Revisit Past Winners’ Coverage of China

From “In the Same Breath”

In China, discontent has grown over the government’s “Zero-COVID Policy” - a set of strict lockdown and quarantine protocols that have been blamed for economic hardship and widespread food shortages in the country. In the past week, this discontent has manifested in an outpouring of public and digital protest both in China and abroad, to such an extent that it is beginning to overwhelm China’s immense infrastructure for censorship.

These protests are the largest in China since the 1989 protests that sought to democratize the country. Those movements, also galvanized largely by students and young people, culminated in the infamous 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which Chinese soldiers killed anywhere from several hundred to several thousand Chinese citizens. 

In 1990, CNN and CBS each won a duPont Silver Baton for their coverage of the Chinese political crisis, Tiananmen Square, and the aftermath. And last year, filmmaker Nanfu Wang was awarded for her film, “In the Same Breath,” which explored the tragic impacts of the Chinese government's initial unwillingness to recognize the COVID-19 pandemic.

Take a look through our archives and watch excerpts of the 1989 coverage here and here. And you can watch clips from an interview with Wang about her film here.