A Q-and-A with Scott Tong of Marketplace

Authors

Date of this Version

8-2-2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

August 2, 2010 in The China Beat http://www.thechinabeat.org/

Comments

Copyright August 2, 2010. Used by permission.

Abstract

As regular readers of this blog know, I spent late June and much of July in Shanghai, with brief trips to other parts of China. One aspect of this sojourn in the PRC that proved memorable was the opportunity it afforded me to finally meet several people whose reporting or commentaries I’ve admired, but whose paths had never crossed mine before, including Kaiser Kuo (whose Sinica podcasts we’ve talked up here before), David Barboza of the New York Times (whose day-in-the-life of a South China worker I singled out for praise in a recent commentary), freelancer Adam Minter (who has probably done more than any other single individual to help American readers understand China’s first World’s Fair, via posts like this one), and Scott Tong of Marketplace (whose excellent series on birth control was recently flagged on this blog).

Scott was about to head back to the U.S. when we got a brief chance to chat, so I came up with a way to carry on our conversation via cyberspace and also make it accessible to others. I asked him if he’d be willing to take some time on the long plane ride across the Pacific ahead of him to answer several questions. He was good enough to oblige. So here, in a continuation of the Q-and-A series I’ve done in the past with the likes of Mara Hvistendahl (who put me in touch with both Adam and Scott, incidentally—thanks Mara!), are the responses he sent me once he got back to America:

JW: Do you have a favorite story you’ve done from your time in China that we can encourage our readers to listen to online?

ST: Nice to be with you, Jeff.

Since you’ve already mentioned our one-child policy stories (thank you), I’ll go with a much less-serious feature on China’s group shopping phenomenon filed for our personal finance show Marketplace Money. I found it wonderfully radio friendly.