Former CNN news anchor Mike Chinoy will screen his recent documentary, Assignment China: Tiananmen Square, next Thursday evening at Taipei’s American Club. The documentary examines news coverage of Tiananmen, which, according to Chinoy, “redefined the relationship between the press, public opinion and foreign policy making, and continues to influence both Chinese politics and international perceptions of China to this day.”
The film is part of a 12-part documentary series, Assignment China, begun in 2008 in association with the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute, where Chinoy is a senior non-resident fellow.
This film series covers more than eight decades of China reporting, beginning with the episode “The Chinese Civil War” on coverage of China in the 1940s, and concluding with “Follow the Money,” about the vast fortunes accumulated by families of Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) and other Chinese political elites, which was brought to light by US reporters in the 2010s. Every major China story to break in the US is covered in between, and all episodes are available on YouTube.
Photo courtesy of Mike Chinoy
Chinoy’s recent book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, just released in March, came as an outgrowth of the documentary project. (See the book review on p14.)
In the introduction, Chinoy writes that the volume includes “many fascinating comments and stories… left on the cutting room floor” as well as nearly two dozen additional interviews. The book’s historical scope extends beyond that of the film and all the way to 2021, including the COVID-19 pandemic and recent journalist expulsions by China.
Chinoy, who began covering China in 1976 and has spent 24 years as CNN’s top Asia correspondent, is currently based in Taipei.
Following next week’s screening, Chinoy will hold a Q&A and a book signing. To attend, the American Club requests RSVPs by the end of the day tomorrow.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
During her 2015 trip to Taiwan, Sophia J. Chang (張詠慧) got fewer answers than she’d hoped for, but more revelations than she could have imagined. “That was the year I last saw my grandmother. She was in hospice care in Tainan, and it was painful to see her in bed, barely able to open her eyes,” says Los Angeles-born Chang. “The grandma I’d known, a fantastic cook and incredibly kind, was already gone.” After their visit, Chang and her grandfather went back to his apartment. There she asked him how he’d met her grandmother. “He hesitated, then started talking a bit.
RSS