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, journalists and veteran China experts Angela Köckritz and Filip Noubel join Jacob Mardell to discuss reporting on China from outside the country.

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?

Angela Köckritz is Deputy Editorial Lead at China.Table, a media organisation that provides independent analyses of China, produced by Germany's largest China editorial team. From 2011 to 2014 she was China correspondent for DIE ZEIT in Beijing and from 2017 to 2020 Africa correspondent based in Dakar, Senegal.

Filip Noubel is Editor At Large for the media platform Global Voices, and former Senior China Analyst for the Prague-based AMO think-tank. 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.

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.