During the News Corp-Dow Jones takeover period, the Journal published an article on its parent company’s history that was both entertaining and contained a bit that was relevant to reporting on China today. Here’s the passage:

In those days, a financial journalist was a combination private detective, stenographer and gossip columnist.”Gathering news was a bare-knuckle business,” wrote Oliver Gingold, who joined Dow Jones in 1900 and stayed for six decades. “Many companies refused to issue annual reports even to their own stockholders.” Reporters spent long hours “waiting outside directors’ rooms or corporate offices for a chance at buttonholing an ‘insider.’” Messengers shadowing the reporters ran the news back to the office where scribes made carbon copies — as many as 24 at a time — that were hand delivered to subscribers.

Remember NYT business journalist David Barboza’s detention in a toy factory (his story on that was headlined ‘My Time as a Hostage, And I’m a Business Reporter’)? And he’s a foreign correspondent with relative freedom to report. Local journalists who want to dig deep must surely be even more ‘bare-knuckle’ in their approach.

A quite fascinating post from the folks at 2point6billion.com by Josh Gartner of China Expat magazine on the ancient trade route, through Tibet, between China and India:

The western media has meticulously documented China’s recent economic explosion. Yet for a long time many wondered why India, the world’s second most populous country, lagged so far behind. Some surmised it had something to do with cultural differences, while other postulated that the problem was political. In the last few years, this debate has disappeared as quickly as India’s record of slow growth has. But a new question has emerged: will China and India be able to move past their rivalry and become partners once again?

The two countries share long borders, primarily along the edge of Tibet, and have coexisted in one form or another for thousands of years. Tea and Buddhism have flowed across their mountainous boundaries and defined their cultures since before Mohammed was born. Yet in the modern era, bilateral trade has remained surprisingly minimal until quite recently. As of 2000, it amounted to only US$2.9 billion, or slightly more than 1980 levels of Sino-US trade, well before China had liberalized its economy.

In the last six years, though, things have changed considerably. China and India’s once precarious relationship, while still somewhat fragile, is gaining strength quickly. Trade has gone up nearly nine-fold since the turn of the millennium, and Beijing is now India’s second most important trading partner by volume (after the US). While specific political differences contributed to the late start of modern economic cooperation, trade has been difficult, yet critical, throughout their shared history.

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