In recent years, many of China’s most distinguished journalists have found themselves living and working outside of China. Some have joined international media organizations while others have built their own platforms, forging a new landscape for understanding China from beyond its borders and outside of the structures its government places on expression. Their work is creating new communities of readers and thinkers in a rapidly changing Chinese diaspora.

What insights does reporting from outside of China bring? What does it miss? What role can independent Chinese language media outlets abroad play in shaping public opinion within China?

To explore these questions, Asia Society’s online magazine ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books will host a discussion with three women pioneering this work: reporter, editor, and digital media entrepreneur Annie Jieping Zhang; The New York Times’ Li Yuan, who is also the host of the popular Bu Mingbai Podcast; and investigative journalist and essayist Jiang Xue. They will be in conversation with Ian Johnson, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and a Senior Fellow for Chinese Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and with ChinaFile’s Editor-in-Chief, Susan Jakes.

The evening will also be a celebration of the collaboration between The New York Review of Books and ChinaFile, as ChinaFile celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and The Review celebrates its 60th.

Annie Jieping Zhang is a Nieman Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. A media entrepreneur, journalist, and columnist, she is the Founder & CEO of Matters Lab, a decentralized social media platform, and Nowhere Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Taipei that has cultivated a distinctive cultural community bridging Taiwan and Hong Kong. Zhang also co-founded and was Editor-in-Chief of Initium Media, a Chinese-language online publication. She previously worked as an Editor at City Magazine; as Executive Editor-in-Chief for iSun Affairs, an online magazine; and as a reporter for Asia Week. From 2006 to 2015, she wrote extensively about the governance, politics, and social movements in mainland China and Hong Kong. She is currently working on a program that builds decentralized support networks for independent journalists who face censorship and political repression.

Li Yuan writes The New New World column for The New York Times, which focuses on the intersection of technology, business, and politics in China and across Asia. She is a co-founder and host of the Chinese-language Bu Mingbai Podcast.

Jiang Xue is an independent investigative journalist. She worked as a reporter and editor for multiple prominent Chinese news organizations from 1998 to 2015. In 2015, with the increasing censorship in China’s media industry, she decided to leave the newspaper she was working for and became an independent journalist. She mostly covers China’s legal system and social justice. She has published multiple influential articles about 709 Lawyers’ families on her own social media account. Her mission is to tell the stories of those who are silenced by the Chinese authorities. She is currently traveling in the U.S.

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, researcher, and Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, a new website that collects hundreds of samizdat journals, books, and underground documentary films. His new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, was released in September. He was a correspondent in China for The Baltimore Sun and The Wall Street Journal, and wrote regularly for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.

Susan Jakes is Editor-in-Chief of ChinaFile and a Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis. From 2000-2007, she reported on China for Time magazine, first as a reporter and editor based in Hong Kong and then as the magazine’s Beijing Correspondent. She was awarded the Society of Publishers in Asia’s Young Journalist of the Year Award for her coverage of Chinese youth culture. In 2003, she broke the story of the Chinese government’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing, for which she received a Henry Luce Public Service Award. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.