The Last Correspondent: Dispatches from the frontline of Xi’s new China – Michael Smith

Posted: March 2nd, 2021 | No Comments »

I have always read foreign correspondent accounts on China – contemporary and historical (I even wroter a history of foreign correspondents in China from the mid-19th century to 1949). Michael Smith was, until recently, with the Australian Financial Review in Shanghai and one of the smarter observers so his memoir should be well worth a read…

It was just after midnight when China’s notorious secret police came knocking.

A late-night visit to his Shanghai laneway house by China’s notorious secret police triggered a diplomatic storm which abruptly ended Michael Smith’s stint as one of Australia’s last foreign correspondents in China. After five days under consular protection, Smith was evacuated from a very different China to the country he first visited 23 years earlier.

The late-night visit marked a new twist in Australia’s 50-year diplomatic relationship with China which was now coming apart at the seams. But it also symbolised the authoritarianism creeping into every aspect of society under President Xi Jinping over the last three years.

From Xinjiang’s re-education camps to the tear-gas filled streets of Hong Kong, Smith’s account of Xi Jinping’s China documents the country’s spectacular economic rise in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.

Through first-person accounts of life on the ground and interviews with friends as well as key players in Chinese society right up to the country’s richest man, The Last Correspondent explores what China’s rise to become the world’s newest superpower means for Australia and the rest of the world.

Michael Smith has been covering China for over 20 years and is currently the China correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. He lived and reported from China up until September 2020, when the Chinese government compelled the last Australian journalists to leave the country. He currently resides in Sydney with his partner. Their dog Huey, however, remains in China awaiting his opportunity to be reunited with his family.

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