Dori Jones Yang began her journalism career early when she took a summer internship with her hometown newspaper. At Princeton, she majored in history but spent most of her waking hours at the college newspaper,The Daily Princetonian. Eager to explore the world, she taught English in Singapore, under the auspices of Princeton-in-Asia, for two years, where she plunged into the study of Chinese, and traveled all over Asia on a shoestring. To deepen her understanding of Asia, she earned a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins in international studies, with a focus on China.
As a foreign correspondent for Business Week, Dori was among the first to report on the changes in China in the 1980s, traveling throughout China and interviewing Chinese entrepreneurs and American business investors. Fluent in Mandarin and married to a Chinese man, she listened to ordinary citizens as well as officials and explained their perspectives to her American readers. In this talk, Dori will discuss what she learned about China’s intentions in the 1980s and how the policies of that pivotal decade inform our understanding of China today.
After reporting on China for Business Week from 1982 to 1990, Dori moved to the Seattle area, where she continued to write for Business Week and US News & World Report. She has written eight books, including her recent memoir, When the Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China’s Reawakening. For more information see her website, https://dorijonesyang.com/.