Melissa Chan, an OPC member and Al-Jazeera’s sole English-language reporter in China, was effectively expelled from China on May 7 after officials denied a usually routine request to renew her journalist visa. China also refused to allow another correspondent to replace her, forcing Al-Jazerra to close the China news operations of its English-language channel. It was China’s first expulsion of an accredited journalist since 1998 and the reasons were unclear. Chan has returned to the United States, where she will be a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford for the 2012-13 academic year.
Chan, who had reported from China since 2007, won the 2001 Alexander Kendrick Scholarship from the OPC Foundation and is a board member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.