Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) announced today, May 3, World Press Freedom Day, that The Caravan, India’s premier magazine of long-form narrative journalism, is the winner of the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The Caravan publishes reportage, commentary, investigations, and literary criticism spanning the worlds of politics, culture, and society. It is known for its exhaustive stories that shine a light on India’s socio-political realities and for demonstrating an unflinching commitment to truth-telling amid India’s democratic erosion and declining press freedom. APARC will present the Shorenstein Award to Hartosh Singh Bal, the magazine’s executive editor, at a public ceremony and discussion at Stanford in autumn quarter 2023.

Sponsored by APARC, the annual Shorenstein Award honors journalists or journalism organizations that have contributed significantly to a greater understanding of Asia through outstanding reporting on critical issues affecting the region. Emulating this purpose, The Caravan and its editors and reporters have unveiled groundbreaking stories with persistence and courage, taking on issues such as the persecution of religious minorities in India, farmer suicides, labor rights, and the increasing threats to democratic institutions.

The Caravan was established in 1940 as a general-interest magazine and was favored by India’s intellectual elites before it shut down in 1988. Two decades later, it was relaunched by Anant Nath, the grandson of the founder of its publisher, Delhi Press, as a monthly on politics, art, and culture, drawing inspiration from long-form American magazines at a time when long-form journalism was relatively unheard of in India. In addition to a monthly print issue, the magazine presents web-exclusive stories on its website, as well as multimedia features and a Hindi section. Since the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party under Narendra Modi in national politics, The Caravan has garnered recognition for its political investigations and daring commentary.

The decline in press freedom and growing threats to democratic institutions in India under the Modi government have been well-documented. “The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media, and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy,’” according to Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index, which ranks India as “one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the media.” In this environment, where media organizations are under constant pressure to toe the government line and critical reporting is often suppressed, The Caravan has kept its commitment to editorial independence. Facing violence, sedition charges, and imprisonment, the magazine has continued to produce investigations exposing Hindu extremist terrorism, political assassinations, gender and caste inequality, and ethnic violence against the Muslim minority in the country.

“Despite intimidation and harassment from the government, The Caravan continues to document the erosion of democracy and human rights in India,” said Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and the director of APARC. “The magazine’s team of intrepid editors and reporters demonstrates the highest level of journalistic integrity and excellence. It is our honor to recognize it with the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award.”

The award also recognizes the contributions of The Caravan’s executive editor, Hartosh Singh Bal, who formerly worked as the magazine’s political editor for ten years. An incisive commentator on Indian politics and society, Bal was the political editor of Open magazine and has worked with The Indian Express, Tehelka and Mail Today. He is the author of Waters Close Over Us, A Journey Along the Narmada and co-author of A Certain Ambiguity, A Mathematical Novel. He is trained as an engineer and a mathematician.

Presented annually by APARC, the Shorenstein Award, which carries a $10,000 cash prize, honors the legacy of APARC’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. The selection committee for the award, which chose The Caravan as the 2023 honoree, noted that the magazine and Mr. Bal have led the last bastion of bold investigative journalism in India under extreme duress.

The committee members are William Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy; Anna Fifield, Asia-Pacific Editor of The Washington Post and recipient of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award; James Hamilton, Hearst Professor of Communication, chair of the Department of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program, Stanford University; Louisa Lim, senior lecturer, Audio-Visual Journalism Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne; and Raju Narisetti, Publisher, McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey and Company.

Twenty-one journalists previously received the Shorenstein award, including most recently Emily Feng, NPR’s Beijing correspondent; Swe Win, editor-in-chief of the independent Burmese news organization Myanmar Now; Tom Wright, co-author of the bestseller Billion Dollar Whale and a veteran Asia reporter; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler.

Information about the 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award ceremony and panel discussion featuring Mr. Bal will be forthcoming in the fall quarter.

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 2023 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations with outstanding track records of helping audiences worldwide understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2023 award will honor a recipient whose work has primarily appeared in Asian news media. APARC invites 2023 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 Wednesday, February 15, 2023.

Sponsored by APARC, the award carries a cash prize of US $10,000. It alternates between recipients whose work has primarily appeared in Asian news media and those whose work has primarily appeared in American news media. The 2023 award will recognize a recipient from the former 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. Over the course of 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 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 and executive editor of the Philippine news platform Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Award nominations are accepted electronically through Wednesday, February 15, 2023, at 11:59 PM PST. For information about the nomination procedures and to submit a nomination please visit the award nomination entry page. The Center will announce the winner by April 2023 and present the award at a public ceremony at Stanford in the autumn quarter of 2023.

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.

Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to announce that NPR's Beijing Correspondent Emily Feng is the recipient of the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. The award recognizes Feng’s eloquent and influential reporting on China amid unprecedented hurdles facing foreign journalists seeking to report in and on the country. She will receive the award at a public ceremony in fall 2022.

Feng, who joined NPR in 2019, roves around China through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. She contributes to NPR’s newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms. Previously, she served as Beijing correspondent for the Financial Times, covering a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology.

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During her tenure at the Financial Times, she began to report extensively on the region of Xinjiang, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang’s detention camps.

“Emily Feng’s reporting is crucially important journalism that pushes the industry forward and tells powerful stories of Chinese citizens amid intense pressure by the Chinese government over investigative stories on the country,” said Gi-Wook Shin, Shorenstein APARC director. “We applaud her courage and outstanding work and are delighted to recognize her with the Shorenstein Journalism Award.”

Presented annually by APARC, the Shorenstein award, which carries a $10,000 cash prize, honors the legacy of APARC’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. The selection committee for the award, which unanimously chose Feng as the 2022 honoree, noted that her work embodies the purpose of the award, stating that her reporting on China’s persecution and treatment of the Uyghurs “stands out as some of the most stunning of the past few years.”

The committee members are William Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy; Anna Fifield, editor of the Dominion Post and Wellington editor for New Zealand's news site Stuff, who is also the recipient of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award; James Hamilton, Hearst Professor of Communication, chair of the Department of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program, Stanford University; Louisa Lim, senior lecturer, Audio-Visual Journalism Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne; and Raju Narisetti, Publisher, McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey and Company.

Feng's reporting has let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She has filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine, the top of a mosque in Qinghai, and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in. Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018, recognized by the Amnesty Media Awards in February 2019, and won a Human Rights Press merit that May. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China earned her another Human Rights Press Award, was recognized by the National Headliners Award, and won a Gracie Award. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.

Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.

Twenty journalists previously received the Shorenstein award, including most recently Swe Win, editor-in-chief of the independent Burmese news organization Myanmar Now; Tom Wright, co-author of the bestseller Billion Dollar Whale and a veteran Asia reporter; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler.

Information about the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award ceremony and panel discussion featuring Feng will be forthcoming in the fall quarter.