John Ruwitch
John Ruwitch is a correspondent with NPR's international desk. He covers Chinese affairs.
Ruwitch joined NPR in early 2020, and has since chronicled the tectonic shift in America's relations with China, from hopeful engagement to suspicion-fueled competition. He's also reported on a range of other issues, including Beijing's pressure campaign on Taiwan, Hong Kong's National Security Law, Asian-Americans considering guns for self-defense in the face of rising violence and a herd of elephants roaming in the Chinese countryside in search of a home.
Ruwitch joined NPR after more than 19 years with Reuters in Asia, the last eight of which were in Shanghai. There, he first covered a broad beat that took him as far afield as the China-North Korea border and the edge of the South China Sea. Later, he led a team that covered business and financial markets in the world's second biggest economy. Ruwitch has also had postings in Hanoi, Hong Kong and Beijing, reporting on anti-corruption campaigns, elite Communist politics, labor disputes, human rights, currency devaluations, earthquakes, snowstorms, Olympic badminton and everything in between.
Ruwitch studied history at U.C. Santa Cruz and got a master's in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard. He speaks Mandarin and Vietnamese.
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Shanghai, China, is approaching the end of its third week of a near-total lockdown to fight COVID. As case numbers rise, so does the frustration of many in the city of more than 25 million people.
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As omicron spreads in China, one of its largest cities — Shanghai — has been placed on lockdown under the government's "zero COVID" policy.
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U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Chinese diplomats in Rome on Monday in what a senior administration adviser described as an "intense" seven-hour session. -
Hong Kong kept the pandemic mostly in check for two years, but now the territory is struggling with a wave of COVID-19 cases that's testing the government's ability to react.
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Until the middle of last year, most cryptocurrency mining took place in China. Then authorities pulled the plug. So Chinese bitcoin miners began moving their gear to U.S. towns like Kearney, Nebraska.
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Hong Kong has imposed severe restrictions to fight COVID-19. For many expatriates, this is the last straw after years of seeing its autonomy erode as China tightens its grip on the territory.
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President Biden's Summit for Democracy has kicked off. China is not invited — but it's still trying to project its own narratives about democracy.
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The meeting lasted more than three hours as the two sides sought to make sure their competition does not turn into conflict.
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"If she does not make it past the coming winter, I hope the world will remember her as she once was," Zhang Zhan's brother said. She posted videos of Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic.
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While China tries to stamp out COVID-19 infections as soon as they pop up, the U.S. has a much more laissez-faire approach of learning to live with the virus, even if it means a thousand deaths a day.
