My address to the 2012 graduates of the Global Business Journalism program at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
I am going to talk with you a bit about luck and about your careers. In China, as you know, luck is important. There are lucky numbers, like 8, so the Olympic games started here in Beijing at 8 pm on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008. The world is an unpredictable and sometimes scary place, so we need all the luck we can get.
About 10 years after I started my journalism career, I was working at a large daily newspaper. I had covered the mayor's office for about three years, and I was tired of endless conflicts with the mayor, who was always calling the editor and complaining about my work. The mayor's version of reality was different from the version of reality that I was putting in the newspaper. So I asked for a new assignment.
