New York Times reporter Edward Wong and Geeta Anand, dean and professor of Berkeley Journalism, discuss international reporting on China and the interplay among journalism, public opinion and government policy. Introduction by CAA Chinese Chapter Board Member and Past President Bak Chan.

Geeta Anand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who serves as dean and professor at Berkeley Journalism. She is the first woman—and woman of color—to serve as dean in the 52-year history of the school. Her stories on corporate corruption won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was lead reporter in a series on healthcare that was a finalist in 2003. She wrote the non-fiction book, “The Cure,” about a dad’s fight to save his kids by starting a biotech company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, which was made into the Harrison Ford movie “Extraordinary Measures” in 2010. She worked as a journalist for 27 years, most recently as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India. She began her career at a free weekly newspaper, Cape Cod News, and then covered local government and courts at the Rutland Herald in Vermont. At her next job at the Boston Globe, she served as City Hall bureau chief and then covered the Massachusetts State House. She spent the next 17 years as a reporter and senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the biotech beat and focused on investigative reporting. She spent nearly a decade in India, the country where she was born and raised, first as a foreign correspondent for the Journal and then The New York Times.

Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent for The New York Times who reports on foreign policy from Washington. He has spent most of his career abroad, reporting for 13 years from China and Iraq for The Times. As Beijing bureau chief, he ran The Times’s largest overseas operation. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 2017 to 2018 and taught international reporting at Princeton University as a Ferris Professor of Journalism in 2017. He is a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and at the Wilson Center in Washington. Mr. Wong received a Livingston Award for his coverage of the Iraq War and was on a team from The Times’s Baghdad Bureau that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He has two awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia for coverage of China. He was on the Times team that received an award for best documentary project from Pictures of the Year International for a series on global climate change migrants. Mr. Wong graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He has dual master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the Berkeley Journalism Advisory Board.

About the California Alumni Association (CAA) Chinese Chapter:
The CAA Chinese Chapter is a descendant of the Chinese Student Club formed over 100 years ago to help ethnic Chinese students overcome social and economic barriers while attending UC Berkeley. It is one of the oldest chapters of CAA’s 75 chartered chapters. In addition to organizing numerous events in the past, the Chinese Chapter has, along with its sister organization, the UC Chinese Alumni Foundation, endowed over 35 scholarships which are awarded annually to student leaders at Cal, by far the most by any individual or organization at Cal. The Chinese Chapter was awarded Alumni Chapter of the Year six times (1984, 1988, 1994, 1997, 2001 and 2018) by the Cal Alumni Association. The Chinese Chapter continues to sponsor social and professional gatherings on topics that support our members and those related to Chinese culture, current society and China’s increasing role on the world stage.