Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China's Most Influential Television Journalist

by Chai Jing, Yan Yan (Translator), Jack Hargreaves (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781662600678
Publisher:	Astra Publishing House
Publication date:	08/22/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,131,074
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Born in 1976, Chai Jing is an award-winning reporter and television host in China. While working at CCTV from 2001, she gained recognition covering the SARS epidemic in 2003. Her reporting on domestic violence in China contributed to the enactment of groundbreaking anti-domestic violence legislation in 2005. In the same year, Chai released "In the Name of Life," an interview with members of China's LGBT+ population that marked the first open appearance of queer people in Chinese media. In 2007, she won the National Green People Award for her coverage of pollution in her hometown. Seeing has sold over 5 million copies since its Chinese publication in 2012. In 2015, Chai Jing was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, and one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy.

Editorial Reviews

06/19/2023

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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-05-18
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.

Kirkus Reviews