The Journalist Who Braves Dangers and Breaks News

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When Zhang Quanling appeared in CCTV live coverage of the 8.0-quake in Sichuan on 14th May, 2008, no one was surprised. For the last few years, the national audience had been familiar with her reports at places closest to where news was breaking. The female television reporter, a native of Ningbo, Zhejiang and a graduate of the German language from Peking University in 1996, has covered various important events since she joined the CCTV in 1997.

Sichuan

When the quake hit the western Sichuan on the afternoon of May 12, Zhang was in Lhasa, a few days after covering the Olympic torch relay on the Zhumulangma and a few hundreds of miles from the epicenter. She set out the next day afternoon from Lhasa and reached Mianyang in the same night. She immediately plunged into the news coverage.

She worked around the clock. From 10:30 pm on May 14th to 1:30 am on May 15th in Dujiangyan, the CCTV showed her coverage of the final phase of a group of fire brigade soldiers working to pull out a woman from rubble. The rescue effort had lasted 13 hours. The woman was finally pulled out after spending 56 hours under rubbles. The whole nation saw how the woman was rescued and how soldiers applauded after the rescue.

On another occasion, after a nine-hour trek from Xuankou Town to Dujiangyan, she told the nation that on her way back to Dujiangyan she had seen villagers on the road 24 hours a day with food and hot water in order to feed PLA soldiers rushing to disaster-stricken areas. She told the nation that soldiers walked all the way from the town to Dujiangyan and back to the town again carrying medicine to be used to prevent the possible outbreak of plagues. She reported to the national audience that on the nine-hour trek back to Dujiangyan a whole mountain 500 meters behind her and her CCTV crew suddenly moved and crashed into the road.

Her coverage in the quake area is highly evaluated by some experts. One expert commented that unlike some other reporters who used scenes as a background, Zhang Quanling tried her best to be closest to the spot where the news was breaking and she interacted actively with people on the spot.

Afghanistan

Sichuan was not her first encounter with earthquake. She ran into an earthquake in Afghanistan in 2002. On March 25, 2002, Zhang and camera man Kang Rui arrived in Kabul with the first batch of emergency aids from the Chinese government. A 5.9-magnitude earthquake hit an area north of Kabul that night. There was no television and no English newspaper at the hotel. The local government had not yet announced the earthquake. It was through the contact with the CCTV headquarter back in Beijing that she learned that there had been a quake nearby. She decided to go, saying that she was a journalist and since she was right there, she wanted Chinese people to watch CCTV’s coverage of the event instead of watching CNN or AP channels.

So the duo hired a four-wheel-drive vehicle and set out after informing the Chinese embassy in Kabul of their action plan. The road conditions were worse than expected. It took them nine hours to cover 200 kilometers of the mountain roads. They ran into a very bad traffic jam in a tunnel. The muddy air in the tunnel made breathing difficult and someone fainted. What they saw in the disaster area was horrifying. Aftershocks made their report difficult. In one of the aftershock, their camera on a tripod was thrown to the ground. After the coverage, they came back to Kabul on March 29th, just a few hours before the curfew in the capital of Afghanistan. It was the most dangerous, most challenging but most successful coverage Zhang Quanling has conducted.

She also said that the local people were very friendly to Chinese. They said that Chinese never did a bad thing to them in all these years and that China was a good neighbor and friend. On the way to and back, the interpreter pointed out water control projects and a hospital built by Chinese engineers.

Other Journalist Missions

Other assignments Zhang Quanling has done are less dangerous but equally newsworthy. She emceed a 140-miniute 7-episode talk show with a senior expert at the Xichang Space Center in September 2007 when China launched its Chang’e Moon explorer. She was a member of the CCTV crew that covered the Athens Olympic Games. She participated in the CCTV’s live coverage on the activities to fight SARS, a trip to Lop Nor, a Chinese sportsman’s epic swim across the English Channel, and the Taiwan leaders’ visit to the mainland.