China's government is making it harder for some news organizations to station reporters they want in China and reporting there remains especially challenging, but there are more American reporters in China today than ever before. And the Chinese government has been aggressively moving to reach American audiences with its view of China and of the world. Many news organizations are shrinking, but CCTV America is hiring.

China watchers today have much greater access than specialists did fifty and sixty years ago and in many ways we're drowning in information. But in many important areas, reliable information is scarce and puzzles abound. Even today, the analytical skills of the best China watchers are still in demand. Getting a handle on decision-making and on political maneuvering still requires knowledge of interests and alliances, norms, rituals, and nuances of language.

China Watching is the term practitioners and outsiders used to describe the effort that reporters, diplomats, and others excluded from China engaged in so as to understand what was happening in China and what it meant for the U.S. and the world. After Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949 most American journalists and others working for U.S. news organizations left China.

William Worthy wrote for the Baltimore Afro-American and was one of the few American journalists to visit China, here with Zhou Enlai in 1957.

The U.S. did not recognize the new government and U.S. diplomatic posts were closed. By fall 1950, soldiers from the two countries were facing each other on Korean battlefields. China generally did not welcome journalists from countries with which it did not have diplomatic relations and the U.S. State Department ruled that U.S. passports were not valid for travel to China. These restrictions eased a bit by the 1960s, but over the next two decades few journalists were able to report from China for U.S. news organizations. Those who did get in, by virtue of not being U.S. citizens or through special invitation were closely monitored. Most American reporting on China was done from the "listening post" of Hong Kong.

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Also available at our website are videos from two recent USC U.S.-China Institute events. Earlier this month, we hosted a symposium on America's ties in East and Southeast Asia and prospects for peace and prosperity there. Andrew Yang, Taiwan's former defense minister, opened the discussion by arguing that the Korean War and America's 1950s security treaties with Japan and Taiwan represented the first "pivot" or "rebalancing" to Asia. Others looked at the roles of regional and international trade organizations, the rise of nationalism, cross-strait relations, and cultural exchange in assessing the current regional situation, potential conflict points, and possible areas of cooperation. Click here to watch those presentations.

We also hosted a talk by Geoff Dyer a Financial Times foreign correspondent with long experience in both China and the United States. Dyer's written The Contest of the Century in which he argues that China's growth and need for resources and markets to continue growing has brought it into competition with the U.S. in many realms. He discussed his book and his point that cooperation is in the best interests of both countries. Click here for his presentation.

On Friday, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy is hosting a conference looking at how countries such as China, India, Turkey, and Poland are using cultural diplomacy and how an established power, Great Britain, is using cultural diplomacy in emerging markets. The USC U.S.-China Institute is co-sponsoring a panel on China's efforts to strength its soft power through Confucius Institutes. We hope you will join us.

All of these projects require resources. We're grateful to those whose support makes them possible. We'd especially like to highlight a gift from Ming Hsu and Nate Rich in honor of John Rich, Nate's father and a distinguished Asia-based journalist. Their generosity is helping to make the Assignment:China project possible.