Didi Kirsten Tatlow (Berlin)

Committing Journalism: Culture is the key, or ‘How can one work as a journalist in censored China?’

How can one get things right and write great stories in China? Amid rampant formalism that renders so much communication empty code, and state and party censorship that has molded perceptions of reality for 1.35 billion Chinese, what is the best way forward? How can one get into the nooks and crannies of a system and culture that tries hard to keep things hidden and ferret out the true stories?

My answer is twofold, and contradictory, as befits the country: Take your clues from the people, not the Communist Party; and pay extremely close attention to the Communist Party. In addition, adopt what I call an “insider-outsider” so you don’t see China merely as “outsiders” do, but the internal coherences and dissonances.

With this talk and discussion event , for which I’d like to devote a lot of time to exchange with the listeners, I hope to get to both practical and abstract or ethical issues, and cast some light on a challenging profession in a complex culture.  

Didi Kirsten Tatlow is a Hong Kong-born journalist who has worked for The Associated Press, the South China Morning Post, Die Welt and, from 2010, the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times. She has won many prizes for her work.

She graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1993 with a B.A. in Chinese and Politics.

Based in China since 2003, her column, news and feature work focused on the culture and politics, feminism and art, education and psychology of a rising nation, while she raised two children of her own. In the summer of 2017 she relocated back to Berlin with her family.