Mike Chinoy, former award-winning CNN Senior Asian Correspondent and Beijing Bureau Chief, spoke about the importance of China’s growing influence over international relations in the Cherrington Hall last Friday.

Chinoy stressed the influence Western journalism has had in shaping public sentiment about China, and he said American media coverage of China’s rise of influence in the Western world has had a significant impact on American’s view of China.

Chinoy also shared his views on past and current Chinese affairs and spoke of the importance journalists have on communicating those affairs.

“China is very important and it’s in people’s interests to know what’s happening there because it’s such an important aspect of the world today,” said Chinoy.

In addition to speaking about his journalism experience overseas, he responded to questions from peers, students and staff at the forum regarding Chinese affairs.

Chinoy’s documentary, “Assignment: China – The Week That Changed the World,” was also shown at the Cable Center last Thursday. “Assignment: China – The Week That Changed the World” is a documentary in which Chinoy reports and narrates about Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972. The documentary featured both interviews from prominent broadcast and newspaper figures present on the trip, including Dan Rather, Barbara Walters and Max Frankel, as well as newly-released video footage from the visit.

The documentary, one part of an eight-part series produced by the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute, tells the story of correspondents and others who have covered China for the American media from the 1940s to the present day.

“The behind-the-scenes story of the role of the press on the Nixon trip was not well known,” said Chinoy. “I hope people get a sense of how journalists covered the event, allowing them to be more sophisticated consumers of information they see. There’s real value in telling the story of the people who told the China story.”

Chinoy served as a foreign correspondent before working as a senior fellow at the U.S. China Institute and has reported on the Tiananmen Square massacre, the death of Mao Zedong, Soviet and U.S. wars in Afghanistan, the Southeast Asian Tsunami and political and nuclear developments in North Korea.

He has worked for CNN, CBS and NBC and won the Dupont and Peabody Awards for his coverage of the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989.