kitchen talk: Reporting on Global China

Background and context

China is becoming ever more difficult to report on, with access to the country shrinking and pressure growing on those covering it from outside. At the same time, China's relevance to all of our lives continues to increase alongside a deepening global footprint. At our August kitchen talk, media expert and veteran China expert Filip Noubel and DIE ZEIT journalist and author Xifan Yang join Jacob Mardell to discuss reporting on China.

The discussion will address a range of pressing questions, including:

• How do journalists in China and outside the country cope with censorship and authoritarian pressure?
• What does China's growing political and economic presence, especially in Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, mean for the region?
• How does understanding Chinese propaganda, as well as clichéd Western narratives, improve reporting?
• How can we overcome the challenge of reporting on China amid a deficit of local expertise?

Filip Noubel is Editor-at-Large for the media platform Global Voices, and former Senior China Analyst for the Prague-based AMO think-tank, among others. Filip worked for media projects in Beijing for over ten years, and has thirty years of experience in covering news, training journalists, and developing media projects.

Xifan Yang is a journalist and author who currently works as Foreign Editor for DIE ZEIT. She was the outlet's China correspondent from 2018 to 2023 based in Beijing and has also reported from other countries, including Iran, India and the United States. Born in China and raised in Germany, Xifan has published a book exploring the history of China alongside her personal family story.

Jacob Mardell is Lead Analyst at Sinification, an organisation that translates and analyses Chinese debates on foreign policy and economics. He previously worked at n-ost as Editorial Coordinator of the China-focused Spheres of Influence Uncovered project and as an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.