Based in Denmark, Yang Chu is something between a journalist, a researcher, a writer, and a media entrepreneur, driven by an obsession with how information travels, gets blocked, and survives.
Endlessly curious, restless, and entrepreneurial — her path has never been linear, but it has always been consistent.
She started her career at Caixin Media, one of China’s most respected newsrooms, where she cut her teeth as a financial reporter. But restless with the limits of traditional media, she left after a brief stint to experiment with what journalism could be. She co-founded Cenci Journalism Porject to cover the communities mainstream media ignored.
When it was censored, she didn’t retreat. Instead, she got curious about what else could work. She explored social innovation, technology, and new models for impact, launching Sinovator under the YouChange Social Entrepreneur Foundation and interviewing global leaders including Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus. When COVID hit, she built a digital archive of censored content, an experiment in preserving what was being erased, and discovered that years of navigating China’s information landscape had given her something valuable to researchers and policymakers.
That curiosity keeps expanding: from China to Iran, from archiving to policy advisory, from independent media to diaspora communities in Europe. Each experiment leads to the next. The common thread is an instinct to build something when information breaks down.
Today she works across research, policy advisory, and media development, contributing analysis to European think tanks, delivering briefings to EU institutions, and building media projects for communities navigating restrictive information environments.
Chu holds an M.A. in Journalism, Media & Globalisation from the Erasmus Mundus Journalism Programme, where she studied at Aarhus University and Charles University in Prague. She received her B.S. in Broadcasting Journalism from Ohio University, where she won first place in the AEJMC-ICD Student International Multimedia News Contest (2010). She has been a Futures Fellow at MERICS (2022) in Berlin and was selected as a Raisina Young Fellow (2025).
Outside of work, she writes essays, spends too much time on social media, and gets her Weibo and Douban accounts banned for speaking up about Hong Kong and COVID-19 — proudly. She keeps writing anyway.
Chu is always up for interesting collaborations, consulting, research, speaking, or whatever doesn’t fit neatly into a category. Reach her at yangchu211@gmail.com.
Yang Chu 