"Being the China correspondent for the business magazine 'WirtschaftsWoche' means constantly digging up, researching and writing good and exciting stories, above all about the fast economic developments there." Matthias Kamp knows what he's talking about. He has spent many years as the economic and political affairs editor of "WirtschaftsWoche" and has been the German magazine's correspondent in China since the beginning of January.

The 41-year-old journalist is a real specialist on Asia, expertise that builds on chance. "In 1988, I managed to get an internship at the Goethe Institute in Seoul, during the Olympic Games there. That was my first encounter with the Far East and I was fascinated by Asia from the very first minute," he remembers. "At the time, I was just coming to the end of my training as a hotel manager. I decided to complete the traineeship and then to study something to do with 'Asia'."

Matthias took that "something" and filled it with real content. He read Sinology, Classical Chinese and Ethnology in Trier. During the basic study stage, a DAAD scholarship took him to the Fu Dan University in Shanghai for a year. "Shanghai helped me understand that China not only stands for fascination and the exotic, but also that everyday life can often be very difficult as well. Despite the rapid development, China still has a number of major problems – for example in the field of environmental protection – and the cultural differences between East and West are not always easy to overcome. Shanghai was a sobering but also important experience," sums up Kamp.

After his studies, he completed an 18-month editorial traineeship at the Holtzbrinck School for Business Journalists in Düsseldorf. "There is no nicer job for journalists. You travel the world, get to know interesting people every day, and get the opportunity to ask whatever you want to," says Kamp, explaining his motives for becoming a journalist. Following the traineeship, he spent a year working as an editor at "WirtschaftsWoche", and then at the beginning of 1998 went to Singapore as the magazine's correspondent. "Those were exciting days, an economic and financial crisis was in full flow in South East Asia. I witnessed the downfall and end of the dictatorship in Indonesia," remembers Kamp.

In 2002 he returned to head office in Düsseldorf, where he worked in the political affairs section, before being drawn back to China in January 2007 to spend at least the next three years there. Kamp, his wife and two sons live in the middle of Beijing's town centre.

The key journalistic topics are education and social policy, economic and finance policy, as well as science and research policy, and the endeavours by Chinese companies to expand abroad. These are also precisely the articles that he delivers as the magazine's correspondent, occasionally including some more "colourful" stories on art and architecture. "Of course, there is no freedom of the press in China, that's a well-known fact. I above all have to read newspapers from Hong Kong, South East Asia and the United States as well," he says.