FROM THE HORSES’ MOUTHS

Mike Chinoy takes on the daunting task of covering the recent history of China by interviewing American journalists and a supporting cast of officials. Mark Jones is more than a little impressed.

How do you spin a coherent narrative from so many various and highly opinionated sources – your peers? It’s a tough crowd.

Mike Chinoy has an economical solution to the narrative problem in Assignment China (Columbia University Press): he doesn’t narrate, he links.

On every page, there are between two and six quotations from his sources with a few introductory sentences. This is a TV news person’s book: nobody is allowed to ramble or stray far from the subject in hand.

There are 25 chapters, arranged chronologically from the civil war to the postpandemic Xi era, which is headed The Door Closes But if you take anything from the previous 455 pages, it’s that the door – a shorthand for media access to China, its leaders, its people, its places – is rarely a binary piece of furniture. Sure, it can be open or shut, but also slightly ajar or even invitingly open so you can see almost everything that’s happening on the other side. Sometimes it’s slammed in your face. Sometimes you have to use cunning to gain entry – or use the back door.

Chinoy links the voices like a skilful anchor, keeping it straight and sober. At different times, some of the biggest names in US TV news – Barbara Walters, Dan Rather –talk about the pressure to keep your own emotions from flowing into your performance. It’s a pressure Chinoy resists, only rarely inserting stories from his own distinguished history as CNN’s senior Asia correspondent from 1983 to 2006.

When American journalists first get to see China first-hand after the Communist victory, the State Department isn’t keen. NBC’s Robert Cohen tells Chinoy, “The policy was to maintain China as the faceless enemy. But everyone still wanted to go”.

It’s a comment that goes to the heart of the story. Ignorance suits the agenda of both sides.

This is a document of scoops and stories put together against the odds, against the will of the Chinese authorities, the wishes of the state departments – and sometimes what your own organisation perceives as its best interests (looking at you, Bloomberg).

But the book’s mosaic style also builds up a detailed picture of people’s lives across this vast land at a time of incredible change. It gives them not just a face, but a voice and a humanity.

For all the frustrations and worse, the interviewees are professionals who come to love China and its people – which is why the expulsions that litter the narrative are all the harder to bear.

Assignment China is described as “an oral history”. Still, you sometimes long for long-form: a substantial piece, say, at the start of every chapter offering the historical outline which our journalists will colour in. The author might counter that this is the historian’s job, not the hack’s, and the book is quite long enough as it is.

But the technique really pays off in the chapters on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and what one reporter describes as the descent from Woodstock to a war zone where only one side has the means of waging war. The pace quickens, as desperation – to file and to survive – sets in.

The 21st century sees a new cast of characters and a different skillset from the reporters. Names like Buzzfeed and Al Jazeera join the familiar media roll call. The finance and economic investigation teams get to work on China’s new rich; the colour and investigative writers document the effects of growing wealth and changing technology.

The Wall Street Journal ’s Josh Chin, whose work in the Uyghur lands led to the book, Surveillance State, warns Chinoy that coverage of China risks becoming “More polarised and less nuanced, because you have fewer people to tell the human story about China”.

That’s the irony. In a world of omnipresent facial recognition technology, the “faceless enemy” is returning, as Chinese people are once again intimidated into avoiding any contact with outsiders who just want to tell their individual, human stories.

And that really is a daunting prospect.