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“There is no 'why?' here”: Memory, forgetting and reporting on China
The 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award Honors New York Times’ Chief China Correspondent Chris Buckley
In three decades of reporting in China, and now Taiwan, Chris Buckley has often grappled with how memories of war, revolution, famine, massacre and extraordinary change are preserved, erased, rewritten and fought over. In this talk, he will discuss the power of the past in China under Xi Jinping, and the challenges and rewards of reporting on — and trying to understand — China in an age of shrinking access.
Join APARC as we honor Buckley, winner of the 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award for his exemplary reporting on societal, cultural, political, foreign policy, and security issues in China and Taiwan.
Buckley's keynote will be followed by a conversation with two experts: Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Xueguang Zhou, the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session.
Moderator: William Dobson, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and a member of the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award.
Speakers
Chris Buckley grew up in Sydney, Australia, and began studying Chinese at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. After graduating with a degree in history and abandoning the beginnings of a law degree, he went to Renmin University in Beijing, where he studied Chinese Communist Party history. He later returned to the Australian National University where he did graduate studies at the Contemporary China Center.
Chris has been the Chief China Correspondent for the New York Times since 2019. Before joining the Times in 2012, he was a senior correspondent in Beijing for Reuters News Agency for 7 years, and before that worked as a researcher and reporter for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune in Beijing. He has covered Chinese politics, foreign policy, social change and environmental issues for over 20 years, but is a newcomer to Taiwan where he now lives.
Chris was with colleagues a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2020 for coverage of mass detentions and repressive controls on Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang region. He was also one of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2021 for coverage of the COVID pandemic. Chris spent 76 days in Wuhan during the COVID lockdown there and was then obliged to leave China in May 2020. He spent two and half years working from southern Sydney, where he grew up, and moved to Taiwan in late 2022.
Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO).
She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power" (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, "The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime" (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.
She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.
Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.
One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy. Another ongoing project is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China.
The latest book, "The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach," draws on more than a decade of fieldwork to offer a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and the rule of law.
His other recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China, interactions among peasants, markets, and capital, access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises, multiple logics in village elections, and collusion among local governments in policy implementation.
Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.
Moderator
Will Dobson is the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Previously, he was the Chief International Editor at NPR where he led the network’s award-winning international coverage and oversaw a team of editors and correspondents in 17 overseas bureaus and Washington, DC. He is the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, which examines the struggle between authoritarian regimes and the people who challenge them. It was selected as one of the “best books of the year” by Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, The Telegraph, and Prospect, and it has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Prior to joining NPR, Dobson was Slate magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief, overseeing the magazine’s coverage of politics, jurisprudence, and international news. Previously, he served as the Managing Editor of Foreign Policy, overseeing the editorial planning of its award-winning magazine, website, and nine foreign editions. Earlier in his career, Dobson served as Newsweek International’s Asia Editor, managing a team of correspondents in more than 15 countries. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dobson holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a Master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. He received his Bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Middlebury College.
