“I have both love and hatred toward the Chinese reality,” she said. She loves that China has made a “revolutionary opening to the world” but dislikes that there is “one-party rule and absolutely no press freedom.”
Gao’s family suffered much during the Cultural Revolution, as the country experienced a period of instability, especially in the economic realm. Nevertheless, “Although my family experienced lots of difficulties because of the political campaign in China, I think all these difficulties were worth it," she said.
As an economic reporter who also covered the political backlash to China’s economic opening, however, Gao incurred the wrath of Chinese officials because her reporting focused on some realities the Chinese government would have preferred to ignore. As a result, she spent more than seven years in jail, serving two different jail terms.
When she was freed for the final time for medical reasons in 1999, media jobs were hard to come by. But she persevered and is still a journalist. Gao write news coverage and analysis for two Hong Kong monthly magazines, Open and The Trend. She also writes news analysis pieces for the newspaper Apple Daily.
And she won’t leave China. “I’m willing to stay in China,” she said. “Although my articles can only be published in Hong Kong and the United States and on the web, I see that my work is very much needed.”
Fewer and fewer independent media “can still insist the principle of freedom of expression,” Gao said. As a reporter, she is still under extreme pressure from the government because of what she writes. “I am now taking the risk that the Chinese regime would fabricate a crime just to imprison me,” she said.
Gao first won an IWMF Courage in Journalism Award in 1995, while she was serving her second jail term. She couldn’t come to the United States to accept the award or express her appreciation for it. More than ten years later, she will finally have her opportunity.
“This award encouraged me to keep my faith, even in the most difficult time in my life,” she said. It crystallized her core operating principles as a journalist: Refuse to kneel down before power and “don’t lie because the powers ask you to.”
Today, Gao continues reporting because she feels a “responsibility to tell the truth to the Chinese people.”
She hopes her Courage award will give her some political insulation, but she is not sure it will. “A person like me is destined to be against the Chinese government, and there is a risk that I might be put in prison for a third time,” she said. When Gao Yu was a student at Renmin University in the 1960s, the government had a big say in what courses students could pursue and what jobs they could take upon graduation. Gao wanted to study the media, but the government shut down that specialty, so she earned a degree in literature theory. And instead of getting a promised newspaper job upon her graduation in 1968, she was sent first to the countryside to teach middle school in China’s Shanxi Province. In 1974, she moved to Beijing, where she taught “about Mao’s thoughts and about Leninism” through 1979.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Gao struck pay dirt with her first writing job at the Chinese News Agency. The agency was located in the government’s Office of Overseas Chinese; its purpose was to attempt to explain the then-unfolding economic revolution to expatriate Chinese in Asia, Europe and the United States. Gao was 30, the youngest reporter at the agency by a decade.
Working at the Chinese News Agency, she learned about Western principles of free expression and a free media. Her first assignment was to criticize the Cultural Revolution. She interviewed many dissidents who had been jailed, always ending the stories by saying that “the Chinese government is starting to change, that the economic revolution is a change for the better.”
It was a difficult balancing act. Gao had to write stories that both criticized and “praised the Chinese government in a different way.” The government could be praised for opening economic doors to the West. Political dissidents who were seen as having gone too far had to be attacked. Gao was at the agency from 1980-88. During this time, she also began to write for Hong Kong newspapers, including Hong Kong Daily News, Sintao Daily and Hong Kong Economic Journal. She also wrote for Hong Kong magazines such as The Mirror and Ming Pao Monthly. At these media outlets, Gao could write more freely, but what she wrote had to meet the approval of China News Services, she said.
In late 1988, Gao became deputy editor of the weekly newspaper Economics. In one story, she quoted an economics scholar who supported economic reforms but criticized the overvaluation of Chinese currency and also said China needed a good constitution to avoid frequent changes in leadership. Government officials later said this article had spawned the student protests that culminated with sit-ins at Tiananmen Square and a bloody confrontation with government troops on June 4, 1989.
In late May of 1989, the former editor of the People’s Daily who then was dean of the People’s University in China urged her to meet with the student protestors on behalf of the press society and urge them to withdraw from the square. He had been told that violence would occur if they stayed. She went alone to talk with six student leaders and helped them “write an article saying that they would be willing to withdraw from Tiananmen if the Army does not come into the city.” She sent the article to colleagues and to several newspapers. On June 3, she was arrested. The next day, the government stormed the square. Gao said she didn’t see the published article, but it was used as evidence against her.
Six months later, Gao suffered a severe heart attack in jail and was released for medical reasons. After her release, she wrote for Hong Kong-based newspaper and other overseas papers.
In 1993, Gao was admitted to Columbia University as a visiting scholar. On the eve of her departure, she was arrested again. The formal charge was “illegally providing confidential information” about the state. She said China had just lost an Olympic bid to Sydney and she speculates that officials arrested her “to put pressure on the Western society.” This time, she was in prison for six years.
Gao was released for medical treatment in early 1999 but spent another year confined to her house. Since then, she has again written for Hong Kong newspapers. Her health is stable now, but her mother and her husband are ailing.
Gao now looks back at the monumental events that occurred since she became a reporter and says the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest success of the whole 20th Century, equal with the ending of World War II.”
She has mixed views about the separate paths taken by Russia and China. She says Chinese propaganda insists that China is doing far better than Russia and touts a growth rate that is more than double that of Russia.
What she sees, however, is the growing gap between rich and poor, severe environmental pollution and what she calls cruel exploitation of peasants. “I see that the most severe problems that happened in capitalism are now happening in China.”
Gao also continues to criticize political restrictions. “Freedom and democracy are the common rule for all the people around the world,” she said. Why, she wants to know, should there be a second-tier standard “for the Chinese situation?”