As the Vice President of Caixin Media and the Managing Director of Caixin Global, what does your day of work look like?
My day starts with a different hat – the co-managing editor of Caixin Global. I participate in the morning news budget meeting (news agenda meeting), during which desk chiefs will pick topics we cover for today, trends we want to follow and big stories we need to curate, review how our stories compare with competitors. The budget meeting is like a morning expresso, strong and enriching. News agenda changes throughout the day, easily keep everyone busy. And I also work on our events, intelligence and research.

Apart from the language used, any difference in news coverage / reader’s interests between Caixin and Caixin Global?
The Chinese-language Caixin.com definitely has a much larger quantity of content, in the form of news, analysis, op-ed, blogs, and databases. English language Caixin Global hand-picks China and Asia stories relevant to non-Chinese readers, with more topic curation and explanation. In addition to news, it should provide the framework, context, and knowledge for our very busy readers.

You have been the Managing Editor of the cn.wsj.com and the Editor-in-Chief of Dow Jones Chinese Newswires. What made you decide to return to Caixin? To what degree have you seen your reporting experience in international media benefit your work in creating the English-language cross-media platform for Caixin?
The experience working at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones was incredibly rewarding. I benefited a lot from interactions with colleagues. I learned a lot from the standard, the culture, the passion and professionalism evident in stories produced by some of the world’s best journalists, day in, day out.  

Re-joining Caixin in 2016, I assumed more responsibilities. Building on Caixin group’s strength in quality news, high-level events and research insights, Caixin Global’s mandate, and my mission, is to bring all of them to the world. Many people say that the 21^st century is the century of Asia, and China is at the very centre of the Asia story. There is a tremendous demand for trustworthy information from China, but insufficient supply. Like our global peers, including the Journal, Caixin wants to build a bridge crossing the information gap.    

What role do you think Caixin Global can take in popularising China's English-language media? Any breakthrough you would like to achieve in the industry?
Popularising China’s English-language media is never the goal. The goal is to show that China also has it – China also has muckrakers, has hard-hitting investigative journalism, has highly sophisticated analysis and independent-minded while idealistic reporters. Language shouldn’t be the barrier.

There is no miracle in the media industry. Trust has to be earned, by each piece of reporting, with time. A breakthrough would be – Caixin Global becomes the first choice, the go-to place for China news in the English language world.

Can you share with us the most impressive summits, roundtables or dialogues you’ve currently hosted in the new normal? 
We did many meetings in 2020, much more than before: about 30 online forums in total and several off-line or hybrid summits.

Two events stood out.

In March, when Covid started to hit Europe and the US, many countries were caught unprepared. The most needed information was the most practical: front-line experiences that China and other Asian countries gathered. We organized a webinar with two front-line doctors from Wuhan and Singapore. It wasn’t our usual crowd – we asked friends and even sources to spread the word among medical workers and public health officials in as many countries as possible.

Dr. Peng, one of the speakers, was responsible for ICU of two hospitals in Wuhan. To avoid cross-infection he stayed in a hotel since the Covid outbreak and couldn’t see his family. His days were filled with life-and-death moments with Covid patients, and nights were occupied by webinars like ours – he barely had time to sleep, but he used every opportunity to pass along what they learned about the disease and ICU rescue tips to the rest of the world.

For that particular webinar, we have medical workers from 40+ countries joining, ranging from Swiss nurses nervous about their first patient to a US hospital president trying to confirm which mode of ventilation support could actually work. The discussion was so technical that as a moderator I was pretty clueless about the content 80% of the time. But when the hour and a half session was over, the zoom chat box was inundated with thanks from participants, pages after pages of “Thank you Caixin”. It was a heart-warming moment. Later we learned that among the audience were a few Australian public health officials who actually revised ICU guidelines afterwards.

Another event was Caixin Summit in November. It was Caixin’s signature annual event, lasting three days with almost 100 sessions. This time we held the summit with dual venues – two offline tracks with the main track in Beijing and a sub-track in Singapore, plus online dial-in. The overarching theme of the summit was Rebuilding Trust. And our speakers, ranging from former heads of state to well-respected philosophers, from Fortune 500 CEOs to environmentalists, shared insights on such a wide scope of topics with a global vision. The summit generated nearly 3,000 media coverage and tens of millions of viewing.

Congratulations Caixin on being ranked as the top ten in global digital subscriptions, which is China’s only media outlet on the list. How does Caixin stand out from the industry? Your expectations for the development of paywalls in China?
The paywall is the most direct link between media and its readers. Caixin’s paywall journey started with a trip.

Hu Shuli, Caixin’s publisher, and I visited the CEO of Financial Times, John Ridding, in late 2017. He shared many valuable insights about paywall, and FT’s paywall was quite successful with a very high retention rate. Caixin had many internal discussions after that trip and decided it was worth trying – we need to identify a valuable revenue source when the advertisement model was in a clear, and likely irreversible, decline.

The paywall was a challenge both in terms of tech development and user education. The habit of paying for content in China was only starting to emerge, with budding knowledge-sharing mobile Apps. The habit of paying for news content was almost non-existent. And not to mention that building a paywall takes lots of resource input. Many complaints and adjustments later, we started to see the uptake of subscribers in 2019, and a rapid rise in the wake of Covid. In a crisis like this, credible information has never been more important.

Media paywall in China starts to take hold, and I believe it will flourish. But it will take some time. After Caixin, Sanlian Life Week, Southern Weekly, and many other media started their own version of the paywall. We have collaborations on joint subscriptions. 

Any upcoming strategies of Caixin Global on the news agenda? Any trends or topics that you are looking into in the coming year?
The core strategy is forever, news. We will focus on more in-depth content on China’s economic and industry trends, big companies, and societal changes. On top of that, there will be two exciting projects: more direct interaction between our editors and experts with readers (we will start a monthly China Chat series, and the first instalment is on January 28), and complement our news with data: we will roll out a database soon, starting from all listed companies in China’s A-share market. Stay tuned! We also welcome more talents to join us in this exciting endeavor.