In a far-ranging trans-Pacific academic dialogue, award-winning scholar Yuezhi Zhao critically reflected on her own intellectual trajectory in pursuing groundbreaking research on media and democratization in the Western, global, and Chinese contexts. In the discussion, she intertwined her personal intellectual biography with China's post-revolutionary history, the political economy and cultural politics of China's post-Mao transformation, and the concomitant developments in communication research in both North America and China. Zhao, who charted a critical research path to addresses the historical erasures and social biases of contemporary Chinese communication scholarship on the one hand, and the Western-centric biases of critical communication scholarship on the other, delineated the relevance and intellectual politics of rediscovering “class” as an analytical category in the current Chinese context. In addition, she argued for the centrality of the urban-rural relationship and ecological perspectives in communication research, as well as outlined the unique contributions of the transcultural political economy perspective that she has pioneered.