Dai Qing
(b. 1941), Chinese journalist and environmental activist. Dai Qing is the adopted daughter of Ye Jianying, who was a high-ranking government official. Raised in a privileged revolutionary family, she was trained as a missile engineer and worked in military intelligence before starting her career in journalism. She came to prominence in the early 1980s for a series of investigative reports, written for the Guangming Daily, about persecution within the Chinese Communist Party in the early days of the revolution.
Dai went on to become the most outspoken critic in China of the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam. In 1989 she published a collection of essays condemning the $30 billion project titled Yangtze! Yangtze! Later that year, Dai publicly denounced the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and on 5 June 1989 quit the Chinese Communist Party. As a result, she was fired from the Guangming Daily, jailed for ten months, and her writing was banned in China.
Dai was awarded the Harvard University Nieman Fellowship for journalists in 1991, the Golden Pen for Freedom Given by the Paris-based International Federation of Newspaper Publishers in 1992, and the Goldman Environmental Award in 1993. In 1997 Dai published a second volume of critical essays on the Three Gorges project titled The River Dragon Has Come!
Further Reading
Dai Qing. (1994) Yangtze! Yangtze! Toronto: Earthscan Publications.
——. (1997) The River Dragon Has Come! Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl Wudunn. (1994) China Wakes: The Struggle For the Soul of a Rising Power. New York: Times Books.
This is the complete article, containing 251 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
