Maplewood mom to head Wall Street Journal’s China bureau

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Even before she was to step off a plane in Beijing on Aug. 17, Rebecca Blumenstein had a lot on her agenda.

She had to pack up the contents of her Maplewood home for the 6,800-mile journey to China, prepare her children for class in an international school, and start hunting for a synagogue in time for Rosh Hashana. And, oh yes, she had to begin planning for her new role as chief of The Wall Street Journal’s China bureau.

“I guess it’s good the High Holy Days are late this year,” she told NJ Jewish News over the phone as she took time out from packing up her family’s possessions and getting ready for her three-year assignment abroad.

“I need to find a Jewish community there,” she said. “I’m not sure what the relevance of being Jewish in China is, but I grew up in a Conservative synagogue, I went to a Jewish summer camp, and we belong to Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange.”

Whatever fears Blumenstein may have about relocating with a husband and three young children to a foreign land with an unfamiliar language are overcome by what she sees as a “great opportunity” to supervise a staff of reporters covering “an incredible story” of the world’s largest nation and its rapidly growing status as an economic giant.

“There is no question that China’s economy is growing faster than any other in the world. It has 1.4 billion people, which makes it almost four times as big as the United States,” she said. “I think it is pretty obvious that China is really a superpower that could emerge and that will have a big effect in this country.”

What lured her to the posting in Beijing was an interoffice e-mail she received at her New York office, where Blumenstein was deputy bureau chief of the Journal’s technology department.

“They were looking for a bureau chief for China, and I applied through the encouragement of my husband, who said it was a place that was growing with opportunities, not only for me but for him and anyone who is a writer or a journalist.”

Blumenstein’s husband, Alan Paul, is a freelance writer for Guitar Player and for Slam, a basketball magazine which is sponsoring his press credentials so that he can work as a journalist in China.

It may be the farthest move Blumenstein has made, but it is hardly her first.

She became interested in journalism as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, edited its student daily, then moved to Florida to cover politics and breaking news for the Tampa Tribune.

Her career path led to the Gannett newspapers in Westchester, then Newsday on Long Island, and, in 1995, back to her native state of Michigan, where she was assigned to cover General Motors for The Wall Street Journal’s Detroit bureau.

Three years later, Blumenstein, Paul, and their first child moved to New York, where Blumenstein began covering the telecommunications industry from the paper’s home office.

“I had not been a business reporter before I went to the Journal, but one of the managing editors had the sense to say, ‘You can teach a good reporter business but you can’t teach a good business person how to be a reporter.’

“Even though the Journal is a sophisticated newspaper, a good part of our job is to translate very complicated things to a level that we can understand them. I view much of my job as being a translator.”

But Blumenstein will probably need a translator of her own when she begins her new job in Beijing. She does not speak Chinese.

“The Journal has a policy of having all of its reporters in China know the language, and my role is not going to be a reporter but of talking with them and editing their stories, figuring out what stories they will be doing, and communicating with the editors back in New York.”

For the next three years, the Blumenstein-Paul family will live in a house owned by Dow-Jones, the Journal’s publisher, in a cosmopolitan community. Her children will attend an international school, where they will spend an hour a day learning to read and write Mandarin.

Although she is concerned about how they will fare on the long plane ride to Beijing, Blumenstein said she expects the children — Jacob, seven, Eli, five, and their two-year-old sister, Anna — will adjust easily to their new culture.

“The kids have been incredibly accepting,” she said.

Loosening a rigid society

But Blumenstein has many other items on her mind as she begins a vital post on a world-class newspaper.

“There is a lot of concern about China because of its sheer size,” she said. “U.S. companies are interested in China because there are a lot of consumers there who eventually can be buyers of goods, and there are lot of people there who can work for much less than people make here.”

Despite her newspaper’s special attention to matters of finance and commerce and its editorial pages’ conservative slant, Blumenstein said that “the Journal has had a long tradition of covering human rights in China.”

In 2001, one of its reporters, Ian Johnson, received a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about victims of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the Falun Gong — a group that some consider a New Age spiritual movement and others a religious cult.

When Blumenstein nears the end of her tour of duty in 2008, the Summer Olympics will be opening in Beijing. She believes it will loosen a rigid society after centuries of dynastic and dictatorial rule.

“The story that China wants to get out now is that it is a country that is open to business, open to journalists, and open to the rest of the world. This is China’s moment, and I think it will be quite leery” of any bad publicity, she said.

Blumenstein said she was focusing on both her future and the comfortable suburban life her family is leaving behind in Maplewood.

“Although China is a different world very far away, we have e-mail, we have the Internet, and we are getting our parents videophones. Communications has changed so much, so it will be easier to keep in touch than it would have been had we done this 10 or 15 years ago,” she said.

“We will miss the people most. We have family here, and we are close with our family and friends. On the other hand, we will make new friends, and being away will make our own family much closer.”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.