U.S.-Asia Law Institute

Assignment China: An Oral History

Friday, March 24, 2023

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Eastern Time

Vanderbilt Hall 201 and Zoom

Register Here

About the event

Reporting on China is one of the most difficult jobs in journalism and one of the most important. American media coverage of China has profoundly influenced US government policy and shaped public opinion in the US and around the world. Mike Chinoy, a former CNN Beijing bureau chief, will talk about his new book, Assignment China, an oral history of American journalists who reported on China from the Communist revolution of 1949 through the COVID-19 pandemic.

About the speaker

Mike Chinoy

Mike Chinoy is a non-resident senior fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. He spent twenty-four years as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving as the network’s first Beijing bureau chief and senior Asia correspondent. Before joining CNN, Chinoy worked for CBS News and NBC News. He won Emmy, Dupont, and Peabody awards for his coverage of China.

About the moderator

Katherine Wilhelm

Katherine Wilhelm is executive director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, and editor of the institute’s online essay series, USALI Perspectives. She is an expert on China’s legal system, public interest law organizations, and civil society. She joined USALI in August 2019 after returning from nearly three decades of residence in Asia, where she split her career between law and journalism. Most recently she was the legal program officer at the Ford Foundation’s China office, where she funded Chinese legal advocacy NGOs and university-based legal research and education programs. Before that, she directed the Beijing office of Yale Law School’s China Law Center, which implements law reform projects in partnership with government, academia and civil society. Ms. Wilhelm also practiced corporate law in the Beijing office of a leading US law firm. Before beginning her career in law, she was a journalist. She reported for The Associated Press from Beijing, Hong Kong, and Hanoi, and for the Far Eastern Economic Review from Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her work has been published in leading newspapers around the world. She was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1996-97. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Niagara University. Email Katherine.