In her new book ‘Wild Ride’, an American journalist details her life in China as the one-party state opened to the world, then regressed back to an oppressive, inward-looking regime.
In 1985, I was invited to work as a “foreign expert” in Beijing for the magazine China Pictorial, published by the Foreign Languages Press under China’s Ministry of Culture. China Pictorial was a government-owned propaganda publication distributed through embassies overseas. It stretched to 24 pages a month, consisting of grainy pictures with paragraph-long captions about China’s happy national minorities and agricultural achievements.
The magazine had about 300 employees. I had previously worked at BusinessWeek in New York, which ran to about 64 pages each week and, though famously overstaffed, had about a third as many employees.
