On this page, I’ll list clickable links to a selection of serious, heavyweight, and very much less so, radio features from the first couple of years in Beijing, when I was trying to capture the normality of Chinese life. It all went down rather well with Radio Four, and especially the Today Programme, which – … Read more …
In reviewing and posting radio pieces from my time as BBC Correspondent in Beijing, I am realising/being reminded just how much of my feature reporting was about ordinary Chinese life – not the heavy politics and economics and social issues of my straight despatches, but more personal, perhaps a touch naive too. For these were … Read more …
In 1985, I was one of a small number of Beijing/Peking-based Western journalists to travel to Tibet in one of the first such groups in many years to be allowed into the province to report. This was at the height of China’s pre-Tiananmen Square opening up – and it was an extraordinary trip. (For a … Read more …
I didn’t take any photos of the concert myself, but Wham!’s concert in Beijing in 1985 was one of the controversial and confusing highpoints of the cautious mid-1980s liberalisation and opening up of China under the reforming leadership of Party Secretary Hu Yaobang and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. Four years later in the spring of … Read more …
This is a feature whose background is largely lost to me 27 years on. But Beijing’s bird market was an amazing place – I wonder if it’s still in largely the same shape as it was then. Click on the link below to be taken to the Today Programme feature. Note that the recording is … Read more …
This is a first experiment with posting some of my old radio features from Beijing where I worked as BBC Radio News correspondent in the mid-1980s. Click on the file above to access an MP3 recording of one of my earlier, rather naive although cheerfully observant, features for Radio 4’s Today Programme. When I arrived … Read more …
As discussed with a marvellously responsive lecture-theatre-full of Cardiff University MA students in international journalism in November 2011, I’m posting here some of my old BBC Radio News features from Beijing, recorded and broadcast between 1984 and 1987 when I was working there as BBC China correspondent. Note that several of these are in kit … Read more …
I thought I might post here a contribution I made this week to Climate Progress, a site I read daily and consider the best current blog on the science and politics of Climate Change. The post was in response to some (partly but not entirely justified) sharp criticism of a BBC piece by my old … Read more …
Why did I switch from journalism to psychotherapy? As chronicled (cautiously) elsewhere on this site (see my long-in-the-tooth Masters thesis from 2000), Romania and covering the revolution there 20 years ago this month were, looking back, the decisive turning point. As this year of revolutionary anniversaries draws to a close (wall-to-wall coverage of the fall … Read more …
As Europe remembers the opening of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this week, I can’t resist posting a picture of what it used to be like in the old days – as Jutta and I cycled through Checkpoint Charlie on a tandem. I was working for Reuters at the time, and we lived in … Read more …