2019 - 2020 Back

  • Date : 2019-11-06

    Time : 19:00 - 21:00

    Speaker : Mr. Mike Chinoy

    Affiliation : Hong Kong America Center & Universities Service Center for China Studies

    Venue : Lecture Theatre 1, Lee Shau Kee Building, CUHK

Assignment China


The Hong Kong-America Center is organizing a film screening series “Assignment China”. The second session will screen the documentary “The Week That Changed The World” produced and directed by Mike Chinoy.


Date: 6 November 2019 (Wed)
Time: 7 - 9 PM
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Lee Shau Kee Building, CUHK
Language: English
Post-screening Q&A with Mike Chinoy.


About the Film Series
From the barriers of language, culture and politics, to the logistical challenges of war, revolution, isolation, internal upheaval, government restrictions and changing technology, covering China has been one of the most difficult of journalistic assignments. It’s also one of the most important. For decades, what American and Western correspondents have reported about China has profoundly influenced international views of the country, and the policies of many Westerns governments.

To explore this issue, the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California produced a 12-part documentary film series for on the history of American correspondents in China from 1945 to the present day. Written and narrated by former CNN Beijing Bureau Chief and Senior Asia Correspondent Mike Chinoy, Assignment China is a vivid introduction to 70 years of political, economic and social change through the eye of the reporters who covered the country.


Mike Chinoy
Mike Chinoy was a foreign correspondent for more than 30 years. He served as CNN’s bureau chief in Beijing and Hong Kong, and as Senior Asia Correspondent. After leaving CNN, he was a Senior fellow the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles. He is currently a Non-Resident Senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute.
He has written four books - China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution (1999), Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (2008), The Last POW (2014) and the forthcoming Are You With Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement.

The Week That Changed The World (Nov 6)
Richard Nixon described his 1972 trip to China as "the week that changed the world” - reshaping the global balance of power and opening the door to the establishment of relations between the People's Republic and the United States. It was also a milestone in the history of journalism. Since the Communist revolution of 1949, a suspicious regime in Beijing had barred virtually all U.S. reporters from China. For the Nixon trip, however, the Chinese agreed to accept nearly 100 journalists, and to allow the most dramatic events — Nixon's arrival in Beijing, Zhou Enlai's welcoming banquet, visits to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City — to be televised live.
The coverage was arguably as important as the details of the diplomacy. It profoundly transformed American and international perceptions of a long-isolated China, generated the public support Nixon needed to change U.S. policy, and laid the groundwork for Beijing's gradual move to open China to greater international media coverage.