One can obtain as wide a range of views on the state of health of the Chinese media as on any other subject these days. Chinese journalists who remember the press up to 25 years ago will assert how much greater freedom exists now. Even the reporting of traffic accidents was forbidden, as Hugo de Burgh points out, “until the taboo was broken around 1980” (p. 36). (In Shanghai, I was told, it was broken when the Jiefang ribao reported that a trolley bus had caught fire on Huaihai Road.)

Younger journalists are more likely to chafe at the limits still imposed upon the media. Many seek to pursue media studies abroad, explaining that they hope to be better qualified if or when there is a new breakthrough in China. Others continue to push at the limits, sometimes getting sacked but often able to move on to another media outlet in another province. Those working for web-based media are often bolder than their print counterparts – including journalists on the People's Daily website who exposed the notorious Nandan tin mine disaster in 2001.

This is a timely book which, as its title suggests, focuses on the Chinese journalist rather than on Chinese journalism – a distinction that would have been impossible to draw until recent years. It is based on fieldwork as well as wide reading although the value of some interview material is reduced by the necessity – revealing in itself – to mask the interviewees' identity.