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 China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between the demonstrators and the Chinese government to find a peaceful resolution, the Chinese government declared martial law on the night of 3 June and deployed troops to occupy the square in what is referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The events are sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement, the Tiananmen Square Incident, or the Tiananmen uprising.
Chai Ling is a Chinese psychologist who was one of the student leaders in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. According in the documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace, she had indicated that the strategy of the leadership group she dominated was to provoke the Government to use violence against the unarmed students. She had also claimed to have witnessed soldiers killing student protesters inside Tiananmen Square.
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.
The Tank Man is the nickname given to an unidentified individual, presumed to be a Chinese man, who stood in front of a column of Type 59 tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5, 1989. On the previous day, the government of China cleared the square of protesting students after six weeks of standoff, in the process killing hundreds or even thousands of people mostly in other parts of Beijing. The lead tank halted to avoid running him over, the man then climbed on top of the tank. The PLA soldiers operating the tank then opened a hatch used for entering and exiting the tank, and briefly talked to the man. 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.
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.
The Beijing Hotel is a five-star state-owned hotel complex in the Dongcheng District of Beijing, China. It is located at the southern end of Wangfujing Street, at the corner with East Chang'an Avenue, 1.5 km from Beijing railway station with views of the Forbidden City and part of Tiananmen Square.
Agnes Smedley was an American journalist, writer and activist who supported the Indian Independence Movement and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Raised in a poverty-stricken miner's family in Missouri and Colorado, she dramatized the formation of her feminist and socialist consciousness in the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929).
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.
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).
Sheryl WuDunn is an American business executive, writer, lecturer, and Pulitzer Prize winner.
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 to 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 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.
Catherine MacPhail was a Scottish-born author. Although she had had other jobs, she always wanted to be a writer but she did not think she would be suited to it. Her first published work was a sort of "twist-in-the-tale" story in Tit-Bits, followed by a story in The Sunday Post. After she won a romantic story competition in Woman's Weekly, she decided to concentrate on romantic novels, but after writing two, she decided that it was not right for her. In addition to writing books for children around their teens, she also wrote for adults. She is the author of the BBC Radio 2 series My Mammy and Me.
Claudius Bombarnac is an adventure novel written by Jules Verne.
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 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.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre were the first of their type shown in detail on Western television. The Chinese government's response was denounced, particularly by Western governments and media. Criticism came from both Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Australia and some east Asian and Latin American countries. Notably, many Asian countries remained silent throughout the protests; the government of India responded to the massacre by ordering the state television to pare down the coverage to the barest minimum, so as not to jeopardize a thawing in relations with China, and to offer political empathy for the events. North Korea, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, among others, supported the Chinese government and denounced the protests. Overseas Chinese students demonstrated in many cities in Europe, America, the Middle East, and Asia against the Chinese government.
