Telling stories about nation more effectively
The question I always ask myself before I pursue a story is: “Why would anyone care?” My job is to tell the world about China, but I have to put myself in the readers’ shoes. For example, why would a United States citizen in Philadelphia care about an incident in Beijing?
As a reporter at China Daily, my job is to address that question and find an angle on each story to ensure that it appeals to an international audience.
July 28 last year represented the 40th anniversary of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed about one-third of the city’s population. I was assigned a story for which I had to reflect on the changes that have occurred in Tangshan — a small city in North China’s Hebei province — over the past four decades.
When I arrived there, I was impressed by the city’s vitality: wide, clean streets; rows of buildings stretching for miles; and busy, modern malls. There were no traces of the deadly earthquake.
I thought about focusing on construction in the city to reflect the city’s rebirth. Almost every building collapsed in the earthquake, so the project of rebuilding the city must have been extremely complex.
Stories often focus on the reconstruction of a city after it experiences a significant natural disaster.
But then I asked myself: Why would a foreign audience care about the reconstruction of a Chinese city 40 years after a disaster?
The answer was that they probably would not. However, as humans, they may be more interested in people’s feelings and about those who lost their lives in the quake.
With this in mind, I decided to talk to survivors of the earthquake and then wrote an article focusing on how they have rebuilt their lives together with the government’s help.
Coincidentally, two interviewees — a couple surnamed Yang — met President Xi Jinping on July 28 when he visited a clinic for paralyzed patients in Tangshan.
I later wrote a follow-up piece about the couple meeting Xi, illustrating how the government has been helping them.