William J. Holstein

My involvement in China started by accident. I was a young man on the foreign desk at United Press International in New York. I wanted so badly to become a foreign correspondent. I would have gone anywhere--South Africa or Paris or anywhere.

One day, the phone call came: "Bill, we need you in Hong Kong." President Jimmy Carter and China's Deng Xiaoping had normalized relations between the two countries and UPI needed to send senior correspondents into Beijing (then called Peking) and I was a backup in Hong Kong. Part of my job was covering southern China and the Canton Trade Fair.

The story of whether the Chinese could overcome their bitter ideological warfare and concentrate on getting rich was happening in the south, where Deng was allowing experimentation with four Special Economic Zones. So I won an Overseas Press Club award for best foreign economic reporting because I had stumbled into southern China at the young and tender age of 27.

The experience shaped my whole life. I later became Beijing bureau chief for UPI and have now been covering U.S.-China issues for 40 years.

Over the past decade, I have been increasingly concerned about the direction Xi Jinping is taking China. In 2014, I helped organize an Overseas Press Club reunion of China correspondents, which resulted in the book, "Has the American Media Misjudged China?: Thirty-five years after China's opening to the world, some of the key assumptions that have guided coverage are being tested by the presidency of Xi Jinping." That was followed by "The New Art of War: China's Deep Strategy Inside the United States" in 2019. And then came "A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology, and Restoring the Media" in 2021. "Battlefield Cyber" marks almost a full decade that I have been warning the world about Xi Jinping.