picture credit: Stephen Sampson

I’ve been back and forth to China since I was a 19-year old student.  Over the past twenty seven years I’ve clocked up about fifteen years living in China and a couple of years in Hong Kong. 

It all started way back in 1981 with a year at Fudan University in Shanghai as part of my Leeds University Chinese degree. After graduating I spent a year on a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard University, then travelled back to China for a year teaching English in the subtropical coastal province of Fujian. When I returned to Britain I joined the BBC, still working on news from China.

In 1988, I became the Beijing Correspondent for The Times, and remained in the job for five years, covering the massacre of 1989, the purge which followed, and the beginning of the economic boom.

In 1992 I married James Miles, who was then the Beijing correspondent for the BBC. For the past seven years we have been living in Beijing again. This time James is the Beijing correspondent of The Economist. We have one son and two daughters who think China is normal and Britain is exotic.