Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Marian David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is Reporting from China.

With me to discuss the decline of foreign reporting from China and his consequences for U.S. China

relations is Jane Perlis.

Jane is a fellow at the Belfare Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard

Kennedy School of Government and was a longtime foreign correspondent

for the New York Times. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993 for her reporting on famine in

Somalia and a member of the New York Times team that was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for reporting

on the war in al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Jane reported for the New York Times from China starting in 2012, leaving as the Times as Beijing

Bureau Chief in 2019. She currently hosts the podcast Faceoff, the U.S. versus China, which recently featured an episode on the decline in the number of journalists reporting from China for U.S. media outlets.

Jane, congratulations on Face Off, and thank you for joining me on the President's inbox.

Thank you, Jim. Very good to speak to a fellow podcaster.

Well, I'm honored to be able to speak to someone who's reporting I have avidly consumed

for a number of years.

You're one of the best at the trade.

So, again, thank you for taking the time to chat with me.

And I want to just begin with something I was struck by listening to

a recent episode of Face Off. This is your episode on journalists in China. And you noted that

today there are only about 20 journalists in China reporting for U.S. media outlets. Tell me some more about that.

Well, the first thing I can say is that it's obviously way too few journalists for covering

America's strategic rival, most important strategic rival, and I might add, for covering

...