Why we need local perspectives to visualize China

How our newsletter Far & Near offers real insights into Chinese society

Screenshot farandnear.substack.com

We are Yan, Charlotte, and Beimeng, three long-time friends and partners from China who are working and studying in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Shanghai.

Over the past decade, we have worked as visual storytellers with various international news outlets. But there has been something bugging us — we see stories about China illustrated with the same stereotypical tropes, like strongman leaders, faceless workers, and omnipresent surveillance cameras.

While these depictions are not entirely inaccurate, they present a distorted and oversimplified view of China and its people.

From left: Yan Cong, Beimeng Fu, Ye Charlotte Ming

Together, we created Far & Near, a newsletter that provides genuine insights into Chinese society for people interested in China beyond geopolitical headlines.

By highlighting visual stories created by local journalists and artists and offering analysis of significant social and cultural issues in the country, we help people see and understand China as a complex and multifaceted society, just like any other.

One story, two approaches

We achieve this by highlighting human-centered, visual stories that complement the foreign media’s macro-level coverage of China’s politics and economy.

Last year, China had a real estate crisis that was widely covered by international media, but most of the reports focused on the financial and economic aspects, treating the story as if it were just about steel, concrete, and money. What was missing from the grand narrative was the devastating impact felt by ordinary Chinese people.

A resident lives in an unfinished apartment. Far & Near featured the story in a recent issue. Photo by Zou Biyu/iFeng

In contrast, Chinese photographer Zou Biyu spent weeks documenting the experiences of homebuyers who moved into an unfinished apartment, providing a perspective on the human toll of the crisis. Zou’s photos take readers into these unfinished homes, inviting them to see the homeowners as individuals, instead of faceless victims of bursting housing bubbles.

At Far & Near, we champion local perspectives like Zou’s that are both critical and empathetic. These stories, told through local perspectives, have become some of the peepholes into China, as the number of foreign journalists based in the country has dropped dramatically due to harsh visa restrictions.

An award-winning video produced by our own Beimeng Fu that showed the frustrating and heartbreaking days of a wife whose husband died in the Zhengzhou subway flood in 2021.

The road we walked

Since launching Far & Near in May 2021, we have been striving to highlight visual stories from China, such as Zou’s, in over 20 issues we’ve published. Along with curating the best stories, our Q&A issues offer insight into the craft of visual journalists and artists, while our special issues respond to the most pressing stories from China.

The efforts have brought us some recognition: We have been a Substack “Featured Publication” in the past two years. Our work has been recommended by leading publications such as Semafor, The China Project, and The Nieman Lab.

But we are most proud of the real impact we’ve created. When protests broke out across China last November, many international media published photos of protestors that can be easily identified by Chinese authorities. We put out suggestions on how to photograph protests ethically with a key message: minimize harm. It prompted many colleagues in international media to bring the case to their newsrooms and question their existing editorial standards.

Poster depicting a statue of the God of Workout by photographer Zhang Xiao. Far & Near featured the collection & photography project in a recent issue. Credit: The Three Shadow Photography Art Center

The sustainability struggle

Despite our passion to devote as much of our spare time to Far & Near and the positive feedback we’ve received, we face the same challenges that many independent journalism ventures face — the lack of revenue, sleep, and a clear roadmap to achieve our product’s full potential.

We joined EJCP with two burning questions:

1. Given our time constraints, how can we be certain that a particular change of strategy is the right one, before devoting a significant amount of time and resources to it?

2. How to achieve sustainability? We were hoping the program would hand us the solution to the puzzle.

However, our mentor Nancy Wang and other lecturers turned our questions back at us. What do we want for Far & Near? How does it fit into our individual career paths, knowing that we won’t quit our jobs or studies to pursue it full time? In other words, we need to have an honest conversation about our goals and define what sustainability looks like for ourselves.

To us, Far & Near is a testing ground for running an independent publication with full editorial control without censorship and selective portrayal. It is also an outlet for us to share our passion for visual storytelling and our insights into Chinese society with our readers. We feel rewarded when we see the positive impact our work has created in a difficult media environment, but we also need to generate sufficient revenue to avoid feeling burnt out by our own passion. Here’s the formula we came up with:

Sustainability = meaningful content + sufficient revenue + making an impact

After finding our North Star, our mentor emphasized the importance of setting up measurable goals by adapting the OKRs framework and introduced us to the concept of Minimum Viable Tests (MVTs), a set of defined experiments that run for a limited time to determine which one has helped us achieve our objectives. If something is working, we keep doing it. If not, tweak the test and try again. Or, if a test is not successful, file it away and don’t dwell on the failure.

A photo and video story about the tropical worlds hidden in Beijing apartments. Far & Near featured the project in a recent issue. Photo by Ding Gang/Caixin

With these guidelines, we have implemented some changes to test their viability:

• A new publishing schedule from irregular to twice a month on every other Thursday, to help form a habit for our readers.
• Clarified targeted our audiences. Besides our existing China observers and visual art audiences, we’ve identified a third group — the Chinese diaspora who want to stay updated on the country from insightful local sources.
• Equal time promoting our work and writing it. As journalists, our focus on content can cause us to overlook the importance of distribution. We extended our social media presence from Twitter, where most China observers are active, to also include Instagram to engage with the visual art community. In the coming months, we will use various channels like Facebook groups to reach out to the diaspora communities.
• Diversified revenue streams. While we have several multivariate tests (MVTs) in place to enhance the conversion rate of free to paid members, we realize that reader contributions alone are not enough to cover our operational costs. We will make up revenue through other forms, such as social businesses (speaking engagements and workshops) and seeking grant funding to support our work.

We are excited to embark on our next 100-day journey, where experimentation and action take center stage, and we invite you to come along. If you’d like to see the real faces of China and gain genuine insights into the society, please sign up for Far & Near and drop us a note at yuanjinpj@gmail.com.