Chris Fyall, left, and Greg Andrews, right, interview a Chinese official

If you have been following this blog from the beginning, you may recall that one of the goals for IU’s delegation to China has been to help Hoosiers to better understand China as a people and culture and also how its economic activities are affecting them.

To this aim, two journalists accompanied us: Greg Andrews, managing editor of The Indianapolis Business Journal; and Chris Fyall, a reporter at the Bloomington Herald-Times. Chris and Greg and I joined IU journalism professors Lars Willnat and Emily Metzgar in presenting at a conference at Zhejiang University.

Chris and Greg also were gathering information and talking to many sources throughout the week. Chris filed reports from China, which appeared in the pages of the newspaper. Like me, Greg blogged and worked on a series of articles which came out today in the pages of the IBJ and at the business newsweekly’s web site, http://www.ibj.com.

As you may discern, I am sharing with you links to their fine work. A subscription is needed to access Chris’ articles. He told me today that he’ll have a full wrap-up story in the paper later this week.

We returned from China little over a week ago, but Professor Scott Kennedy remained in the country for a few more days. While there, he discovered that the IBJ‘s site has been blocked in China, along with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. “I can’t see anything in your blogs that would justify this,” Kennedy said in an e-mail, “but in one sense you can take pride you’re receiving attention.”

In advance of our trip, the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business (RCCPB) welcomed to IU Bloomington John Pomfret, The Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent for Asia. We had an opportunity to interview Pomfret, who spent seven years covering China.

Below is a link to an article I wrote for Perspectives on Policy, an electronic newsletter that went out to about 200,000 IU alumni and friends. My colleague Steve Hinnefeld produces the newsletter each month, along with others on the arts, sports, science, health and wellness and IT, which you can subscribe to here.

Pomfret provided a lot of useful context for what we saw and reported on. Here is a link to my article, which I hope you’ll find interesting.

More photos are coming.