Word: munro
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...foreign correspondents based in Peking, probably none have been writing about the "new" China with more skepticism than the Toronto Globe and Mail's Ross H. (for Howard) Munro. Since his arrival 2½ years ago in the Chinese capital, where he is the only resident North American journalist, Munro, 36, has reported on a Potemkin village in Inner Mongolia that he suspected was set up to mislead visiting foreigners, pieced together detailed accounts of Peking's struggle with trade deficits, and chronicled the attempts of Mao's successors to revise the Chairman's teachings. For his enterprise, Munro was pointedly...
...Munro may now be in line for another reprimand. The cause: a stinging seven-part series on human rights in China?or the lack of them?that has run in the Globe and seven U.S. dailies. In this series, Munro's China appears as an Orwellian hell where a citizen can still be executed merely for "preaching counterrevolutionary slogans," where freedom of movement and career choice are all but nonexistent, and where authorities discriminate against relatives of former petty landowners. In one telling vignette, Munro writes of a man who insists that local postal clerks read his letters...
Raised in Vancouver, Munro studied political science at Stanford University and most recently covered politics for the Globe from Washington. There, as in other assignments, he became known for meticulous research. That has been both more imperative and more difficult for Munro in Peking, for he does not read or speak Chinese and often has to rely on interpreters. But as Globe Managing Editor Clark Davey notes, Munro remains "a student in every sense of the word...
...Munro's own term for his reportorial style is "incrementalism"; typically, he squirrels away all sorts of documents, vignettes and conversations that he later weaves into stories. Thus, after months of observing coupon-carrying Chinese shoppers he is convinced that rationing has been far more extensive than the Peking regime admits. His report of death sentences being handed out for nothing more than the use of dissident slogans was based on a careful compilation of the court notices that occasionally appear throughout China. Says Munro: "Incrementalism is the only way I know of overcoming the problem of limited access...
...Many of Munro's dispatches are accompanied by pictures taken by his wife Julie. They have not experienced the intimidation that is sometimes inflicted upon Western correspondents in Moscow, where the government has been known to harass foreign reporters (it expelled an American journalist on currency-violation charges earlier this year). When the Chinese want to express their displeasure with a correspondent they do so simply by ignoring him?and living in Peking without access to the bureaucracy or permission to travel can be like being stranded on some barren planet...