When Yuan Wenyi touched down in Tripoli in 2011 to witness the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi for Shanghai’s Dragon TV she became the first female war correspondent from the city since Mao founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949.



The 36-year-old reporter remembers her action-packed debut as a conflict reporter as a “sheer delight”. But her first experience of war was almost her last.

In September 2011 Yuan’s team came under attack while reporting on the advance of rebel fighters from the National Transitional Council (NTC) in the deserts around the Gaddafi stronghold of Bani Walid.



“Run! Run! Run!” she recalls screaming at the station’s cameraman, Li Yanjun, as a shell exploded not far from their filming position, sending them scrambling back towards their vehicle.



As they raced away from the action, bullets whizzing through the air, Yuan remembers worrying that the car might explode: “I felt so desperate … All the blood rushed up into my forehead. I totally lost my voice.”

During her 119 days in Libya, Yuan said she came to admire the motley crew of middle-class revolutionaries who rose up against their country’s eccentric despot; doctors, engineers and lawyers who had no experience of conflict but yearned for freedom. “They might have looked absurd but they had the guts to make sacrifices,” she said.

A year later Yuan was deployed to Syria, reporting on the country’s descent into carnage from Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. In the summer of 2014 she flew to Ukraine to report on the clashes between Russia-backed rebels and separatists from Donetsk.



Female voices are still a rarity among China’s new generation of war correspondent. But Yuan



said she hoped Chinese newsrooms would gradually shake off the outdated idea that war zones were for men. “Work is work – it’s just the same for me as for everybody else.”