A WSJ reporter writes about being kicked out of China

Lingling Wei, a Wall Street Journal reporter, writes about being forced to leave China, where her parents live, earlier this year.

Wei writes, “Beijing called the eviction of American journalists a response to Washington’s earlier expulsion of Chinese journalists. ‘It’s not personal,’ a Chinese official told me. But for me, it couldn’t have been more personal: I was being forced to leave my family. The expulsion also brought to an abrupt end my dream of reporting from the country where I was born and raised, and which I call my motherland.

“In the fall of 2010, I became a U.S. citizen after 11 years in New York, where I earned a graduate degree in journalism and began my career. The following spring, the Journal dispatched me to Beijing to do what I’d always wanted: independent reporting in China. ‘We’ve never seen an application like yours before,’ an official at the Chinese Consulate in New York told me when I applied for a journalist visa, referring to my Chinese background. Back then, I felt I symbolized the benefits of a close relationship between the two world powers.

“By 2020, however, I had become collateral damage—what some Chinese call ‘bomb ashes’—in an intensifying political firefight. I felt frightened and helpless, and thought about quitting to remain with my parents, who are in their 70s. My family’s ‘red roots’ go back almost a century. What would they think of me being expelled from China because I’m an American journalist?”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.