorship; her 2015 documentary Under the Dome was viewed 300 million times in seven days before being censored. Prepub Alert.

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June 19, 2023
In this gripping debut memoir, Chinese TV journalist Chai fights to find the truth—and her own voice—as she covers stories on topics including youth suicides and pollution in a country determined to hide bad news. Born in 1976, Chai fell in love with stories as a child, and took a brief radio reporting gig at 16. Later, she began working for state-run CCTV as a host and reporter. Here, she mixes episodes of sexism and censorship from higher-ups with accounts of her professional triumphs. In the book’s most moving sections, Chai recounts her interviews with victims of domestic violence imprisoned for killing their husbands (“During their interviews, the women all said, ‘The final night, he was especially strange’ ”), which helped bring about China’s first restraining order laws. Elsewhere, Chai details how returning to her home province of Shanxi to discover the coal industry had transformed the sky into “a burnt wok covering the earth” moved her to report on pollution throughout China despite pushback from her superiors. Though the prose is sometimes rocky (“Sleeping at night, it was quiet in the mountain; so quiet that it was hard to sleep”), Chai’s pursuit of truth in the face of adversity is deeply inspiring. Budding journalists and readers looking for a window into a changing China will be riveted.

June 15, 2023
One of China's most accomplished TV journalists reflects on the reporting that shaped her career. Chai Jing begins this memoir with a consideration of her rise to prominence in Chinese media at the end of the 20th century and then offers an insider's perspective on some of the most significant stories she covered during her 14-year career. As she notes of her devotion to her craft, this was "not just a job, but a way to live, to throw myself into this thorny world...experience the principles of journalism with flesh and blood until I was intertwined with people's destinies like water in water." Among the profound events the author chronicles are an inexplicable murder by a talented but troubled student and the human toll of catastrophes such as the 2008 earthquake and the SARS outbreak. Lighter fare occasionally appears as well, as in the author's investigation of apparently fraudulent efforts to prove the existence of South China tigers in a region where they were presumed to be extinct. Throughout this consistently moving book, we get a clear sense of both Chai's talent for engaging with her interview subjects and encouraging them to speak frankly before the camera and the challenges she faced as a woman reporter. She also memorably relays thee political dynamics of Chinese media--e.g., the role of state oversight and censorship. Occasionally, there is a certain voyeuristic quality in the author's narration of the most heart-wrenching events and a tendency, notoriously common in contemporary journalism, to bend news toward entertainment. Admirably, however, Chai includes commentary on her own unease at sharing the intimate details of victims' lives, and she astutely identifies some of the ethical quandaries that confront anyone tasked with exposing individual suffering for the public's ostensible benefit. Ultimately, readers will agree that these are important stories told with insight and sensitivity. Poignant and thoughtful considerations of Chinese news stories from behind the scenes.

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