My friend the former BBC Shanghai correspondent Francis Markus, who has died aged 65 of cancer, was a talented journalist whose compassion for those he reported on led him to spend the last two decades of his life working for humanitarian organisations throughout Asia.
After being posted to Shanghai in 2002, Francis demonstrated not just an unerring news sense, covering protests in Hong Kong and social change in China, but a deep interest in human stories, from the suicide-watchers patrolling one of China’s highest bridges over the Yangtze River, to the lives of those dealing with HIV.
