The Chinese immigration official sees her as a fashion reporter, working for a publication with a very industrial title, “Women’s Wear Daily” which based in New York City, covering non-political events such as the Miss World beauty pageant at the city of Ordos, near Mongolia.

But that’s just a glimpse of what Kathleen McLaughlin, really is. In person, she is delightful to chat with, frank and straightforward, with occasional mischief smile flashing on her face when she tells stories about her adventure in China as a foreign correspondent for numerous publication such as Bloomberg, Global Post, The Guardian and The Economist since more than a decade ago.

One thing for sure, she is obviously more than just a fashion journalist. Kathleen was one of the first international reporters who covered Tibet in 2008, right after the worst anti-China riot in 20 years, that killed no less than 140 people –according to the Tibetan government in exile.

She is also the one who uncover the link between China’s growing plasma industry in Henan province in the early 1990s — where poor farmers were paid to donate their blood plasma– and the worrying HIV/AIDS epidemic that rapidly spread in the area.

Her stories led her to all corners of China, meeting people from all walk of life, including strangers that can put her own life in danger. One of Kathleen’s frightening moments was in 2008, when a young man guarding a factory in Xinjiang pointed a gun at her, telling her to stay away. She was there to cover the riot in a province where the Moslem Uyghur minority is often oppressed. “My photographer and I don’t even react right away, we kind of look at each other and don’t talk to each other for an hour,” she says.

I meet her for a lunch at the Dudley cafeteria, Lehmann Hall, right at the corner of Harvard Yard, last Monday. She arrives on time and gives a big smile when she sees me.

Of course, her time in China has some wonderful moments too. She loves hiking on the Great Wall of China and she often find solace outside of Beijing where she can see the blue sky. Although she can live with the pollution in Beijing, the only thing that she cant stand is the fact that sometime the sky is so grey with thick smog. “They really have to do something about the pollution,” she says.

In overall, Kathleen believes China is going upwards, with a spiral-like path, full of ups and downs. “Well, right now its going down. But you cant dispute the fact that there are more people with opportunities now compare to 20 years ago,” she says.

Kathleen first came to China in 1999. She describe her initial encounter with the country as a whim, an accidental turn that suddenly change her life. “There was a job opening as a copy editor, for a Chinese state-own media, I applied and got in,” she says. She was working as a political reporter for Lee, a newspapers chains in Montana, at the time. She covered the Native American issue, private prisons that started to expand in that state and local politics.

There is nothing much can be found on social media about Kathleen’s personal life, before or after her China’s years. There’s no mention about her family at all, or her early schools days in her hometown in Butte, Montana. She seems really discipline at keeping her private life, well, private, hidden from the public’s eyes. Her profile picture on Facebook shows it perfectly. Kathleen put a picture of herself with a big sunglasses and a headscarf that barely reveal her face. Only people who has met her before can recognize her from that photo.

All her biography pages, scattered in Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and several journalism websites, carefully written to represent her professional life only. She wrote that she finished her journalism school in University of Montana in 1993, and then work for a local publication, then went on to become a foreign correspondent in China.

“Reporting in China probably made me more careful about my personal information,” she says. “You always feel that someone is watching you and yes, I always feel a little bit paranoid.”

In her first trip to China, Kathleen’s visa has a stamp that stated that she is a ‘foreign expert’. She chuckled whenever she mentioned it. “But, that trip open my eyes, because I got to see how Chinese government works, how the censorship works, and all,” she says. Those insights would be proven useful in her following trip to China.

After her contract ended, she returned to her old job in Montana. “I had so much fun, there were many crazy stuff in Montana,” she says, laughing. After a couple of years and a wedding, she got a job as a business correspondent for BNA, a subsidiary of Bloomberg Media that specializes on business and legal issues, in Shanghai, China. “This time I brought my husband to China with me,” she says.

In her second trip, Kathleen enter China with a student visa. She enrolled in Shanghai Jiaotong University as a student in their language course. But being a student was not intended as a disguise for her reporting job. “If you’ve been in the streets in China, you’ll know that its hard to get around without knowing the language,” she says. So, she learns Mandarin and in a year, she can converse seamlessly with locals. “I still have many things to learn about the reading and writing,” she adds.

This time, being in China is not just a whim anymore. She wanted to be there. “At the time, China was like on the verge of explosion,” she says. With the economy booming, China rapidly become the centre of global attention. “I felt I need to get back there,” Kathleen says.

In 2008, she began working for Global Post, a digital media that focus on international news. She now has the chance to reach a wider audience in the internet. However, when she applied for a journalist visa, the Chinese government flatly rejected it. “They never give a visa to online media before,” Kathleen says.

At the same time, she heard about a fashion publication based in New York, called Women’s Wear Daily, who was looking for someone to write business news in Asia Pacific for them. They hired Kathleen, and her visa was issued promptly after.

Even though she never plan to use her fashion journalist credential as a disguise, it works well for her. By being a non-threatening fashion reporter, she gained access to the elite in Chinese society who usually never speaks to the international press. “From them, I receive information about many things and got invited to many governments’ events,” she says.

Kathleen remembers how the Mayor of Ordos, in China, invited her for dinner, just before the Miss World Beauty Pageant in that city. It was a chance for her to see how the Chinese elite think and behave, especially knowing that Ordos is one of the most corrupt place in China, where buildings upon buildings were built but no one ever live in it, creating ghost towns.

Kathleen also remembers how shocked she was when she saw the situation in Lhasa, Tibet, in 2008, just after the riot. “I was shocked, shocked, shocked at what I saw,” she says, repeating the word “shocked” three times. “The city was occupied, there were tanks in the street. Soldiers everywhere. Monasteries empty, the monks all gone. Who knows what happened to them.”

She believes the only factor that made Chinese government allow her to enter Tibet was pure luck. “I think I got lucky. After the riot, the Chinese want to say to the world that they let foreign journalist into Tibet,” she says. “I was one of only few journalists who actually apply to go.”

Besides the harrowing scenes that she saw, Kathleen movement in Tibet was also tightly monitored. “I’m sure I was followed,” she adds. “One day, someone broke in my hotel room and check my stuff.”

However, her biggest clash with the Chinese government happened in 2011. With the support from Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Kathleen embarked on a journey to Tanzania and Uganda, to investigate the widespread distribution of fake anti-malaria medicine there. This happened when Chinese health aid and pharmaceutical companies were making big presence in Africa. Her story was published in the front page of the Guardian. But then something odd happened.

“I was on a Christmas holiday in the US, when my husband whose still in China, called and asked about our subscription to the Global Times in China,” she says. They don’t subscribe to that newspapers, but that day, there was one copy on their front door. On its front page, there was a headline about Kathleen’s story but with a twist: the government vehemently denied it.

“I later found out that the state media went full offensive against my story, because Chinese President Xi Jinping was making his first trip overseas to Tanzania, where I did this reporting,” she says. Not only that, a couple of days later, Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned The Guardian Bureau Chief in China and threatened to revoke her visa.

“After that, The Guardian just cancel the publication of the second half of the project,” she says, barely able to hide her contempt. They were supposed to continue her investigation into the factories producing these fake medicine inside China. “That’s how they interfere with my work. Very clever,” she says.

Although nothing happened to Kathleen personally afterwards, the incident deeply impact her. She recalls how sometime police officers will suddenly appears during her interviews and that really disturb her sources. Another time, a source cancel their appointment, and make sure she knew that they was told not to talk. She was repeatedly detained, hold up, for hours, just to delay her reaching a place or meeting someone.

All that didn’t deter Kathleen from doing her job. She even become more focus in revealing things that was kept hidden in many parts of China. In the last five years, she specialized on health and scientific research issues.

“In 2020, China will spend more money in scientific research than the US, but there is no independent reporting and investigation toward their scientific practices,” she says. “Nobody really look into it.”

Chinese local media tried to investigate but they are facing a lot of restrictions and censors. “I find it really interesting, and no one is doing it,” Kathleen says. Does she has better access to this kind of stories? She smiles, “I don’t want to interview Donatella Versace for the fourth time. My days as fashion journalists is over.”

She understand the risk of doing real journalism in China. But, she also become more and more familiar with the people and its culture. “China is hard to explain. Their [censorship–] style is not like what you saw anywhere else in the world. Its kind of subtle,” Kathleen says.

She remembers a story when she went to North Korea border with her colleague. They hired a young driver who takes them around. In the last day of their trip, the driver asked for more money. After a small squabble, they agreed to paid him a little extra.

“We went back to our hotel, and found out that he had called the police on us, complaining that we don’t pay him enough,” Kathleen says. They then explained to the officer that they had paid him three times the usual rate. The police understand and left.

“But then the driver start calling us, and threatens to beat us off,” she says. Once again, the police came, this time it was Kathleen who was asking for help. That day, those Chinese police protected and escorted them safely out of town. (*)