Lingling Wei, the chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, published a personal essay Tuesday recounting how she went from a young Chinese journalist writing an angry email to an American professor after the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade to being expelled from China and barred from returning to cover a U.S.-China summit.
In the newsletter essay, Wei said that in May 1999, while working for a state-owned Chinese newspaper, she wrote to Stephen D. Solomon, the founder of New York University’s business and economic reporting program who had offered her a scholarship. At the time, three Chinese journalists were killed in the NATO bombing, which President Bill Clinton had described as a “tragic mistake.”
Wei wrote that her email’s subject line was “A tragic mistake?”—with quotation marks around it—and that she questioned Clinton’s characterization, telling Solomon what she had been taught to think: that China was right, NATO was wrong, and the bombing was no mistake.
Solomon replied with one sentence, Wei wrote: “By fulfilling your dream of becoming a journalist, you will have an opportunity to get beyond all the political posturing.”
Twenty-five years later, Wei recounted, she is the Journal’s chief China correspondent. China expelled her in 2020, and this spring, she wrote, she was denied a visa to return to cover President Trump’s summit with Xi Jinping. She said a customs officer at JFK Airport handed back her blue passport and said, “Welcome home,” upon her 2020 return from Beijing. This spring, she wrote, she repeatedly refreshed a visa application portal until seeing two words: “Review failed.”
In the essay, written as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Wei said she revisited the email with Solomon. He said the stakes for journalists are higher than when she first wrote to him, according to the essay. “Uncovering the facts rather than uncritically accepting government pronouncements serves a primary goal of the First Amendment—informing the public and holding political and public officials accountable,” Solomon said.
Solomon told Wei that “your responsibility to go beyond the official account and help your readers learn the truth is a greater challenge than it was in 1999.”
Wei wrote that she reread her 1999 email recently and that the person who wrote it “feels like a stranger now.” She said the instinct to reach for the human story—the boy who couldn’t hug his mother on Mother’s Day, the young woman who wanted to have a baby—was already there, and that Solomon did not plant it but “showed her what to do with it.”
In related reporting, Main Street Independent previously covered the U.S. revocation of a Xinhua journalist’s visa after China expelled a New York Times reporter, illustrating the pattern of reciprocal expulsions between the two countries.