Dai Qing is a journalist and author who has published more than 20 books in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and several English- and German-speaking countries. Her 1989 book on the controversial Three Gorges Dam Project on China’s Yangtze River was hailed by the Far Eastern Economic Review as a “watershed event in post-1949 Chinese politics, representing the first use of public lobbying by intellectuals and public figures.”
She continued her pioneering use of environmental investigative journalism in China in a 1997 follow-up book “The River Dragon Has Come!” on the dam project. After publicly denouncing the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, she resigned from the Chinese Communist Party and was imprisoned for 10 months. In 1992 she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and is the recipient of the World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen for Freedom Award, the Goldman Environmental Award and the Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award.