Project: Explore how to report public policy in a society with limited free speech, and make it profitable online.

Hu Ben came to journalism through blogging. In 2005, while still in college at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, he joined a writer’s network blogging about international affairs that were not covered by official Chinese media. After he graduated the next year, Ben joined Phoenix Weekly as a political affairs reporter and in 2007 he won a national journalism award for his writing about North Korean defectors in China. In 2008, he moved to Netease, one of the biggest online news sites in China. He and three other journalists followed the 2008 Olympic torch all over China, traveling 24,000 miles through 107 cities over 120 days. They published a book about the people along the route. After finishing this project, Hu joined Southern Weekend, a weekly newspaper in Guangzhou, where he has written about how Chinese government works, how public policies are made, and how information flows inside the government.

Information on this page is from the fellowship year.