Mike Chinoy

Mike Chinoy is a nonresident scholar at the 21st Century China Center, part of UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Previously, he spent 15 years as a nonresident senior fellow at the U.S.-China Institute of the University of Southern California. From 2006 to 2009, he was a senior fellow at the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, focusing on security issues in North Korea, China and Northeast Asia. He is also the co-creator, writer and producer of a new documentary about Taiwan’s greatest Olympic hero, “Decathlon: The C.K. Yang and Rafer Johnson Story.”

Before joining the Pacific Council and USC in 2006, Chinoy spent 24 years as a foreign correspondent for CNN. He was the network’s first bureau chief in Beijing, and he served as bureau chief in Hong Kong and senior Asia correspondent. He began his career with CNN as a correspondent based in London covering global trouble spots. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he worked for CBS News and NBC News based in Hong Kong.

He reported on many of the most important events in Asia since the mid-1970s, including the death of Mao Zedong; the rise of China; the Hong Kong handover; the Soviet and U.S. wars in Afghanistan; the Southeast Asian tsunami; and developments in Taiwan, Thailand, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere — including North Korea, which he has visited 17 times. In addition, he covered the conflicts in Lebanon, Chad and Northern Ireland, as well as the First Gulf War. 

He is the author of five books:

• “China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution,” a history of his years as a journalist reporting on China, described by the late Harvard University Sinologist Ezra Vogel as “an extraordinarily vivid account of what it was like covering China from the front lines”;
• “Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” described by The Washington Post as a “tour de force of reporting”;
• “The Last POW,” a No. 1 bestseller in the Kindle Singles politics/social science category for six months;
• “Are You With Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement,” described by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather as “a terrific biography told by a world-class journalist”; and
• “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic,” described by PBS anchor Judy Woodruff as “riveting reading for anyone who wants to understand China, or cares about how great reporters do their work.”

He has received numerous awards for his journalism, including Emmy, Peabody, Dupont and ACE awards for his coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis. He is currently working on a book about the man who served as the U.S. government’s chief Chinese-language interpreter for 40 years, interpreting for seven presidents and countless other senior officials.

Chinoy holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Studies from Yale University (1973, cum laude) and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1975). He is currently based in Taipei.