Seeing

In the tradition of Katy Tur, Jane Pauley, and Peter Jennings, Chai Jing shows us the power of television news and the complex challenges of reporting in China.

After becoming a radio DJ in college and a TV interviewer at 23, Chai Jing is thrust into the spotlight when she takes on a position as a news anchor at CCTV, China’s official state news channel. Chai struggles to find her role in a male-dominated news organization, discovering corruption, courage, and hope within the people she meets while honing her talent for getting people to reveal themselves to her.

In eleven propulsive and deeply felt chapters, Chai recounts her investigations into SARS quarantine wards, a childhood suicide epidemic, the human cost of industrial pollution, and organized crime, while looking back at her growth as a journalist. Chai Jing shares the philosophical and emotional complexity of the ethical challenges that are always present in such revealing reporting, while she also finds hope and purpose, time and again, in the vital and intimate stories of her interviewees.

This candid memoir from one of China’s best-known journalists provides a rare window into the issues which concern us most, and which face contemporary China and the whole world.