Dai Qing is a Beijing-based freelance journalist, environmentalist, and investigative historian who has published more than 20 books in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, UK, the US and Canada. Her 1989 book on the controversial Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River, Yangtze! Yangtze!, was hailed by the Far Eastern Economic Review as a “watershed event in post-1949 Chinese politics, representing the first use of public lobbying by intellectuals and public figures.” Dai Qing continued her pioneering use of environmental investigative journalism in China in a 1997 follow-up book on the dam project, The River Dragon Has Come! After publicly denouncing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, she resigned from the Chinese Communist Party and was later imprisoned for 10 months.
Dai Qing was a 1992 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and is the recipient of the 1992 World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen for Freedom Award, the 1993 Goldman Environmental Award, and the 1993 Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award. Dai Qing was a 1998-99 Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. She is also a Probe International Fellow, a Toronto-based environmental think-tank with whom she has collaborated since her release from prison. Probe International is the sponsor of her current trip to Canada where she is giving public talks at the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, and University of British Columbia.
