Professor Jaime A. FlorCruz is a veteran China-watcher and foreign correspondent in China. He was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent, responsible for strategic planning of the network’s news coverage of China from 2001 to 2014. He served as TIME Magazine’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent from 1982 to 2000 and Newsweek’s Beijing reporter in 1981. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Peking University, and the Founding President of Peking University Overseas Students’ Alumni Association from 2012 until present.

He served concurrently as the China Chairman of the Fortune Global Forum, a meeting of global business and political leaders, held in Beijing in 2005, Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 2013, and Guangzhou in 2017. As a Time Inc. consultant, his year-long work for the forum focused on program development and government relations.

Jimi, as he was fondly called by his colleagues, took two years of intensive Chinese language study at the Beijing Languages Institute in 1976. He received his B.A. in Chinese History from Peking University in 1982, in addition to B.A. in Advertising at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in 1971. He worked for a year in a state farm in Hunan province in 1972, and also in a fishing corporation in Shandong Province from 1973 to 1974. Twice weekly, he gave English lessons to professors at Peking University in 1978 and students at Peking Normal College from 1979 to 1981. He also appeared on Chinese national television, teaching English songs every week for the program, “Let’s Sing.”

Professor FlorCruz has extensively reported in China since 1981 when he started his journalism career as a Beijing reporter for Newsweek. In 1982, he joined TIME Magazine’s Beijing bureau and served as Beijing bureau chief from 1990 to 2000. In 2000, he was the Edward R. Morrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the first non-American journalist chosen for the prestigious fellowship. He has witnessed and reported the most significant events in China for the past three decades. In addition to his on-air reporting, Professor FlorCruz contributes regularly to CNN.com and writes a weekly online column “Jaime’s China” offering analysis about Chinese society and politics.

Professor FlorCruz is the Dean of the Foreign Press Corps in Beijing, having been the longest serving foreign correspondent in China until his retirement in 2015. He was a two-term president of the 400-member Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China from 1988 to 1990 and from 1996 to 1999. In November 2017, he was elected to a four-year term as one of the Vice-Chairs of the Peking University Alumni Association, the first-ever foreign alumnus elected to the position. Professor FlorCruz is fluent in English, Filipino, and Mandarin Chinese.