About Chinese Storytellers

Chinese Storytellers

Chinese Storytellers is an English-language community and Substack newsletter of Chinese journalists working abroad, founded in March 2019 by a group of Chinese women journalists based mainly on the East Coast of the United States. It is not, its co-founder Jin Ding has emphasised, an organisation: it has no formal structure, no staff and no headquarters, but is a volunteer-run community of people who face the same problems in their careers and lives as Chinese journalists reporting in English — and who decided to solve them by teaching one another. The community runs a Slack workspace and mentoring, gathers through online groups that began with a WhatsApp chat and a Google form, and publishes stories and media criticism about coverage of China through its Substack at chinesestorytellers.substack.com. Co-founders named in interviews and podcast profiles include Jin Ding, who later worked as a programme manager at the Associated Press, and Isabelle Niu, co-founder also of the Loud Murmurs podcast. In a period when Chinese journalists abroad have been caught between US-China confrontation, visa and designation battles, and persistent questions in Western newsrooms about who gets to tell China's story, Chinese Storytellers became a piece of professional infrastructure: a place where Chinese journalists could be colleagues to one another rather than tokens, translators or suspects. In this directory it is filed under Beijing by the rollout's convention for China-focused outlets published abroad; its community is based mainly in the United States, and this profile states that plainly.

Founding in March 2019

The founding story is preserved in unusual detail because Jin Ding told it on the Bund to Brooklyn podcast, in an episode about gender, community building and fighting for diversity in journalism. 'In 2019 in March,' Ding recounted, 'a group of Chinese women journalists, mostly on the Eastern coast of America, started this community called Chinese Storytellers. We're not an organization because there's literally no organizational structures. We're also just a community and a community of volunteers.' The founding impulse, as Ding described it, was practical and peer-to-peer: 'We gather a group of people like us — we face exactly the same problems, issues in our career and our life. And we thought maybe we would just figure those things out by teaching each other.' The first tools were humble — a WhatsApp group, and a Google form to see who was out there and what they needed. That origin matters to the community's character. Chinese Storytellers was not founded by a foundation, a university or a media company; it was founded by working journalists, initially women, who discovered that the specific difficulties of being Chinese, immigrant and a journalist in an American newsroom — identity, language, race, gender, career ladders that assumed a different biography — were widely shared but privately borne. The community's later forms, from Slack to Substack, are all elaborations of that first Google form: ways of finding one another and pooling what each member had learned the hard way.

The people: Jin Ding, Isabelle Niu and the members

Two co-founders are publicly associated with the project. Jin Ding is a former journalist who became a programme manager at the Associated Press and later Chief of Staff at the Center for Public Integrity; Ding appeared on a Yale Poynter panel in February 2023 on diaspora, diversity and power dynamics in the global newsroom, speaking about diversity in and beyond the newsroom from the standpoint of a Chinese immigrant journalist and community builder shaped in part by the Asian American Journalists Association. Isabelle Niu is a co-founder of both Chinese Storytellers and the Loud Murmurs podcast; in podcast interviews about the two projects she discusses discrimination, media bias and the barriers facing women in Chinese-language media — including how female reporters are targeted with sexist language and doxxing in ways male journalists are not, and how Western media can render invisible the work of the female journalists who support reporting credited to others. Around these public figures sits the membership itself: Chinese journalists — and, as the community grew, visual journalists, producers, translators and writers — working for English-language outlets, many of them women, many immigrants, many in the peculiar professional position of being hired for their China knowledge while being suspected, in the politics of the moment, of China sympathies. A Bund to Brooklyn episode captured the member experience through Siyuan, a journalist writing for China-focused English-language outlets, who described finding the community and learning from it how to become a journalist — the mentoring function operating exactly as the founders intended.

What the community does

Chinese Storytellers' activities fall into three kinds. The first is mutual aid and professional infrastructure: a Slack community, mentoring relationships, and the informal exchange of job knowledge, contacts, immigration and career experience, and craft — the 'teach each other' mission of the founding. For journalists whose difficulties are partly structural — few senior Chinese journalists existed in US newsrooms to mentor the next cohort — a peer network substitutes for the missing ladder. The second is convening and voice: members appear, as a community, in the profession's conversations about itself, from the Bund to Brooklyn and Arts of Travel podcast interviews to panel discussions of diaspora journalism, where the community's existence is itself evidence in arguments about diversity and power in global newsrooms. The third is publishing, through the Substack: stories, essays and media criticism by Chinese storytellers, in English, under their own names and editorial control. Splice Media's guide to Asia's most useful newsletters summarised the Substack in one line — 'Does exactly what it says on the tin. Showcases the writing of Chinese storytellers' — and listed it in the China section alongside Sinocism, Sixth Tone and the SupChina newsletter, which indicates the company the publication came to keep in the professional China-media ecosystem. The Substack is the community's shop window; the Slack and the mentoring are its working interior.

'No Country for Chinese Journalists'

The Substack's most consequential publication is also the clearest statement of the predicament the community exists to answer. In 2020, Chinese Storytellers published 'No Country for Chinese Journalists', a collective piece built around statements by eight Chinese writers warning that 'Chinese journalists have become the primary victim of the confrontation' between the United States and China. The Global Investigative Journalism Network carried the piece with an editor's note situating it precisely: on 18 February 2020 the US State Department had designated five Chinese media outlets — Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio International, China Daily and the People's Daily's distribution operation — as foreign missions, one move in a retaliatory cycle of press restrictions between Washington and Beijing, while the coronavirus pandemic was simultaneously sparking a wave of investigative reporting inside China and exposing the delicate balance Chinese journalists navigate. A contribution by Jin Ding detailed the risks and restrictions Chinese journalists face from both directions: pressure and suspicion in China for working with or for foreign media, and suspicion in the United States — of divided loyalty, of being conduits for Beijing — for being Chinese. The piece's title states the thesis: a journalist can be too Chinese for America and too American-facing for China, and belong fully to neither country's press corps. That squeeze is the founding condition of Chinese Storytellers, and the essay remains the document through which the wider profession — via GIJN's republication — encountered the community's analysis of it.

The wider predicament the community answers

The pressures named in 2020 did not ease, and the community's continued relevance is best understood against them. Chinese journalists working abroad operate amid visa restrictions and expulsions that have thinned both countries' press corps, foreign-agent and foreign-mission designations, online harassment — including the sexist targeting and doxxing of women reporters that Isabelle Niu has described — and a subtler newsroom problem that panel discussions at Yale and elsewhere have aired under the heading of power dynamics in the global newsroom: Chinese staff have historically done essential reporting, translation and fixing for English-language coverage of China while receiving generic titles, little credit and a disproportionate share of the personal risk, a pattern journalists at the Asia Society's 2023 conversation on China reporting in exile described in parallel terms for their own field. Chinese Storytellers does not claim to solve any of this systemically. What it offers is the classic remedy of every journalists' diaspora before it: a room of one's own — peer recognition, practical knowledge, bylines in a venue the community controls, and senior figures, like Ding at the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity, whose careers demonstrate that the ladder can be climbed. Its volunteer, structureless form is both its authenticity and its limit: it can convene, mentor and publish, but it cannot litigate, lobby or employ.

Relationship to Loud Murmurs and the podcast world

Chinese Storytellers sits in a small constellation of Chinese-diaspora media projects from the same generation and overlapping people. Isabelle Niu's other co-founding project, the Loud Murmurs podcast, is a Chinese-language podcast about media and culture, praised by interviewers as a favourite Chinese-language podcast and a critical resource on media coverage of China — and, in Niu's phrase, on media coverage of the media coverage of China. The pairing is instructive: the same cohort built an English-language community and publication (Chinese Storytellers) to intervene in how English-language journalism treats China and Chinese journalists, and a Chinese-language podcast (Loud Murmurs) to conduct media criticism for Chinese-speaking audiences. Podcast interviews have also been a primary medium through which the community's story reached the profession — the Bund to Brooklyn episode with Jin Ding, produced by the 1990 Institute's podcast, remains the fullest single account of the founding — which suits a community of journalists: its history is preserved substantially in the recorded conversations of its members, and researchers should treat those interviews, alongside the Substack itself, as the primary sources for its story, since a volunteer community without an office or an annual report generates no other archive.

Publishing on Substack

The choice of Substack as the publication venue placed Chinese Storytellers in the centre of the English-language China-newsletter ecosystem of the 2020s — the same platform that hosts the field's major independent titles — while keeping overhead at zero for a volunteer project. The Substack's function, per the descriptions quoted above, is showcasing: it gives members and affiliated writers a place to publish stories and criticism that might not fit, or might not be commissioned, in their employers' outlets — personal, reflective and media-critical writing about covering China and being Chinese in journalism — under bylines that build the writers' own names. That function complements rather than competes with members' day jobs, and it solves a specific problem the founders identified: the invisibility of Chinese journalists' individual voices inside institutional coverage. A reader who encounters a striking piece of China reporting in a major outlet rarely learns what its Chinese journalists thought about the story; on the community's Substack, those journalists are the authors. The Splice guide's inclusion of the title in a professional directory of Asian newsletters — regional company that includes the field's reference titles — marks the point at which a support community's blog had also become, in the ecosystem's own judgment, a publication worth a busy journalist's subscription.

Assessment and limits

An honest profile must record what Chinese Storytellers is not. It is not a news organisation with reporters assigned to beats; it does not break daily news; its publication is occasional rather than scheduled; its membership figures, internal governance and finances are not public — consistent with its founders' insistence that it is a community of volunteers with 'literally no organizational structures' — and its public record is therefore thin in the ways this profile has had to navigate: interviews, a Substack, a landmark collective essay, directory listings and panel appearances, rather than institutional documentation. Its significance is nonetheless real, and of a kind directories of media should capture: it is one of the first self-organised professional communities of the Chinese journalistic diaspora in the United States, founded by women journalists in March 2019, before the worst of the US-China press confrontation, and it gave that diaspora a name, a Slack, a mentoring ladder and a masthead. When the confrontation squeezed Chinese journalists from both sides, the community had already built the room in which they could compare notes — and, in 'No Country for Chinese Journalists', it told the rest of the profession, in eight voices at once, what that squeeze felt like from inside. Chinese Storytellers is profiled here on that basis: a small, volunteer, structureless community whose Substack and convening power made it an institution in the only sense that finally matters in journalism — the sense in which other journalists know it, use it, and cite it.