The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University’s hub for interdisciplinary research, education, and engagement on contemporary Asia, invites nominations for the 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award recognizes outstanding journalists who have spent their careers helping audiences worldwide understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2024 award will honor a recipient whose work has primarily appeared in American news media. APARC invites award nomination submissions from news editors, publishers, scholars, journalism associations, and entities focused on researching and interpreting the Asia-Pacific region. Submissions are due by Thursday, February 15, 2024.

Sponsored by APARC, the award carries a cash prize of US $10,000. It rotates between recipients whose primary body of work has been featured in Asian news media and those whose primary body of work has been featured in American news media. The 2024 award will recognize a recipient from the latter category.

For the purpose of the award, the Asia-Pacific region is defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Australasia. Both individual journalists with a considerable body of work and journalism organizations are eligible for the award. Nominees’ work may be in traditional forms of print or broadcast journalism and/or in new forms of multimedia journalism. The Award Selection Committee, whose members are experts in journalism and Asia research and policy, presides over the judging of nominees and is responsible for the selection of honorees.

An annual tradition since 2002, the award honors the legacy of APARC benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. Throughout its history, the award has recognized world-class journalists who push the boundaries of coverage of the Asia-Pacific region and help advance mutual understanding between audiences in the United States and their Asian counterparts.

Recent honorees include India’s magazine of long-form journalism The Caravan; NPR's Beijing Correspondent Emily Feng; Burmese journalist and human rights defender Swe Win; former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Tom Wright; and the internationally esteemed champion of press freedom Maria Ressa, CEO of the Philippine news platform Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Award nominations are accepted electronically through Thursday, February 15, 2024, at 11:59 PM PST. For information about the nomination procedures and to submit an entry please visit the award nomination entry page. APARC will announce the winner by April 2024 and present the award at a public ceremony at Stanford in the autumn quarter of 2024.

Please direct all inquiries to aparc-communications@stanford.edu.

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Feng is recognized by the Shorenstein Journalism Award for her stellar reporting on China under strenuous conditions. She was joined by two other China experts on a panel about the future of China reporting: Stanford’s Jennifer Pan, a professor of communication and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs (FSI), whose research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics, and Louisa Lim, an award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC, and who also serves on the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award. FSI Senior Fellow Andrew Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford, chaired the discussion. 

The Appearance of Foreign Media Coverage 

As China has grown into a geopolitical superpower, understanding Beijing’s decision-making is more crucial than ever. Yet under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the number of foreign correspondents on the ground has atrophied, digital surveillance has intensified, and online censorship of sources has tightened. Being tailed constantly during reporting trips is now the norm, says Feng, and many sources are running dry, no longer willing to talk to reporters. “This kind of digital surveillance not only stymies public discourse and civil society in China but also inhibits our understanding of the country,” Feng notes.  

More worrisome still is the rise of harassment, in person and online, of foreign correspondents and the portrayal of their work as intelligence gathering for foreign governments. Feng described how Chinese state media outlets, local government officials, and security personnel have been gradually laying the ground to cast foreign reporters as agents of foreign influence — accusations that carry physical danger and legal costs for reporters. “That kind of language is particularly tough on ethnic Chinese reporters like me,” says Feng, who has personally confronted race-based harassment and xenophobic nationalism. A year ago, for example, she discovered she had been unknowingly subject to a national security investigation related to a story she had done half a year earlier.

In addition to whittling down the number of foreign correspondents on the ground and increasing the pressure on those who remain in the country, China’s COVID restrictions have been detrimental to press freedom. The foundations of journalistic work — talking to people, fact-checking, traveling to gather information — have become nearly impossible. 

These increasingly challenging conditions have forced Feng and other China reporters to sacrifice the kind of stories they tell about the country, often filing dry reports that diminish global interest in China. “The result,” says Feng, “is a growing opacity, and opacity about a country as big as China breeds suspicion and mistrust. But it seems to be what China wants: the appearance of foreign media coverage without truly getting to the heart of what is going on in the country and without access to the people making the stories happen.”

A Vehicle for the CCP

In her remarks, Professor Pan described China’s changing media landscape and the rise of digital repression. Fundamentally, she explains, media in all its forms in China is a vehicle for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to preserve its staying power. But while the Chinese government has always worked hard to control the domestic information environment, it is now increasingly limiting what the world can know about the country. “The Chinese government thinks it can tell the China story better.”

Altogether, Pan notes, these recent trends — the rise of digital censorship in all its forms, the government’s ability to influence the production and consumption of information, cyber harassment, and undermining of journalists and their work — indicate that the Chinese government has many levers at its disposal to constrain not only the activity of journalists but also limit their reach and influence.

It remains to be seen, however, whether all these efforts will produce the outcomes the Chinese regime wants. Clearly, by eliminating access to foreign correspondents, the world will know less about China, Pan says. “It’s less clear whether this will be advantageous in the long term for the CCP.”

Reshaping the World’s Media

What is filling China’s information vacuum? Since she left the country after reporting from China for a decade for the BBC and NPR, Lim has been interested in this question, or what she calls “the other side of the campaign to marginalize foreign journalists and to cut down on the coverage from China.” 

Jointly with the International Federation of Journalists, Lim has examined how China is trying to shape a singular story from its perspective by bypassing resident correspondents who speak Chinese, study China, and are savvy about Chinese history, culture, and politics. Her investigations reveal that the Chinese government targets journalists — particularly local journalists from countries in China’s periphery, like Pakistan or Bangladesh — offering them paid tours in China and other enticements in exchange for pro-China reports that it then features in state media. For example, in these pro-China reports, the political indoctrination camps in Xinjiang are portrayed as vocational training camps designed to combat extremism.

“You can see how foreign journalists are being used to legitimize and validate China’s tactics,” says Lim. “That’s why it’s so important that we have sources on the ground telling other stories, but also why that work has become harder. It speaks to the importance of the media and of what China calls ‘discourse power,’ how important it is to China to tell the China story in a particular way.”

Reconfiguring Our Knowledge of China

What is the future of China reporting? There has been a noticeable shift to remote reporting, Feng explains: not only in the sense of reporting on China outside of the country but also in relying on different sources of information. “Traditionally, in journalism, we travel and meet people, but I find more and more that reporting relies on data. The advantage is obvious: you might be blocked from accessing a detention center in Xinjiang, but it’s hard to block satellite images of these camps. This opens up a whole new area of China reporting that relies on data journalism.”

Another development, notes Feng, is the emerging beat of “China and the rest of the world.” Foreign correspondents now increasingly report from outside of China on the perceptions of China around the world and tell stories about how China influences all manners of countries and sectors. However, there are costs to this process of reconfiguring our knowledge of China without being in the country, Feng says. “The cultural context and the human reporting are lost, and it is that kind of in-country reporting that helped us make sense of the facts and figures that come out of this massive country.”

Feng, therefore, worries about the future of China reporting. “I don’t worry that China is about to take over the world or invade Taiwan, but I do worry that in the off-chance that this does happen, we won't have enough correspondents on the ground to make sense of that.”

She also cautions that there is no next generation of China correspondents building experience to replace those who are leaving the country and to take up reporting when she and others move on. “There are no new young academics or journalists who want to come to the country, and those who want to are unable to do so. In this vacuum of explanatory, investigative, or simply empathetic reporting on the country, I fear we begin to accelerate toward more misunderstanding, mistrust, and perhaps even conflict.”

“I look forward to returning to China and reporting again if I can, but I hope other people take up the mantle soon,” she concluded.

The grand bargain led to China's continued growth. The drawback, however, was that this economic growth has been accompanied by the accumulation of local government debt with little transparency and central control. When the global financial crisis impacted growth rates, local deficits and debts spiked. In response, Beijing began to shut down backdoor financing and opened front-door options that were transparent and under the control of national authorities — but with limited success.

Reining in Local Government Financing Vehicles

The researchers posit that "only beginning in 2017 did the Communist Party’s own Central Leading Group on Finance and Economic Affairs and various government-related media begin to label local government debt as a threat to the economy, raising the alarm bells by calling it a 'gray rhino,' a likely high-impact threat that was being ignored." Why, then, didn’t Beijing quickly put a stop to local government debt? Why did central authorities wait until 2015 to put measures in place, and wait even longer to identify local government debt as an economic threat?

Oi and her colleagues explain that studies of policy implementation and regulation in China tell us that the national government faces information asymmetry problems, where localities can subvert upper-level directives because the center has imperfect knowledge of what local agents are doing. Such subversion is most likely when local interests are not aligned with Beijing’s. Now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question is whether the pendulum will swing back toward more tolerance of local debt for the sake of economic growth.

All indications, the authors agree, suggest that during COVID-19 and its aftermath, especially as China also has vowed to win and maintain the fruits of the battle against poverty “at all costs,” localities are going to need extra resources, borrowed or not. The center’s pendulum, at least for now, is swinging further away from fiscal discipline toward local incentives and growth.

Evading Institutional Reforms

Oi and her colleagues contend that the expansion of local government debt is a feature of China's developmental model, which aims to "circumvent rather than tackle difficult institutional reform, kicking the can down the road, opting for an easier fix to avoid the potentially high political costs.” 

The authors' primary takeaway is therefore that local government debt in China is not a local problem. Similar to other developing nations that depend upon local partners, China faces a dual-commitment problem: "growing the local economy without debt requires the central state to simultaneously commit to respecting its local agents’ access to and control over the fruits of local development (of which local fiscal resources are the most crucial part), while exercising credible fiscal discipline over precisely the same set of local agents that the center seeks to incentivize.”

For nearly three decades, Chinese central authorities have relied on the grand bargain to boost the nation's economic might. Oi and her colleagues reveal that the problem of local government debt reverberates to the highest echelons of the Chinese state decision makers and continues to present strategic challenges for the economic juggernaut.