Jaime A. FlorCruz was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent, responsible for strategic planning of the network’s news coverage of China, from 2001-2014.
FlorCruz has studied, worked, and traveled in China for more than 40 years, and he has reported extensively on the country as a journalist since 1980, when he started his journalistic career in China and worked as a reporter for Newsweek magazine. In 1982, he joined TIME magazine’s Beijing bureau and served as Beijing Bureau Chief from 1990 to 2000.
FlorCruz has witnessed and reported the most significant events of China’s past four decades, including the country’s economic and social reforms, the crackdown on the Tiananmen protests in 1989, the death of Deng Xiaoping, and the 1997 Hong Kong handover. He has also covered cross-Straits relations, the Sichuan earthquake, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang.
In addition to his on-air reporting, FlorCruz contributed regularly to CNN.com and wrote a weekly online column, “Jaime’s China,” offering analysis about Chinese society and politics.
FlorCruz is the longest-serving foreign correspondent in China to date. He was a two-term president of the 300-member Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (1988-90 and 1996-1999). He was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2000.
FlorCruz is fluent in English, Filipino, and Mandarin Chinese. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in advertising from Polytechnic University of the Philippines, a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese History from Peking University, and an Associate degree in Mandarin Chinese from the Beijing Languages Institute. He is the founding president of the Peking University International Alumni Association (2010-present).
He is now writing a book on his personal account as a student at Peking University from 1977 to 1982, to be published in early 2017.
