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1992 Nicolet High School graduate Jonathan Ansfield, a resident of Beijing, China, calls himself an “accidental journalist.”
“My career path has been a serendipitous and at times reluctant one. But, looking back, journalism was the easiest way to write about China and make a living doing it,” said Ansfield in an e-mail interview with The Chronicle.
Journalism came into his life in 1998, while Ansfield was taking a year off from a graduate program in Chinese literature at the University of Chicago to improve his spoken Chinese in Beijing. And he “ended up helping launch an English-language culture/entertainment/ lifestyle guide called City Edition,” he said.
“Since we covered a lot more social and national stories than you’d normally find in a free city guide administered by the state — pollution, film industry reforms, Amway in China, a couple of high-profile [expatriate] murders — I had made a lot of friends in the press corps,” Ansfield said. These connections eventually led to his first job as a correspondent, with the wire service Reuters, and more recently to “a couple pieces in the Asian Wall Street Journal; a cover feature for Wallpaper magazine (March 2005);” and now, mainly to reporting for Newsweek magazine.
Initially “hooked” on China by a Chinese literature survey course he took in his freshman year at Brown University, Ansfield began studying Mandarin, the official language of China.
So, during his junior year, he spent a semester in Beijing. Luckily, and somewhat unusually, he said, he had Chinese roommates and “quickly got exposed to their natural warmth and openness and breadth of interests and ambitions. The inexhaustible curiosity of the country was perhaps my deepest first impression.”
Ansfield was lured by the magnetism of modern China — “coming into its own as an economic force in the mid-late 1990’s” — with “its flourishing urban street culture and underground arts scene” and “the pungent scent of opportunity” in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, he said.
He finally had to decide whether to hold onto his fellowship at the University of Chicago or stay on in Beijing [where he was by then the managing editor of City Weekend, as it had been renamed].
At the time, in 2000, he had just begun dating his future wife, Amy Li, then the advertising manager of City Weekend. So, Ansfield “stayed on as editor there for double the pay” and “committed [himself] to a hazy but overwhelmingly hopeful future, much like China’s at the time,” he said.
‘ Big Brother’
His personal life, he said, is not greatly affected by policies and practices of the Chinese government, one of the world’s last remaining communist dictatorships, except that it is bureaucratic. “It’s a lot easier to come to China and stay here than it is for foreigners (Chinese included) in the States,” he said.
He also said that he’s “always felt the presence of the law much less so than in the States, probably due to the inconsistency with which it’s usually enforced … particularly as it relates to foreigners.”
As a member of the foreign press, however, he is very much affected by the government. “Big Brother isn’t always watching but we’re never really sure when he is,” he quipped.
“When there are sensitive Communist Party meetings or anniversaries/deaths and big protests or other student incidents, the state surveillance apparatus is clearly on higher alert.”
Recently, after the death of a reformist leader, Ansfield said, cell phone messages between him and his boss “were mysteriously scrambled on occasion and we had to be careful to use untapped phones to plan stories, exchange information or plan meetings.”
This was not because he and his editor were threatened, he said, but “to protect well-placed sources and Chinese dissidents.”
Another challenge is the difficulty of conveying China’s complexity, contradictions. Particularly because of the importance of the U.S.-China relationship — as “strategic partner[s] or strategic competitor[s] — Ansfield feels “a tremendous burden of responsibility … to be fair and accurate and well-contexted.”
Ansfield and his wife, Amy, a Communist Party member who is “a venture capitalist in the original sense of the word,” live in “a newish Western-style” condo with “all the convenience you’d have at home.”
She is currently opening a store, which will sell furniture and art objects from Southeast Asia and the couple also owns “a bar/café in a stone boat structure on a fishing pond in Ritan Park,” one of Beijing’s oldest parks.
The city, like its political and cultural landscape, is “a giant tangled mess with a grand semblance of order,” according to Ansfield. “You can either look at it up close or from afar — both are equally real.” Ansfield said he prefers to spend most of his days “trying to dig [his] way through it.”
Jewish stereotypes
As for Chinese views and experience with Jews, Ansfield cautioned that “everyday American ‘political correctness’ remains largely irrelevant and incomprehensible in a society that is 80 percent one ethnicity and 90 percent registered atheist” and noted that “Jews have had but a marginal, passing history” there, so “most Chinese aren’t in a position to know much more … than the all-too-familiar stereotypes.”
But “if I was applying to work for a Chinese company, I’d happily write ‘Jew’ at the very top of my [resume] because educated Chinese … are bound to think two things: smart and good at business.”
“Even my father-in-law proudly proclaimed at my wedding: ‘My wife and I are [Communist] Party members and our ancestor was also Jewish — Marx.”
Ansfield also noted that in some of the “booming coastal hotbeds of manufacturing …you often hear people claiming to be the ‘Jews of China’ — not because of any religious [or] blood connection but instead [because of] their reputation a successful entrepreneurs.”
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