BEIJING: David Ferguson, 65, wore a kilt when taking a group photo with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and other foreign experts on September 30. Ferguson and the other foreign experts were all receiving 2020 and 2021 Friendship Awards, which are given annually by the Chinese Government to honor outstanding foreign experts working in China.
Ferguson works as a writer and editor for Foreign Language Press (FLP) and has been in China for 15 years. When he was young, he travelled extensively around the world, but China had never been on his radar. “It was just too big and too far away,” Ferguson told Beijing Review.
He met his Chinese wife when she was studying in the UK and the couple moved to China in 2006. “I came to China with a great ignorance of what the country was like,” he said. He thought of China as a huge, poor country with one or two outposts of modernity, namely Beijing and Shanghai, and of the people as po-faced peasants in green Mao suits. “My imagination was, I think, shared by many people in the West,” he added.
However, when Ferguson arrived in Jilin, an industrial city in northeast China’s Jilin Province and the home city of his wife, he discovered a reality far different from his expectations. “It was absolutely nothing like that,” he said, recalling Jilin to be a modern city and the people to be dressed in modern, fashionable clothes. “There was a lot of food and a decent standard of living.”
In early 2008, his wife found an advert for a job as a journalist and editor with China.org.cn, a Beijing-based government online portal to China. However, Ferguson originally had misgivings about becoming part of the Chinese media and working on behalf of the Chinese Government.
The events that changed his mind were the violent riots that took place in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region on March 14, 2008. “That was a big story here in China. And it was also a big story in the Western media,” he said. He read extensively, watched a lot of footage of the event, and found that he was looking at two completely different stories—the Western media story and what was actually happening. “The Western media story, bluntly, was a pack of lies,” Ferguson said. “So, I decided that at least some person should try to do whatever they could to tell a more truthful and honest story.” More than one month later, he became an editor with China.org.cn.
During his two years with the online portal, Ferguson covered many major events, including the Wenchuan Earthquake and the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games. “My journalism was mostly about confronting Western myths,” he said.
For example, when encountering fake news about 1.5 million Beijing residents being evicted from their homes to make way for the Olympics, he was angry. “That was probably the biggest single lie that I have ever seen,” Ferguson said. As a foreigner living in Beijing, he researched the story very carefully and wrote what he found to be the truth.
Ferguson, however, can neither speak nor read Chinese. “I did not try to paint a picture of what China was saying. I read very carefully what the Western media was saying and challenged their versions of events,” he said.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
