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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China has had tremendous success containing the spread of COVID-19 while simultaneously being resistant to cooperating and collaborating with international partners to end the pandemic.
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President Biden has ordered a fresh investigation by US intelligence agencies into the coronavirus. A question is: how can they do this without Chinese cooperation?
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Early in the pandemic, Taiwan was praised for handling COVID-19 exceptionally well. Now, Taiwan is struggling through its worst bout of coronavirus yet.
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Some scientists worry the possibility the coronavirus escaped from research facilities hasn't gotten enough scrutiny. Others say it appears far more likely to have emerged naturally. -
The WHO's report with China concluded that COVID-19 likely started in bats, jumped into humans via another animal. But some are pushing for an investigation into the possibility it leaked from a lab.
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President Trump has been saying there will be a coronavirus vaccine "within weeks," and drugmakers are racing to produce one. In China, hundreds of thousands of people have already gotten shots.
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The Chinese foreign ministry said it took this step "to uphold the concept of a shared community of health for all and to honor its commitment to turn COVID-19 vaccines into a global public good."
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Experts say the Communist Party sees more at stake than public health. One of the biggest concerns is the economy. China is also looking to defuse criticism over its early handling of the outbreak.
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China is leading the global race in the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. Half of the vaccines that have already gone into clinical trials were discovered by Chinese companies.
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By not inviting Taiwan to its health assembly, the World Health Organization kept out "scientific expertise on pandemic disease" and "damaged the WHO's credibility," the secretary of state said.
