Shuli Hu

Shuli Hu was the very first Pacific Leadership Fellow. During Ms. Hu's three-month long residence, she collaborated with faculty on issues concerning the Chinese media. In May 2006, Ms. Hu was a featured presenter at Changing Media, Changing China, a conference held at IR/PS.

Ms. Hu is the editor-in-chief of Caijing, an independent business and financial journal published out of Beijing, China. Since Ms. Hu's launch of Caijing in April 1998, the journal has become the leading domestic publication concerning China's financial markets and business environment. Under Ms. Hu's editorial leadership and journalistic vision, Caijing's profile as a respected journal has grown worldwide, with economists, scholars, and the public looking to Caijing for reliable and thorough investigations of the Chinese market. The magazine has exposed corruption and abuses in corporate governance, banking, and the stock markets. It also was largely responsible for breaking the story of the SARS epidemic.

Ms. Hu's career in journalism was actually not one that she chose herself. She was assigned to study journalism when she was admitted by the Chinese literature department of Beijing University after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Upon graduation, Ms. Hu was assigned to the Worker's Daily and sent to Xiamen, one of China's Special Economic Zones (SEZ), to found the newspaper's first local bureau. In 1987, Ms. Hu was awarded a World Press Institute fellowship for early career journalists to study in the United States. In the early 1990s, she was transferred to China Industry & Business Times and became the chief of the international desk. As the 1990's progressed, Ms. Hu became more intent on creating a news medium that would be both informative and powerful in China. As she states, "I soon found that in China, reporting on business and finance is much more exciting and practical than reporting on politics. While business and finance constitute the motivating force pushing our society forward, and thus offer the most fascinating scenarios for journalists to cover, they are less taboo than politics in China. We are thus able to go beyond what falls into the narrow definition of business and finance, and can indulge ourselves in covering business-related issues such as SARS."

Ms. Hu was honored by the World Press Review as the 2003 International Editor of the Year. The World Press Review presents the award each year to an editor or editors outside the United States in recognition of enterprise, courage, and leadership in advancing the freedom and responsibility of the press, enhancing human rights, and fostering excellence in journalism.