Tracy Dahlby, former Tokyo bureau
chief, National Geographic contributor and author of the new memoir Into the
Field: A Foreign Correspondent’s Notebook, looks back on a life of reporting on
Asia
You got your start as a reporter
for a financial newswire in Japan during the 70s, back when it was still big on
heavy industry, but had begun shifting toward a consumer economy. China stories
often echo that narrative these days, but was Tokyo ever so polluted?
I’d say “not as” but it could be pretty grim. I remember being
profoundly disappointed when, in 1976, I climbed Mount Fuji for the first time
only to stumble upon slopes strewn with trash. I wondered how the Japanese, who
had a reputation, in poetry and prose, as world-champion lovers of nature could
let their iconic mountain go to hell like that. So Fuji was my reigning
metaphor. And it’s true that Tokyo often choked under a blanket of industrial
smog. I don’t think it ever reached what China is coping with today. But it
pays to remember that Japan got its pollution problems under control and, with
the right policies, China has a shot at doing so too. How China does that while
maintaining economic growth and meeting rising popular expectations is, of
course, the compelling mystery.
Much is still made of the
apparent economic similarities between China now and Japan during the boom
years. You write in your book about covering both during your career -- what
comparisons hold up, and which strike you as misguided?
During my brief time at the financial news wire in Tokyo, I took
the stock market closings in my shaky Japanese and wasn’t always sure I’d got
the decimal point in the right place. Frankly, I’m still a little amazed that
the global economy survived. In writing about those times today, however, I very
much feel China looking over my shoulder because there are the obvious
similarities between Japan then and China now—the active, pointed pioneering of
overseas markets and the gobbling up of vast sources of raw materials, the
frenetic building of roads, dams, bridges and airports and, above all, the
psychological transformation that comes to a country with rapidly rising
consumer expectations. The big difference, of course, is a matter of scale and
scope. What China has undertaken dwarfs other models and that’s what makes it
such a wonderful, wrenching, gripping story to behold.
When and why did you first come
to China as a journalist?
I made my first trip to China in January of 1978, about 14 months
after the death of Mao Zedong. Beijing was a city of bicycles, Mao suits and,
for foreigners, a Friendship Store that was not exactly consumer-friendly. It
wasn’t easy for an American to get a visa back then. But a friend of a friend
in Hong Kong, a wonderful local businesswoman, insisted that I apply and that I
turn over my passport to her. It turns out she had been at school with a man
who worked the other side of the fence for China travel and presided over the
tourist visa stamp. So I found myself headed over the border by train to
Guangzhou and then Beijing with a group of Japanese, American and Australian
tourists. I somehow managed to report a story for The New York Times travel
section on that jaunt at a time when China had become an alluring ticket for
American travelers. So I guess you could say I started my China watching as
half tourist, half hustling hack, and that’s pretty much the way I proceeded in
my career, as a friend recently put it, letting myself “wander and wonder.”
There were earlier motivations, too. I was a typically restless
undergrad in Seattle, Washington, living at home and eager to trade a ho-hum
life for the excitement and adventure of the wider world. I’d heard reports of
the Cultural Revolution on a radio in my bedroom that was ridiculously
large—the size of a shoebox. Today, we can dial up tons of information about
China on our smart phones or e-tablets. In those days, China was a black box,
information was scarce, and what there was required strenuous decoding. That of
course meant that China was a tremendous mystery that fired your imagination.
You really wanted to get out to Asia and take a crack at trying to figure it
out.
It's rare to go a week lately
without a dust-up between China and any of the countries that ring the South
China Sea. Did the region always seem destined for conflict, or did most seem
to buy into China's "peaceful rise" sales pitch?
It’s remarkable to me how little has changed in the fundamental
terms of that dispute over the last two decades, despite today’s frenetic
foreign press coverage of China’s new harder line. I open “Into the Field” by
recounting a nearly three-month reporting swing I took through the South China
Sea immediately after Handover in Hong Kong in 1997. With the help of friends
in Manila, I managed to talk my way out to the Spratlys with a transport plane
full of rifle-toting Filipino military men. It was starkly beautiful out there
but blessedly little was going on, at least on the surface. Then as now, the
billion- or maybe trillion-dollar question was the extent of resources that might
rest on the sea floor. Such visions, part analysis, part ambitious national
dreaming, will, I’d wager, continue to ratchet up tensions as China continues
to rise, peacefully or not.
China is the clear center of
attention for the financial press in Asia, but reporting long-term can create
something like tunnel vision. Where in the region, if anywhere, do you see
untapped economic potential on the level of a China or Japan?
That’s a good, tough question and journalists have a lousy track
record when it comes to accurate prognostication, at least this one. I’d
venture to say, however, that once investment and infrastructure gain even more
traction in a place like India, China’s neighborhood becomes an even more
competitive place. Add to that improvements in intra-regional trade and
marketing ties between and among the countries of Southeast Asia and, barring
the unfortunate and unforeseen, you have a recipe for sustained growth that
will include China, perhaps be dominated by China, but will by no means rely on
China alone.
In the mid-80's you were brought
in from Tokyo to eventually serve as managing editor for Newsweek
International. How did the view of Asia from NYC differ from your own when you
returned?
It reminds you just how much times have changed. Back then America
was focused on what was generally perceived as a Japanese economic juggernaut
and the challenges posed by Japan’s ballooning trade advantages vis-à-vis the
United States. Japan’s economic advance had energized a group of formidable “Japan-bashers”
in business, government and the media that made the Japanese seem ten feet
tall. The economic challenge was real enough but there was something else at
work, too. By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union was into its final
fizzle, and imploding, and America needed a new focus for its ambitions and
anxieties, and Japan was “it.”
As time went on, of course, Japan proved a disappointing bogeyman.
Its economy had bottomed out by the early 90s and lapsed into a marathon,
years-long recession. China began to emerge as a new focus of concern. The 9/11
attacks and the aftermath shifted America’s central preoccupation to the war on
terror, which may have deflected an even more intense focus on China as
America’s new rival for superpower status. Today, of course, bilateral relations with China have today
become an intensely observed gauge of how and to what extent America will be
able to maintain its pride of place in world leadership.
What we tried to do at Newsweek, back in the day, was to help
provide readers with the context they could use to develop a clearer
understanding of complications of U.S.-Japan relations—the historical,
political and, I dare say, some of the psychological factors that not
infrequently contributed to one of the two sides not really hearing what the
other side was trying to say. Fast-forward 30 years, and the U.S. media faces a
similar challenge in preparing Americans for China’s rise and how it will
affect the way we live our lives and do business in this country.
Freelance, especially in China,
is the name of the game for many aspiring foreign correspondents
these days. How did you make the jump from part-time to full-time reporting,
and to what extent is the path you took still open to would-be journalists
here?
My advice on that score never varies. As I say in my book, “Pick a
part of the world you can fall in love with and plant yourself there for at
least two years. Try your hand at freelancing. Teach English, tend bar, or give
body modification classes—whatever it takes to ward off starvation. Meanwhile
suck the place into your bones. Absorb its language and politics, its loves,
hates, and idiosyncrasies, the alarming as well as the charming…. The place
doesn’t have to love you back, at least not right away. But if doing journalism
is your goal, make sure it’s somewhere the rest of the world wants to know
about too.”
I think China admirably fills that bill. It’s both a place of
endless fascination, big and small, and somewhere people who aren’t in China
want and need to know about. In my case, in Japan, I used my freelance
assignments to try to hone basic skills (and I had precisely none to start
with), while I worked at the art of becoming pleasantly annoying until sources
would agree to talk to me and somebody finally gave me a regular job.
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