Maggie Zhang

Photo taken in Hangzhou

Maggie Zhang is a fresh graduate from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. She studies Culture, Society and Media, an interdisciplinary major in her undergraduate. She is currently pursuing a Master of Journalism degree at the University of Hong Kong.

Maggie has a strong curiosity about exploring the world and talking to people from all walks of life. She participated in several international exchange activities during her undergraduate study. As the only mainland Chinese student from Japan to an exchange program in Taiwan, she witnessed the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019. She also went on a summer sociological fieldwork in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Laos. The research topic is gender discrimination in the workplace of Southeast Asian countries.

She starts her journalism journey from a non-profit media platform with students from HKU and CUHK. She wrote articles about social issues such as nationalism, domestic violence and the global pandemic. The most popular article featured students’ experiences and attitudes towards media during the COVID-19 from a global perspective. She also took an internship at the international news department of Bytedance. She has written many international news stories, such as the Biden-Putin summit in Geneva, the global heatwave, and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Despite many restrictions, she found many Chinese people in Japan to cover the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics, and the videos went viral on Tik Tok.

Fluent in Mandarin, Japanese, and English, she is looking forward to becoming a journalist covering international news in Asia in the future.