Hu Shuli

Hu is a paragon of important journalism inside China’s notoriously close-fisted media environment. As a young reporter, she was suspended from her paper after asking it to cover the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Undeterred, Hu started the business paper Caijing and exposed everything from stock-market manipulation to a state cover-up of the SARS outbreak. Hu’s current home, the media company Caixin, retains her penchant for provocation; last year she issued an extraordinary call against state censorship.