All eyes were focused, all ears attentive. Each word was rife with insight and life lessons. At the end of his talk, thirty-four (34) young minds were as impressed as they were inspired by the person he had become.
The man is Jaime “Jimmy” Florcruz, CNN’s bureau chief and correspondent. He’s the one we see on TV, covering China for CNN. And we’re proud to say that he’s Filipino like us.
Mr. Florcruz was the fifth speaker we, the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation (GBF) scholars, invited to “Conversations,” a professional chat series we organized to meet different people from various sectors who have accumulated valuable insights from their experiences in China.
Unlike our previous guest speakers, Florcruz invited us to his antique-inspired apartment, just a few meters from his office. After touring us around his work place, he began his talk in his living room with us comfortably gathered around him, a raconteur narrating a story to a curious crowd. Ana Segovia, his ever-cheerful wife, was graciously preparing a snack for us.
Jimmy Florcruz started his presentation with two powerful words, “China matters.” It really does to him. He would otherwise not have come to China one fateful day in August 1971. He was an advertising student, an activist, a protest theatre artist, an editor-in-chief and a student council vice president at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) when he accepted the invitation to join a 15-member Philippine Youth Delegation sponsored by the China Friendship Association. It was for a three-week tour to promote cultural exchange and foster diplomatic relations. Little did he know that the supposedly brief journey would turn into a still ongoing sojourn. From the moment he set foot on Chinese soil, Florcruz’s life would never be the same again.
He had been a vocal anti-Marcos militant in the frontline of student activism, denouncing poverty, corruption, the Vietnam War, tuition fee increase, even the law requiring students to take up Spanish. His days of “rusticated youth” as Philippine democracy disintegrated under Marcos’s authoritarian rule put him and his group in the blacklist. Going to a communist-controlled country was illegal at the time. But young Jimmy was persistent about seeing a communist-socialist country in the making.
Welcome to China
Without a direct flight from Manila to Beijing, his group flew from Manila to Hong Kong and took a train to Beijing. Their host ushered them into a small hotel and allowed them to visit universities and revolutionary landmarks around the city.
They observed the simplicity of old Chinese society – the car-less avenues, the poor and backward quality of life, the people enjoying the most basic amenities. They experienced the difficulty of being illiterate, unable to read, speak and write in the language of a strange new country.
With the onset of martial law in the Philippines, Jimmy’s return to his family was deemed too risky. This was aggravated by Marcos’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, signaling the persecution of leftists. Among the 15 delegates to China, the five blacklisted included Jimmy.
Then began the trickling in of gruesome news about colleagues – those the government classified as opponents and detractors were killed in military clashes; some went into exile; others went underground. Jimmy had no choice but to wait until the situation subsided – a long wait when he found himself stranded in a foreign country undergoing a “cultural revolution” for twelve painful years.
“Never Forget Class Struggle.”- Chairman Mao
Young Jimmy witnessed it all- the surge of civil consciousness had resulted in class warfare. The socialist utopia in his mind was totally different from what he saw – the warring factions, tremendous bloodshed, political betrayal, economic filth and squalor, simmering popular discontent, persecution left and right, name it.
He was startled by the first snow fall of his life on his first winter in December 1971. Thinking to escape a freezing Beijing, he and his group left with urban Chinese locals for Hunan, the home province of Chairman Mao. There they volunteered to work in Changjiang State Farm, wanting to bridge the gap between the intellectuals and the peasants, expecting to inculcate the Chinese proverb that those with good brains must be able to work with those with good hands.
They were asked to give manual labor – planting rice, feeding livestock, digging drainages, harvesting tea leaves and the like. The lack of other things to do after work almost bored Jimmy to death. His greatest luxury was a trip to a public hot bath once or twice a month. To further ease boredom, he wrote letters home.
Farm work was tedious and monotonous, but he learned a lot from the experience. He might have somewhat regretted giving up his well-lit, well-heated dorm in Beijing for a cold, unheated room in Hunan, but he found the wisdom he gained in the process to be worth more than what he had given up in the city.
Jimmy observed a kind of socialist utopia in the countryside – a harmonious neighborhood sharing communal resources equally. Life was hard, dull and repetitive but the people were basically satisfied, enjoying a “collective bliss and equality” in poverty. It was also an eye-opening experience to see how women in the countryside adapted to the change of circumstances. Most of them had embraced revolution and militancy, picking up arms in place of cosmetics.
Next Jimmy worked as a volunteer in a fishing company in the Yellow Sea at Shandong province from 1972-1973. By the time he returned to Beijing in 1973, his passport had expired. Now he would avail of education and employment opportunities. In 1974 he began a two-year Chinese Translation course in Beijing Language Institute (now Beijing Language and Culture University). In 1982, he managed to study and earn a degree in Chinese History at Peking University. While doing his thesis about the youth movement in his senior year, he taught English part-time to professors in Peking University and students in Peking Normal College. He also appeared several times on “Let’s Sing,” a Chinese TV station’s weekly program teaching English songs.
The Big Break
The light turned green for Jimmy Florcruz when he accepted a Newsweek Magazine offer of a job, the beginning of his journalism career, in 1980 to 1981. He relished the glory of the byline for two weeks when he wrote about the trial of Mao’s widow, then a hot national controversy. But Jimmy was destined for something bigger – his big break came in 1982, when he became a staff reporter for Time Magazine, eventually becoming its Bureau Chief from 1990 to 2000. Realistically skeptical, he had dreamt of this and was totally overwhelmed when it happened.
In the summer of 1989 he witnessed one of the darkest moments of Chinese history -the crackdown against mass protest in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Having seen the bloodbath with his own eyes led to Jimmy co-author the book “Massacre in Beijing,” another milestone in his career.
Being in China for more than 30 years has made Jimmy a critical spectator to a country in profound transformation never before seen in the world – immense changes in the last three decades marked by Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policy that triggered a long and turbulent process of recovery and economic reform.
Meanwhile his list of achievements lengthened. Eventually he became dean of the Foreign Press Corps and two-time president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China(1988-1990, 1996-1999). With a lone slot left reserved for an American journalist, Jimmy changed the rule, getting that slot and being accepted to the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York from 2000 to 2001. As CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent in China, he has interviewed prominent personalities like Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin – the Shanghai mayor who later became the president of China. His coverage has been varied – SARS, transsexuals, Panda bears, the recent winter tragedy and now, the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“Success has never been a cake walk…”- Florcruz
Jimmy Florcruz encapsulates the challenges China confronts: Can it make its rapid development sustainable? Can it maintain long-term stability? Can it coax Taiwan to peaceful unification? And can it keep its “Chineseness” while riding the global tide? These are vital questions yet to be answered and Mr. Florcruz is definitely thrilled to be an eye-witness.
Success has always been a juxtaposition of challenges and opportunities. “Great achievements stand alongside daunting challenges,” as Jimmy puts it. Hard work is always an imperative investment. Pounding the pavement makes resilience of paramount importance. He has grappled with seemingly insurmountable barriers and difficulties, beginning with language and culture shock, onto other glass ceilings to break in homesickness, pollution, red tape and more. From an optimist’s viewpoint, these predicaments have helped him acquire his competitive credentials in bilingual skills and cross-cultural knowledge.
Jimmy does not ignore luck as a vital ingredient of his life either. Hard work and skill must be incorporated with being at the right place and at the right time. He considers himself very fortunate have been “breaking barriers when the time was ripe to be doing so.”
Nor is whopping success in his professional life all he can brag about. He has also struck a balance between career and family life. He is happily married to Ana Segovia Florcruz, with a son, Johai, and a daughter, Michelle. It would take another long article to share the magic of their love story.
Foreign media vs. China’s Bureaucracy
China was never a venue for progressive ideas before embraced the market economy. With media owned and controlled by the State, press freedom was never a concrete right. Everything, even the weather forecast, is kept secret by the authorities. The past three decades have however given way to freer and more open access to public information, though the government is still not transparent enough to reveal the real score. As a journalist for the past 30 years, Jimmy has experienced the restrictions himself, making his news reporting in China gripping and distinctive.
Jay Aldecoa, a scholar from Silliman University, asked Jimmy Florcuz about the most difficult part of his job as CNN news anchor in China. His team has to grapple with censorship and information secrecy, being stonewalled at the top by bureaucratic foot-dragging, logistical problems. Doing a story means first securing a permit, then being accompanied and assisted by a Chinese official in the process of getting information.
In SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in Beijing, Jimmy had to rely on whistleblowers and unofficial sources as authorities desperately hid its severity. His team had to gather and deliver the news at the risk of their health and well-being. But with foreign media in disseminating information worldwide, incompetence in handling the problem of SARS has consequently forced the government to invest sufficiently in the public health sector.
With its increasing geopolitical importance, China cannot afford to be as secretive nowadays, says Florcruz. Hosting the 2008 summer Olympics has opened the way to experimenting with positive changes and farther penetration by foreign media
A Global Superpower?
Paolo San Gabriel from the University of Santo Tomas asked Mr. Florcruz in the open-forum if he believes China will become a global superpower in the future. Jimmy gave a fascinating answer. It is not a question of “if” but a question of “when,” he said. China is certain to exercise a major global influence. Given its exponential growth in the last three decades, it is inevitably bound to become even greater, bigger, better.
China has become what it is today because of its pragmatic, pro-business environment which promotes the boom of private enterprises, foreign investments and trade, he stressed. In addition, the system of government has been decentralized and there is an ample supply of cheap labor and a better flow of information. On the other side of the coin is the price of prosperity in unemployment, regionalism, social unrest, corruption, environmental degradation and the growing gap between the rich and the poor.
Jimmy Florcruz encapsulates the challenges China confronts: Can it make its rapid growth sustainable? Can it maintain long-term stability? Can it coax Taiwan to peaceful unification? And can ot keep its “Chineseness” while riding the global tide? These are vital questions yet to be answered and Mr. Florcruz is definitely thrilled to be an eye-witness.
His story was very appealing to 34 Filipino scholars who have already spent more than five months in China. Like him, most of us experienced our first winter in Beijing and enrolled in the same school where he studied Chinese. His trip was supposed to last for only three weeks; it has lasted for over 30 years and counting. We were sent by the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation to study Mandarin and Chinese culture in Beijing for ten months. Who knows? We might want to stay longer like Jimmy, not because of political persecution back home but because of constant enticement in China’s diverse cultures, rich history, boundless opportunities and sweeping changes.
As Jimmy Florcruz puts it, “After thirty years, China is as different as night and day. Experiencing the changes is exhilarating. China is like a bottomless mine to explore and study.”
