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Biography: Living in Beijing
Guo working on an assignment in Beijing's Forbidden City, the former royal palace, in 2001. Guo cultivated his academic and professional goals from humble beginnings in Beijing. He is the youngest of three children. His parents, now retired, were factory workers with a middle school education. Guo's mom, Peng, used to work in a chalk factory while his dad, Xiaochuan, labored in a lumber mill. Guo's parents came of age in the Cultural Revolution between 1967 to 1976 and were subsequently denied access to education. The revolution's principles, dictated by China's president, Mao Zedong, forced people to become laborers. Zedong, himself an educated man, believed that education breeded dissident behavior and that people needed to return to a working-class, or a laboring way of life. Although Guo's grandparents were landlords, or affluent people, his parents were stripped of their material wealth and forced to live a working class life. Guo's parents supported a family by working long hours for little wages. Most other children in their neighborhood also finsihed their education after middle school, but Guo's parents found the money to send their children to better schools in the city. Guo's father was determined not to let his children suffer the same fate.
Guo, an avid basketball fan, attends a Blazers game in November 2003 at Portland's Rose Garden. Guo attended high school in 1991, long after the Cultural Revolution was over and education was again accessible to students. In those years, Guo had watched a Chinese war correspondent Shizhen Tang of the Xinhua news agency achieve fame in Beijing. Tang covered the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, and interviewed important political figures in the Middle East such as Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and Palestinian Council President Yasser Arafat. Guo became enamored with the lifestyle of a war correspondent and was determined to study journalism. "I think that his choice to become a journalist is connected with his personality," said Guo's brother, Aimen, a 32-year-old doctoral student in Chinese history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "He is good at communication with people. He has enthusiasm to know all sorts of people and all kinds of places, and he also has a very incredible ability to understand others." Guo's uncle was the first of his family to enter a university in 1976 and set a precedent for Guo and his siblings. Guo entered Xiaman University in Southeast China to study journalism in the fall of 1995. In his senior year, Guo secured an internship in which he was the editor of international news of CCTV, the largest TV station in China. He translated international stories and prepared the captions for broadcast. It was at CCTV that he also met another famous war correspondent, Junyi Shui, who covered the war in Serbia and the NATO air attack in Sarajevo in 1999. Guo began to feel more confident that he was acquiring the skills to do that job someday.
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