About

The Short Version

Paul Mooney is an American freelance journalist who has reported on Burma, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong since 1985. He has been on staff at Reuters, Newsweek, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Eastern Express, the South China Morning Post, and Knight-Ridder Financial News. His articles have appeared in leading publications and web sites around the world. Paul, the recipient of a 14 journalist awards for his reporting on China, was based in Beijing from 1994-2012. In 2013, the Chinese government refused to re-new his journalist visa, ending his 18 consecutive years as a journalist in China. Paul has been living in Hanoi since 2018.

The Long Version

I first became interested in journalism as a teenager serving in the US Army in Vietnam in 1968. I’d gone to Vietnam feeling gung ho about the war, so much so that I dropped out of high school when I turned 16 to enlist in the Army, afraid the war would end before I got there. But my support for the war began to fade soon after I arrived when I realized how the fighting was being waged and its effect on the Vietnamese people.

My unit, the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, had a small trailer library in the base camp, with hundreds of books on a wide variety of topics. Noteworthy, and surprising, was its large collection of books on Vietnam’s history and the war. I began to read my way through the collection of books on Vietnam and found that these journalistic accounts provided a more accurate picture of the situation in Vietnam than I’d gotten during my military training. The first book I read was David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire, a scathing look at the failure of American policy in Vietnam. The book was based on Halberstam’s own experiences reporting the war. Halberstam’s description struck a chord with me as many of the things he pointed to as examples of the American quagmire in Vietnam were things that I was seeing on the ground in Vietnam myself. The Making of a Quagmire and other similar books had a huge impact on me.

I also read a few of the works of Bernard Fall, a prominent French war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina in the 1950s and 1960s. Fall gathered first-hand information on the war by trekking through the jungles of Vietnam with US infantry platoons. Fall’s military classic Street Without Joy, a portrayal of the French failure in Vietnam, had obvious parallels with the American involvement in the country. Sadly, Fall was killed the year before I arrived in Vietnam along Highway 1, which the French troops had earlier dubbed la rue sans joie, hence the name of his earlier book.

I made a list of books in the library that I wanted to read and I asked friends going back to the rear base camp to bring books back out to my fire support base, where I read them by candlelight at night in my small bunker. I was so obsessed with the poor strategy used by the United States that after I completed my first tour, I volunteered for a second one, anxious to serve as a military advisor to a Vietnamese unit, in the extremely naive belief of a 19-year-old that one young man could somehow have an impact on US policy. During my second tour I served on the DMZ and later as an advisor to the 18th ARVN Division, two experiences that only served to cement my frustrations with the war.

By the time I left Vietnam two years later, I’d read dozens of books on Vietnam’s history and the war and I had also taught myself Vietnamese, using my time as an occasional advisor to Vietnamese army units and contact with Vietnamese friends to hone my language skills and to gain a new perspective on the country.

I returned to the Bronx in September 1970 with an intense interest in Asian history and politics and a desire to be a journalist. I received my general equivalency diploma while in the Army and within a week of leaving Vietnam, I enrolled in Fordham University under a special program for Vietnam veterans. I later transferred to Manhattanville College because they had an Asian studies program and Chinese classes there. I received my B.A. Degree in East Asian Studies from Manhattanville College in 1974. I owe both schools a deep debt of gratitude for giving a high school dropout a chance to receive a university education. After graduation, I went to Taiwan to continue my Chinese language studies and stayed there for several years.

I returned to the US in 1978 keen to find work in journalism, but having no experience I couldn't find an opportunity. Two years later, however, with the help of Peter Murray, a childhood friend who always looked out for me, I found a part-time job at Newsweek magazine working as a photo filer. Over the next five years I slowly worked my way up the ladder, moving on to photo researcher, news clipper, editorial researcher and occasional reporter.

With the support of Newsweek, which provided me with a partial tuition reimbursement program and a flexible work schedule, I entered graduate school at Columbia University in 1982. Three years later, I obtained a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs and a Certificate in East Asian Studies from the East Asian Institute. Upon graduation in 1985, I moved my family to Taiwan to begin my career as a freelance journalist, starting off as a stringer for Newsweek. During the next five years on the island I wrote for Newsweek, Asiaweek, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, International Herald Tribune, Far Eastern Economic Review, the Hong Kong Standard and other international publications.

My reporting initially focused on politics, primarily the struggle between the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) and the fledgling opposition movement known as the dangwai, or outside the party, a reference to the fact that Taiwan was ruled by one party. I was fascinated by the courage and determination of the opposition in the face of the iron-fisted rule of the KMT, which used harsh measures to keep it’s opponents from gaining strength. Many of the senior opposition leaders were in prison while others were under constant surveillance by the notorious Taiwan Garrison Command. Some were hurt, and a few were even killed under mysterious circumstances. Being a part of the opposition movement was not without serious risks.

I soon learned the KMT’s autocratic rule affected many other areas of society and I was drawn to write about social issues in Taiwan. I wrote about child prostitution among aborigine girls, some of whom were as young as 11 or 12, the suppression of Christian groups, the struggle of activist groups to push back the destruction of the environment, and the plight of elderly Nationalist soldiers who had fought for the KMT on the mainland, only to be abandoned in poverty in Taiwan.

My focus on these issues in Taiwan and China has a lot to do with my background. I grew up in a working class neighborhood of the Bronx, the youngest of five children, the fifth to quit high school and the fourth to enlist in the military. My father was a building janitor and I spent my first 17 years living in basement apartments in different parts of the Bronx. My mother cleaned offices during the day and sometimes worked as a waitress in the evenings. In the mid-1960s, buildings around us were abandoned and the neighborhood entered a steep decline. Drug addiction spread through the area resulting in a dramatic and dangerous increase in crime. Around this time, some friends were murdered during muggings, several went to jail, and at least two died from drug overdoses.

Although I was a voracious reader, I didn’t like school. I played hooky 60-90 days each year of junior high school, ending up in the worst classes in one of the worst schools in New York City. I barely showed up for my first year of high school, just waiting until I turned 16, when I could legally leave school and find a job. After doing odd jobs for a year, I enlisted in the Army on my 17th birthday in 1967.

These early experiences, and my reading of books by Charles Dickens, George Orwell, John Steinbeck and other writers gave me a keen sense of empathy for the down and out that has influenced the types of stories that I do.

A turning point in my career came in late May 1989 when Asiaweek magazine asked me to go to Beijing to help cover the rapidly expanding student protests in China. This was the biggest story I’d ever covered and it had a huge impact on me. I spent some 18 hours each day mingling with student protesters in Tiananmen Square, getting to know many of the leaders. I was there in the early morning hours when the first People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops made their unsuccessful march to the square on June 3, turned away by citizens keen to protect the student protesters. I was back out on the streets hours later that morning and that afternoon when the first soldiers emerged from their underground hiding places and the first bloody clashes occurred. That same evening, I saw armed PLA units and tanks enter the city and open fire on innocent civilians. I also watched with horror as people fell around me. The wounded were rushed to nearby hospitals propped up on bicycle seats, carried by two people, or on public buses commandeered by Chinese citizens. I’ll never forget how brave these people were, nor the plea that I heard over and over again that night from outraged Chinese: “Please tell the world what’s happening here.”

Over the next few days I barely slept, working almost around the clock to accommodate news organizations around the world with their rolling deadlines. The day after June 4, I snuck around the tightly controlled universities as students hurriedly packed their belongings to escape just before security police searching for student leaders raided the campuses. For a week or so after the bloody crackdown, I received the odd phone call from time to time from students, teachers, dissidents and workers I had met earlier, all on the run from place to place, their voices full of fear. The phone calls gradually came to a stop. I can't remember any of their names, but their faces are still clear in my mind and I often wonder what happened to them. 

I left Beijing at the end of June determined to return to China to work as a journalist. Exactly one year later, my wife, two daughters and I moved to Hong Kong, where I began to make monthly reporting forays into provinces all over China. During this period, I worked for Japan’s Kyodo News Service and later the Far Eastern Economic Review.

In 1994 I moved to Beijing to open a bureau for Knight-RIdder Financial News, reporting on financial and economic news. In 1997, I returned to freelancing. In the years since, I’ve written about North Korean teenage refugees hiding out in fear, the plight of street kids in Beijing, the fate of young farm girls who’ve turned to prostitution to improve their lives, young rural boys kidnapped and forced to work as slaves in illegal brick kilns, known as Black Kilns, the plight of children with AIDS, the abuse and torture of rights lawyers and activists, the bitter lives of the handicapped, the threats people faced from exposure to asbestos and heavy metals poisoning, two hidden killers, and brutal government abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang. I also wrote about the progress China has made during this period, the new faces of China’s top cities, growing personal wealth, improved living standards and the slow and insufficient improvements in basic political rights, such as freedom of expression.

In 2013, the Chinese government declined my application for a journalist visa to work for Reuters in Beijing. No reason was given, but it is clear this was related to my almost two decades of reporting on sensitive politics and human rights issues in China. In March 2014, I returned to Asia to take up a posting as Reuters bureau chief in Rangoon, Burma. A year later I resigned from that position so that I could have more freedom to report things that interested me and to cover a wider area of Southeast Asia.

My more than 30 years reporting in Asia have been a bittersweet experience. I worked most of these years on my own as a freelance journalist in areas where the craft of journalism can be very trying, especially without institutional support. Focusing for so many years on China’s down and out has had a deep impact on me. One can’t cover such issues for so many years without feeling immense sadness.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to my wife Eileen and daughters Annie and Teresa, who suffered as a result of my passion for a way of journalism that was never lucrative. I could not have done what I did without their love and support.

I’ve faced a lot of ups and downs in my career as a journalist. However, I’ve been fortunate to meet and write about incredibly courageous people and to witness first hand the great changes that have taken place in Asia during the past 35 years. I wouldn’t change a single thing.