In Memory of my friend Li Xing

By Ho Manli

Li Xing's sudden death two weeks ago rendered me mute with disbelief. Not a week before her death, we had had a joyful reunion in San Francisco and she had stayed overnight at my house. After she returned to Washington, DC, we had corresponded via E-mail the day before she was stricken.

It has taken me until now to regain my voice, to add to the outpouring of shock and grief over her untimely death. Much has been said about Li Xing as a journalist, about her passion for her craft, about her dedication to China Daily. She possessed all of that, but what made Li Xing run so hard? It was a quality found in the best of journalists: hunger. She had that hunger for stories, that hunger to be on the frontlines, that hunger to bear witness when history is being made, and the fire in the belly to pursue that to the ends of the earth.

We could see it in her from the very beginning, when John Wood and I first went to Beijing to help found China Daily. We could see it from the way she first tackled feature stories as a cub reporter, to recent years, when we worked closely with her during the Beijing Olympics and later helped her launch China Daily's US Edition. Even while holding senior editorial positions, Li Xing continued to trot across the globe to cover stories. She wrote her weekly column, and we edited it every week, on the topics she had covered and cared passionately about.

She considered us kindred spirits. We came from a Western journalistic work ethic where hunger such as hers was prized, where a punishing pace like hers was the norm in the pursuit of important news. During our recent stints at China Daily, we hit the ground running as soon as we got off the plane in Beijing. That was the pace Li Xing set for herself and we followed suit, not just for China Daily, but for her.

As she entered her sixth decade, it was difficult for us to imagine Li Xing sidelined or banking her fire, so we suggested that she come across the Pacific and devote herself to her first love – reporting - as China Daily's senior US correspondent.

She came in May and plunged into her assignment with her usual zeal. The last time we saw each other, we joked about a video interview that she had given in mid-July to an American reporter who had asked her the most banal of questions outside the US-China Governor's Forum in Salt Lake City, Utah.

After Li Xing's death, we were outraged to find an anti-China screed posted online by this same reporter – who, as it turned out, works for a right-wing Tea party Republican news network - in which he called Li Xing "one of China Daily's principal propagandists".

In English, the word propagandist has negative connotations. It means a mouthpiece who will parrot, lie, and obfuscate to promote a certain agenda. No one could be further from that than Li Xing. In his remembrance of her, Li Xing's college classmate Jing Jun wrote that although attractive, she was considered a nerd by other male schoolmates. I don't know whether it was nerdiness as much earnestness, for Li Xing possessed a guilessness and purity that made her truthful, open-minded and receptive to different points of view. There was not a cynical bone in her body. She was also the most solicitous and loving of friends.

Her parting words to me in San Francisco were: "You know that idea for a joint column in which we present the American point of view and the Chinese point of view on a topic? I want to talk to you and John about that. We should get that going!"

Li Xing - "Dawn Star" - how we shall miss your exuberance. How we shall miss you!