Hong Kong has one of the highest rates of Western journalists per capita of any non-Western city in the world, including a number of the best foreign correspondents in the business.
A near-complete information blackout by Chinese censors has blocked most people in mainland China from seeing sriking photos, videos and news about Hong Kong’s ongoing democracy protests.
When Deng Xiaoping arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in January 1979, his country was just emerging from a long revolutionary deep freeze. No one knew much about this 5-foot-tall Chinese leader. He had suddenly reappeared on the scene after twice being cashiered by Mao, who famously described him as “a needle inside a ball of cotton.” But in 1979 he knew exactly what he wanted: better relations with the U.S. He and President Jimmy Carter appeared to be serious about resolving differences.
Mark L. Clifford is the author of, most recently, The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency. He is the Executive Director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council. Clifford has lived in Hong Kong since 1992 and previously was the Editor-in-Chief of the South China Morning Post and Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Standard. He has held senior editorial positions at Businessweek and The Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Seoul.
Denise Y. Ho is an Assistant Professor in the department of history at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese history from Harvard University and taught previously at the University of Kentucky and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is an historian of 20th-century China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period. Her current book project is a history of museums and exhibitions entitled Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China.
Her articles and reviews have appeared in The China Quarterly, China Review International, Frontiers of History in China, History Compass, Modern China, The Journal of Asian Studies, and the PRC History Review. Chapters by Denise Ho will appear in the forthcoming volumes Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard University Press) and The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (Oxford University Press). She has written for The Atlantic, The China Beat, China Policy Institute, Dissent Magazine, The Nation, and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.
