For the past six years, Mitch Moxley has lived the life of a young expat journalist in Beijing. In that time he has appeared on a Chinese dating show and in a music video, written about his time posing as a fake Western businessman at the behest of a mainland company, and worked in the bowels of state media. He has also written for The Atlantic , Time , The New York Times and other international publications. His first book, Apologies to My Censor , charts this period of his life. He talks to .
Where books by writers such as Peter Hessler ( Strange Stones) and Michael Meyer ( Last Days of Old Beijing) look at China through the eyes of a foreigner, mine is very much about the life of a foreigner in China. I felt no book had addressed the foreigner experience in China since Foreign Babes in Beijing, which took place in the 1990s and might as well be a different eon in China-time. Apologies to My Censor is about the six years I spent in China, chronicling the year I spent at the state-owned China Daily, my attempts to learn the ropes of freelancing in a foreign country, as well as some of the more offbeat adventures and misadventures of being an outsider in China. It's part travelogue, part memoir, and hopefully a bit more humorous in nature than most China books out there. I wanted to write a candid book about the expat experience, even if that meant exposing some details about myself that I wasn't totally comfortable with sharing.
I came to China on a whim. I was working as a freelance journalist in Canada and was less than satisfied about where my career, and life in general, was heading. One day I found an advert online for a job as an editor and writer for China Daily. I had never really imagined coming to China, but I figured I had nothing to lose. The next thing I knew I was on a plane to Beijing with a one-year contract. I planned to stay for a year but quickly got addicted and ended up staying for six.
The most common form of censorship at China Daily is self-imposed. Most people know what they can and cannot report, and rarely push boundaries. Of course, once in a while it's more overt. I filed stories that never went to print, editors can cut anything remotely sensitive from articles, and on a few occasions I was told beforehand that I couldn't report certain things.