PUP's Most Famous
SPECIAL FEATURE
The Activist Who Reached CNN
By Jessica Mariz Ignacio
Indeed, this university is a treasure pot.
Not only that PUP gives underprivileged Filipino youth a chance to study, it also helps in creating a substantial impact in the global history. I would not even be surprised if one day, I would see a PUPian step on the moon and set the Philippine flag on its soil.
A Filipino and a PUP alumnus, Jaime “Jimi” FlorCruz amazed the entire country when he first rung out of CNN News as its Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent. That was in 2001. He started becoming a full-pledged journalist in 1982, where he served as TIME Magazine’s Beijing bureau reporter after publishing a great number of bylines for Newsweek.
FlorCruz was also the co-writer of the book Massacre at Beijing (1989), a record about the crackdown against the protesters in Tiananmen in June 1989. He was also a receiver of the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000. The fellowship was only offered for American nationals—he was the first non-American.
You might be wondering how FlorCruz managed to devote almost most of his life in China. What was he doing there? Believe it or not, it had something to do with him being in PUP. Being a PUPian activist, to be exact.
According to his interview with Harija Riza Khama of The Philippine Reporter, FlorCruz said that he was then a 20-year old student leader at the Philippine College of Commerce (now PUP) and president of League of Editors for a Democratic Society (LEADS) when he was invited to go on a study tour in China together with other fourteen student leaders in 1971. It was originally intended to be a three-week tour but while in China, then-President Ferdinand Marcos suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus, allowing the dictator to detain opponents and detractors ad infinitum. FlorCruz, a vocal anti-Marcos activist, was stranded in China for twelve years.
Developing a Cabin Fever Syndrome in China, FlorCruz decided to start living his new life. He worked in a state farm in Hunan province for nearly a year. Then he took intensive Chinese language study and translation learning at the Beijing Languages Institute. Adding to his Bachelor of Arts degree in Advertising which he took at PUP in 1971, he studied again in Peking University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese History.
He gave college professors at Peking University and college students at Peking Normal College English lessons twice a week. Not only that; he also taught the Chinese national television some English songs in a weekly program titled Let’s Sing.
And the rest was history. ###
Jaime "Jimi" FlorCruz in his dashing suit as CNN's Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent.
(Source: CNN.com)