JMSC talks: Soft Power, Hard Reality: China’s Global Ambitions

PEN Hong Kong and the Journalism and Media Studies Centre jointly present:

Soft Power, Hard Reality: China’s Global Ambitions

Speakers:  Natasha Khan and Louisa Lim
Moderator:  Ilaria Maria Sala
Date:  Wednesday, 17 January 2018
Time:  5:30-6:30pm
Venue:  Digital Media Lab, G/F, Eliot Hall, The University of Hong Kong
(No registration required)

Please join us for a panel discussion on China’s rise and what it means for journalists, authors and academics around the world. We will examine how the Chinese government’s propaganda machine reaches across borders to influence media, academia, and literature. How this affect what we read and see? What can we do to resist pressure from the rising superpower? Or, in fact have we already overreacted–seeing conspiracy even where there is none?

Natasha Khan is a business reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She holds bachelor’s degrees in both law and business and a Master of Journalism from the University of Hong Kong. Before joining the Journal in 2017, Ms. Khan spent six years at Bloomberg News, where she reported on health care in the region, Hong Kong politics and the financial holdings of China’s ruling class.

Louisa Lim is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is an award-winning journalist, who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. She is now a Senior Lecturer in Audio Visual Journalism at the University of Melbourne and the co-host of the Little Red Podcast, a monthly podcast focussing on China beyond the Beijing beltway.

Ilaria Maria Sala is an award-winning journalist and writer. She has been living in East Asia since 1988, and calls Hong Kong home. Sala has written for a number of international publications, from Le Monde to The New York Times, is a columnist for HKFP, and writes regularly for Quartz. She is the author of two books in Italian, and is on the Executive Committee of Pen Hong Kong.

PEN Hong Kong is the local Hong Kong chapter of PEN International, and as such, adheres to the PEN Charter. Three Hong Kong delegates represented us at the conference of PEN International in Ourense in September 2016. We were officially launched on 13 November 2016 as a bilingual centre, a revival and transformation of the former “Hong Kong (English-speaking) PEN Centre.”