Formerly the Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of its influential 'Letter from China' blog. Recently in Shanghai, he kindly took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to speak with TALK.

You covered the Iraq War for the Chicago Tribune. How does a war zone compare to the China beat?

They use very different muscles, journalistically speaking. Covering a conflict is exactly as you might guess – humbling, gruelling, exhilarating – and it teaches you more in a week than you probably learned in the previous year. When I went into journalism, I never planned on becoming a semi-expert on the virtues of various armoured-car companies, but such was life in Iraq for a while. But China, as a writing subject, demands patience and deliberation where conflict rarely permits them. Understanding China demands digging into the history, recent and ancient, and you overlook it at your own peril. Unlike in a war zone, I rarely get much out of a short interview in China, so I avoid them. But the two experiences share something in common: On some DNA-level, journalism is about trying to divine what motivates people, what makes them struggle or hate or succeed or despair, and places like China, or the Middle East, with turbulent histories, distill those emotions into a concentrated form that you don’t find elsewhere. I learn more here than I ever imagined, and the longer I stay, the less I feel like I know.

It seems you have the freedom to explore the infinite angles of life in China in your writing. How do you decide what to write about?

The choice of stories is the product of more collaboration than it might appear. Often I suggest things to write about, and often my editors have ideas, and then we hash out what makes most sense. Those of us in the field might instinctively imagine that we know that best stories to write, but there is real value in getting a voice from the place where people actually read the magazine. It keeps us from being obscure or redundant. On the most fundamental level, I try to write about things that I hope people don’t know already, to dig a bit beneath the surface of the life that we all share here and to find stories that people don’t immediately discuss.

Do you receive a substantial amount of feedback from readers living within China, either foreign or local?

By definition, people are either reading English or translated versions of my stories, which tend to pop up online. About two-thirds of my mail is from foreigners, either in China or abroad, and one third comes from Chinese readers. The truth is that I love hearing from Chinese readers because, traditionally, being a foreign correspondent was a kind of extractive experience, in which visitors came, saw, and wrote – all for an audience on the other side of the globe. Technology has changed that, of course, and it makes us more accountable and aware of how our perspective fits in to Chinese views, not just American views. We are not always going to agree, and that’s fine. But hearing a fact-based perspective, in a tone that suggests sanity, is a treasure, and it can absolutely shape how I see China.

You often blog about the growing pains of the Chinese internet. Why is this topic of special interest to you?

The internet is even more transformative in China than it is in the US or elsewhere, of course, because it instantly plucks people out of their individual lives and casts them into a community of their choosing. That does not necessarily mean it is expanding their perspective. Like an American who only watches news channels that they agree with, the Web can create an artificial sense of righteousness, as if everyone agrees. Chinese authorities have been more successful than many might have expected at narrowing and shaping the internet in a way that is consistent with their image of the law. Most people don’t have the technical ability or will to look beyond those confines. But all of that goes up in the air during a moment of crisis. The truth is that China’s internet is in its infancy, and we only know what kind of social forces it might someday exert until the system is stressed. Chinese history suggests that this happens with regularity.

Web: www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos