Jan Wong - Journalism Career

Journalism Career

In the late 1970s, Wong began her career in journalism when she was hired as a news assistant by Fox Butterfield, China correspondent for the New York Times. Wong became tired of Party ideology and returned to Canada from Beijing. She then studied journalism at Columbia, receiving a Masters degree, and found work with the Montreal Gazette, Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal before joining the Globe and Mail as a business reporter.

In 1988, the paper sent her to China where she worked for six years as its foreign correspondent among other things covered the Tiananmen Massacre. She later chronicled her Chinese experience in a book, Red China Blues, which was promptly banned in China. After a return trip in the late nineties, she produced a second book entitled Jan Wong's China, a somewhat less personal account of social life, the economy, and politics in modern-day China.