A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH CHINA IN 20 OBJECTS

featuring

Jaime A. FlorCruz
Adjunct Professor, Peking University
Former Beijing Bureau Chief and
Correspondent for CNN and TIME Magazine

Jaime A. FlorCruz will be joining us from Manila. Please take note that to accommodate the time difference, his China Seminar talk is
scheduled for 2:00 p.m. HST.

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Jaime A. FlorCruz  is an adjunct professor at Peking University and a veteran China-watcher.

He was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent, responsible for strategic planning of the network’s news coverage of China (2001-2014). He served as TIME Magazine’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent (1982-2000) and Newsweek’s Beijing reporter (1981).

Jaime (“Jimi”) FlorCruz, born in the Philippines, was a vocal anti-Marcos activist during his college days and in 1971 he traveled to the People’s Republic of China on a study tour. His three-week tour unexpectedly turned into an open-ended period of political exile in China.

While in China, FlorCruz studied, worked and traveled extensively. He worked for a year (1972) in a state farm in Hunan province, Mao Zedong’s birthplace and also in a fishing corporation in Shandong Province (1973-74). In Beijing, he studied two years of intensive Chinese language at the Beijing Languages Institute (1974-76). He received his B.A. in Chinese history from Peking University (1982) in addition to a major in advertising at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in 1971.

FlorCruz has reported extensively on China since 1981, when he started his journalistic career as a Beijing reporter for Newsweek. In 1982, he joined TIME Magazine’s Beijing bureau, and served as Beijing bureau chief from 1990 to 2000. In 2000, he was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the first non-American journalist chosen for the prestigious fellowship.

FlorCruz has witnessed and reported the most significant events of China’s past three decades, including the country’s economic and social reforms, the crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

He is the co-author of Massacre at Beijing, a book about the 1989 Tiananmen protests (Warner Books, 1989) and Not On Our Watch, a book about campus journalists during the martial law years in the Philippines (2012).

He is writing a book on The Class of 1977, a personal account of the years he lived and worked in China and the time he studied at Peking University (1977-82). He is also researching for a book on the PLARIDEL, the first community newspaper published in his home province of Bulacan during the American Occupation (1907-1914).