On China, Journalism and the Environment: A Conversation with Christina Larson

Christina Larson at a panel during the Duke-UNC China Leadership Summit (far left)
DEAN Correspondent Emily Feng sits down with Christina Larson, who recently spoke at a panel the Duke-UNC China Leadership Summit about Energy, Environment and Climate Change in China. (Note: This transcription is slightly edited to preserve flow and improve readability.)

I’m curious about your path into journalism. How did you end up reporting in China and reporting on science stories in particular?

I worked for the paper at Stanford as the international newswire editor, and that's when I became interested in foreign affairs and foreign reporting. My first actual job in journalism was as an editor for a magazine in D.C. called Washington Monthly, which does long form reporting. It’s a solutions-oriented publication, and focuses a lot on US policy and US politics. While it wasn't a direct move into international affairs, it really trained me in how to ask questions and interview people. And it really shaped my outlook, in that I’m not really interested in just covering problems. For instance there are a lot of environmental problems in China--it’s a disaster--but what [Washington Monthly] was really interested in was: okay, there’s a problem, who is trying to find a solution, or what are the obstacles to making the solutions actually valid?

In 2007 I [received] a fellowship from Johns Hopkins SAIS that allowed me to do my first international reporting project in China. I spent about two months going around the country interviewing NGOs that were pretty new and focused on the environment. I went across the country…to Beijing, Shenyang, Lanzhou, Chengdu, and Kunming, which are really different cities. Different landscapes, different questions, you know, air pollution versus deforestation. I was lucky in terms of the timing, in that 2007 was just before mainstream media had caught onto the idea that in order to solve global climate change, you had to get China on board. So when people ask me for advice [about journalism], I don’t say, do what [other journalists] are doing now. I say, what can you be doing ahead that many people aren’t doing, but will need more people in five years or a couple years out.

I lived in China during the 2008 Olympics, but came back early because my dad had cancer. I looked for a job in D.C and ended up working at Foreign Policy (FP) magazine in DC for two and a half years. I was an editor and writer. I wrote about China, but I edited all sorts of things. But I always felt like I wanted to get back in the field. I felt like I had started something and hadn't finished it. I went back to China in 2011 writing for FP. I had always focused on environmental policy, but it was there that I really started focusing on not just on the policy but the science that precedes it. And that's been interesting, because I feel like when we talk about China and the Chinese environment, climate change, and energy issues, we hear about what people are thinking about in government…what NGOs are doing, what role the media can play, what role lawyers can have…[but we] haven’t heard a lot from the scientists. So I feel like I’m serving the discussion that way, and all these voices are like notes in a symphony…I’m glad that others are contributing from different angles.

We get a lot of people with different backgrounds here to talk. One reason why I’m always interested in what journalists have to say is because they’re the ones on the ground collecting information to pass on to policymakers, analysts, academics. What are some unique perspectives you bring reporting?

I think there is a lot of attention [to public and government announcements] that deals with signs, but it’s really important to look at the follow through. And so I think that there have been quite a number of ways in which you’ve seen that Beijing has announced measures to strengthen the air quality, and there seems to be a lot of excitement about it and optimism, but when you’re there, you sort of say, well, okay, this wasn't sufficient. I’m glad that fuel standards have been tightened in Beijing, a city where there are actually the most stringent fuel standards in China. But there are still trucks coming in from Hebei, and they're blowing really bad, noxious emissions into the air. And in most recent years, Beijing has been working with surrounding areas. It’s things like that that you might not think to ask, [for example] about the trucks from Hebei, from a policy perspective, but when you’re there, it’s more intuitive. And there are some days when the weather is great and Beijing is beautiful and there are some days when it’s really smoggy, but we only see the pictures from smoggy days, because those are the most arresting or strange. [It’s important] just to understand the variability. I also think that in any country, a lot of things happen or don’t happen, not because of logic, but because of personal relationships or because of arbitrariness, because someone met someone on that day or someone had the budget to allow that at the time. So living there, you get a sense of the rhythm of it.

China is at once a very controlled country - authoritarian, look at way the Internet is controlled - but it’s also really uncontrolled on a street level. Fireworks were banned during the New Year, but I could tell you living in Beijing that there were not zero fireworks. So knowing the difference between what happens and what is proclaimed is important. Also understanding what other actors are at work…I think that when you are looking at China from a great distance, it’s easy to talk about China as if it were a monolithic entity with centralized decisions that speak for everyone. But when you’re in China, you realize that the local government and the central government and the local people all have different economic interests, and how they clash and collide actually determines whether the policy makes a difference on the ground.

We hear a lot about the issues foreign journalists face in China; for example, getting a visa or obtaining certain environmental statistics. Is there a reason you focused on science reporting?

The Chinese government is releasing more and more information about the environment, about air pollution, and soil pollution. It’s released the broad level data, for instance, for a national survey of the level of soil pollution collected between 2006 and 2010. But though they released the broad level data they haven't the underlying data, so there’s partial victory for disclosure of information. I started talking to scientists…I mean, there are many avenues you can take. These are people with interesting information that's not being presented. So that's what made me focus on [science].

I think the biggest barrier to information or getting interviews, whether you are talking about scientists or NGOs or people who work at banks, is not that the government’s intervening. It’s that they are worried about talking with people that may [bring] repercussions to their employers. Generally speaking, of course, there are exceptions where they really have been worried about the government interfering. And I think that in certain fields, scientists have more room to talk than they did in the past, whereas NGOs and civil rights lawyers are under increasing pressure. Now, this could all change in a year or two years -- it's all cyclical. But in the moment, I think that this is the case.

What are stories that you think are underreported or very difficult to report, which is why we might not have heard about them?

Well I think in the digital age, you can find almost everything online. Now, whether it’s collated and reported in a comprehensive way, or whether it’s someone’s blog posts or social media posts about what’s happening in their village, it’s out there somewhere, you just might not know to look at it. So it’s a big of a question of screening, like what are the mainstream media outlets picking up.

In terms of what sort of emerging stories for the future or things I think will be interesting... McKinsey projects something like basically the Chinese rate of urbanization will have really slowed by 2030 and will have peaked at around 75% urban. But India’s rate of urbanization is picking up. So we’ve seen these stories about increasing energy use, increasing meat consumption, energy consumption, changes in the ways of life, strains on families, as part of the clash of the new and old that comes along with migration in China. I think we’ll see more of the same but different, and different ways in which some of those factors will play out in India. And I think the relationship between China and India is really interesting. In the Chinese media, there’s a lot of concern about what the US and EU thinks, but there’s not as much attention paid to India, even though it’s their neighbor...and they share a lot of resources. So I think India's impact on China, not just in terms of policy, but in terms of the migration of people and shared waterways, is really interesting. 

Christina Larson is an award-winning journalist in Beijing who writes about the environment and the human side of China’s economic boom. She is China Correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek and Asia Contributing Correspondent for Science magazine. Her reporting from Asia on the environment, climate change, science, technology, and culture has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, TIME, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Yale Environment 360, and Foreign Policy magazine, where she is a contributing editor.
 

Emily Feng is a senior at Duke University and the president of the Duke East Asia Nexus.