A Western journalist’s experience over three decades in China’s changing media landscape
Robert F. Delaney, American by birth, arrived in China in 1992 as a language student. He wound up in Wuhu, then a second-tier city in southeastern China, with minimal language skills. He recalls struggling to acclimate to life outside of big urban centers without knowing the language. He remarked, “It was kind of difficult to get anything done at that time using very rudimentary Chinese.” In hindsight, the cultural immersion gave him “an advantage, which didn’t feel like an advantage at the time.”
Flash forward to 2024, and Robert Delaney now works as a columnist and the North America bureau chief at the South China Morning Post. On the sidelines of the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative on ”Crossing New Rivers by Feeling the Stones? Aspirations, Expectations, and China's Role in the 21st Century,” Robert shared his insights and experiences as a journalist in China.
Journalism in China
After finishing his studies in 1995, Robert worked as a journalist in China until 2007, with some intervening stints in Jakarta and Hong Kong. He recalls that “China was very different during that period... it was really an ideal place to be a journalist”. Comparing the situation then to nowadays, he reflected that “the Chinese government was not particularly transparent, but it was much more transparent than it is now. You could get robust information and data to be able to report on what is happening”.
However, this freedom came with a major caveat. Sensitive topics were still considered out of bounds. While Robert generally wrote for financial news services, he experienced an incident while he was temporarily covering for a political reporter. “I remember doing a telephone interview with a US diplomat regarding issues about Taiwan. And the phone went dead. The line was cut. They clearly were monitoring what it is that foreign journalists were talking about,” recounted Robert. While this was the “one and only” case where he felt as if his work was monitored, this was not the only incident that made an impression on him. A good friend of Robert's in Beijing, a documentary filmmaker, disappeared while he was working in the city. The situation, which was eventually resolved after about six months, shocked him and served as one of the plotlines in his 2018 novel, "The Wounded Muse".
Understanding Chinese society
Robert witnessed Chinese society undergo dramatic changes in a short time during his time living there from 1992 to 2007. “It’s hard to even explain how much changed,” he remarked. These societal changes, he believes, influenced China’s rapid growth and commercialization. “China wanted to progress and make up for the lost time that occurred under the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward,” he commented, referring to the tumultuous years the country faced before it opened to the rest of the world.
However, there are still many misconceptions in Western narratives about China. “There is this idea that a lot of ideologues put out there that the Chinese are just waiting for something to happen to make their government collapse or disappear,” he said, highlighting the Western tendency to overestimate negative Chinese attitudes against their government. According to him, most Chinese citizens are aware of the negatives that come with their government, but the majority believe that their government is “looking out for their best interests" and are not interested in the kind of instability that was pervasive in the country throughout the last century.
Writing about China
As a columnist, Robert focuses on explaining how the American political environment influences the US approach toward China. He notes that he tends to focus on the Republican Party because it “has changed so dramatically over the past ten to fifteen years from one that was staunchly in favor of alliances with its traditional allies to a party that's become very skeptical about this.” In writing a column, Robert aims to “raise these red flags and [explain] why are we going down this route and how people do not see how much these stances undermine American national security interests […]”.
Since arriving in China over thirty years ago with little knowledge of the country, its people, or its languages, the country has significantly shaped Robert’s life and career. Both as a journalist and an author, his writing has been significantly informed through his cultural immersion in the region. Now back in North America, Robert dedicates his insights and knowledge to demystifying China’s relations with the West, and in doing so, hopes to contribute to building an environment where China and the West live side by side in mutual respect.
Robert F. Delaney manages a team of correspondents and editors in North America that focuses on stories highlighting all aspects of the U.S.-China relationship, helping to establish Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post as one of the most important news outlets for coverage of these issues. Previously, Robert covered China and Mongolia in his role as Bloomberg News' Beijing bureau chief, and was also based in Indonesia and Canada as a Bloomberg journalist with a focus on the finance, mining, and energy sectors.
Robert F. Delaney attended the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative titled “Crossing New Rivers by Feeling the Stones? Aspirations, Expectations, and China's Role in the 21st Century” from February 18 to 21, 2024. This program was a forward-looking opportunity to debate and understand the future of global engagement with a rising China. It convened an intergenerational, international, and interdisciplinary group from government, the private sector, and civil society to engage in off-the-record conversations to evaluate sources of misunderstanding between China and the globe, to explore state and non-state mechanisms through which to productively engage China, and to identify risk-mitigating pathways.
