Catherine Sampson or Cate Sampson is a British writer of crime/thriller fiction. Her first four novels were published by Pan Macmillan, using the name Catherine Sampson. [1] . Her most recent books have been published using the name Cate Sampson. She has also worked as a foreign correspondent for The Times and other publications.
Sampson was born in 1962 [2] in Swindon, England. [3] She studied Chinese at Leeds University where she graduated with a BA in 1984. [4] She then studied at Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. [5] After working for the BBC in London she was assigned by The Times to Beijing in 1988. [6] As the newspaper's China correspondent, Sampson covered the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. [7] She also worked as a freelance journalist during the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 [8] before beginning her literary career in London. Since 2001 she has been based again in Beijing. [9] Sampson's first novel, Falling Off Air, was published in 2004. She is married to James Miles, a foreign correspondent of The Economist. [10]
The heroine of Sampson's early books was Robin Ballantyne, a British TV journalist working for "the Corporation" (possibly a veiled reference to the BBC, [11] for which Sampson herself had once worked, and which was also her husband's employer during the 1980s and 90s [12] [13] ). In Falling Off Air (2004), [14] Ballantyne witnesses the death of a celebrity neighbour and gradually discovers how it mysteriously relates to her own professional and private world. [15] In Out of Mind (2005), Ballantyne goes in search of a missing camerawoman, and becomes embroiled in "Corporation" intrigues. Ballantyne is less central to the action in Sampson's third novel, The Pool of Unease (2007), in which she shares the main role with Song Ren, a private detective. [16] [17] Both are trying to unravel the murder of a British man in Beijing. In the fourth novel, The Slaughter Pavilion (2008), Ballantyne is mentioned only briefly and Song becomes the protagonist. [18] His investigations explore the gritty and lawless world of rural China. [19]
Hit and Run in Beijing: Portrait of a City (2008) ISBN 962-217-803-0 [20]
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The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth Clearing or June Fourth Massacre, troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement or the Tiananmen Square Incident.
Chai Ling is a Chinese psychologist who was one of the student leaders in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. She is the founder of All Girls Allowed, an organization dedicated to ending China's one-child policy, and the founder and president of Jenzabar, an enterprise resource planning software firm for educational institutions.
Kathryn Adie is an English journalist. She was Chief News Correspondent for BBC News between 1989 and 2003, during which time she reported from war zones around the world.
Tank Man is the nickname of an unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a column of Type 59 tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5, 1989, the day after the Chinese government's violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and shared to a worldwide audience. Internationally, it is considered one of the most iconic images of all time. Inside China, the image and the accompanying events are subject to censorship.
John Ringo is an American science fiction and military fiction author. He has had several New York Times best sellers. His books range from straightforward science fiction to a mix of military and political thrillers. He has over seven million copies of his books in print, and his works have been translated into seven different languages.
Jan Wong is a Canadian academic, journalist, and writer. Wong worked for The Globe and Mail, serving as Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, when she returned to write from Canada. She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong's buffet in 1963, and earlier of the House of Wong which was the city's first Chinese restaurant to open outside Chinatown.
Ding Zilin is a retired professor of philosophy and the leader of the political activist group Tiananmen Mothers. Ding is the mother of Jiang Jielian, one of the first student protestors killed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and ensuing crackdown.
Tananarive Priscilla Due is an American author and educator. Due won the American Book Award for her novel The Living Blood. She is also known as a film historian with expertise in Black horror. Due teaches a course at UCLA called "The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic", which focuses on the Jordan Peele film Get Out.
Jan Mark was a British writer best known for children's books. In all she wrote over fifty novels and plays and many anthologised short stories. She won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject, both for Thunder and Lightnings (1976) and for Handles (1983). She was also a "Highly Commended" runner up for Nothing To Be Afraid Of (1980). In addition, she has won the Carnegie Medal twice.
Chaohua Wang is a freelance essayist and researcher, with a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Xiong Yan is a Chinese-American human rights activist, military officer, and Protestant chaplain. He was a dissident involved in 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Xiong Yan studied at Peking University Law School from 1986–1989. He came to the United States of America as a political refugee in 1992, and later became a chaplain in U.S. Army, serving in Iraq. Xiong Yan is the author of three books, and has earned six degrees. He ran for Congress in New York's 10th congressional district in 2022, and his campaign was reportedly attacked by agents of Communist China's Ministry of State Security.
Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now is a 1996 book by Chinese-Canadian journalist Jan Wong. Wong describes how the youthful passion for left-wing and socialist politics drew her to participate in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Speaking little Chinese, she became one of the first Westerners to enroll in Beijing University in 1972.
Claudius Bombarnac is an adventure novel written by Jules Verne.
Beijing, alternatively romanized as Peking, is the capital of the People's Republic of China. With over 21 million residents, Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city and is China's second largest city after Shanghai. It is located in Northern China, and is governed as a municipality under the direct administration of the State Council with 16 urban, suburban, and rural districts. Beijing is mostly surrounded by Hebei Province with the exception of neighboring Tianjin to the southeast; together, the three divisions form the Jingjinji megalopolis and the national capital region of China.
Tiananmen Square or Tian'anmen Square is a city square in the city center of Beijing, China, named after the eponymous Tiananmen located to its north, which separates it from the Forbidden City. The square contains the Monument to the People's Heroes, the Great Hall of the People, the National Museum of China, and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China in the square on October 1, 1949; the anniversary of this event is still observed there. The size of Tiananmen Square is 765 x 282 meters. It has great cultural significance as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history.
The 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre (20周年六四遊行) was a series of rallies that took place in late May to early June 2009 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, during which the Chinese government sent troops to suppress the pro-democracy movement. While the anniversary is remembered around the world; the event is heavily censored on Chinese soil, particularly in Mainland China. Events which mark it only take place in Hong Kong, and in Macao to a much lesser extent.
The persecution of Falun Gong is the antireligious campaign initiated in 1999 by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to eliminate the spiritual practice of Falun Gong in China, maintaining a doctrine of state atheism. It is characterized by a multifaceted propaganda campaign, a program of enforced ideological conversion and re-education and reportedly a variety of extralegal coercive measures such as arbitrary arrests, forced labor and physical torture, sometimes resulting in death.
Liu Xianbin, from Suining, Sichuan province, People's Republic of China, is a human rights activist, China Democracy Party organizer, writer and signer of Charter 08.
Dori Jones Yang is an American author and journalist specializing in topics related to China.
Feng Congde is a Chinese dissident and Republic of China Restoration activist. He was as a student leader from Peking University during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which placed him onto the Chinese government's 21 Most Wanted list. He spent 10 months hiding in various locations in mainland China, until he was smuggled out to Hong Kong on a shipping vessel.
