Rising China: Echoes of a Rising Japan?

Susan Chira will speak about rising China, and compare it to her 20-year-old experience as a journalist reporting on risen Japan and rising Korea. Even as Iraq grabs the headlines, the story of Rising China is one of the most gripping, the most resonant of our times. It presents enormous and obvious policy challenges, and considerable journalistic challenges, too. What is familiar in China's rise, and what is unique? How do you cover and present to readers a country that is at once exuberant and fearful, increasingly prosperous and increasingly unequal, newly open and reflexively repressive? The New York Times has had a personal brush with these many faces of China: its researcher, Zhao Yan, is still mired in jail after a year, charged with violating its vaguely-written, draconian law on state secrets.

Susan Chira was named foreign editor for The New York Times in January 2004. Previously, Ms. Chira had been editorial director of book development since September 2002. Before that she was the editor of the Week in Review section at The Times since October 1999, after having served as deputy foreign editor of the newspaper since February 1997. Prior to that, she served in a variety of reporting positions including national education correspondent, correspondent for the newspaper in Tokyo from October 1984 until February 1989, metropolitan reporter in the Albany and Stamford bureaus, and reporter for the Business Day section.

Ms. Chira joined The Times as a trainee on the metropolitan desk in 1981 and was promoted to reporter in July 1982.

She received a B.A. degree in history and East Asian studies from Harvard University in 1980, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, she was a reporter and later president of The Harvard Crimson. She studied Japanese for a year and a half at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo and at Middlebury College, Vt.

Susan Chira is married to Michael Shapiro, a writer and assistant professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. They have a daughter and a son.