China Live: Two Decades in the Heart of the Dragon

Chinoy is the Electronic Age's version of an old China hand. He visited the place first in 1973, opened CNN's Beijing office in 1987, was an eyewitness to the events in Tiananmen Square in May 1989 and is today the network's Hong Kong bureau chief. He became a reporter in the first place, he says, because he saw it as a way of getting into China. Although the keystone of his book is a dramatic account of CNN's live coverage of the Tiananmen demonstrations (and of some of the off-the-air activities as well), it is very much Chinoy's professional autobiography, from his liberal student days at Yale; his first visit--as a tourist--to China; his journalism apprentice work in Northern Ireland, Taiwan and Vietnam; his grad school days at Columbia; and in 1976, his first job as a stringer for CBS News in Hong Kong, when he made several trips to the mainland. With NBC, he covered Asia and what he could learn of the Afghanistan war, but after the network passed him over in choosing its man in Beijing, Chinoy joined Turner's new cable operation. Chinoy is not an analytical writer or a political--or social--theorist, but he has an old-fashioned reporter's knack of telling just the way a street or a crowd or one frightened dissident looks. Although it's difficult not to be initially skeptical about a book by an employee of Ted Turner's CNN that is published by Turner Publishing and sounds so unabashed in its praise of CNN and all its works, Chinoy is more than a loyal company man. He has an interesting personal story to tell, and he tells it well. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Apr.)