Assignment China: Tiananmen Square, reported and narrated by Mike Chinoy, tells the behind-the-scenes story of the American reporters who covered the tumultuous events of spring 1989 in Beijing. With video footage and still photos, some never shown before in public, and interviews with journalists who were there, including Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Daniel Southerland of the Washington Post, Dan Rather of CBS, Dorinda Elliott of Newsweek, and many others, it tells a largely unknown side of a story the world is revisiting 25 years later. The documentary is the latest episode in a series on the history of American correspondents in China produced by the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

About the Speaker

Mike Chinoy is currently Senior Fellow at the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. Mr. Chinoy was CNN’s Senior Asia Correspondent and served as a foreign correspondent for more than thirty years. After joining CNN at its London bureau in 1983, Chinoy served as Beijing Bureau Chief from 1987 to 1995. During that time he covered the 1989 events at Tiananmen Square, earning the CableACE, duPont and Peabody awards. He was also Hong Kong Bureau Chief for five years. His other awards include the Silver Medal from the New York Film Festival and Asian Television Awards for his reporting in Indonesia and Taiwan. Chinoy has published two books, China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution (1999) and Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (2008). He taught at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and ran the School’s Hong Kong summer program 2007-2009. From 2006-2009 he was Edgerton Senior Fellow at the Pacific Council for International Policy. He has a M.A. in Journalism from Columbia University and a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Yale University.