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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The Senate is poised to pass a major bill that would pour billions into science and technology to compete with China. It's one of the few pieces of legislation with strong bipartisan support.
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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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China is poised to release once-a-decade census information that experts say will highlight a shrinking fertility rate — one of the country's biggest long-term economic challenges.
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The Biden admin. has taken a tough approach to China so far, but it is hoping to make climate change an arena of cooperation. It will be a test of Biden's compete-and-cooperate China policy.
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It's been 50 years since the U.S. and China engaged in "Ping Pong Diplomacy" - opening dialogue by having teams compete in the table top games.
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With reports of violence against Asian Americans rising, some in the AAPI community are considering guns for self-defense, and have attended firearm training.
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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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Europe has mostly tried to avoid political confrontation with China, but this week things came to a head over what EU officials say are human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region.
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Officials are meeting in Anchorage for the first Cabinet-level talks between the two countries since President Biden took office. Secretary of State Blinken laid out concerns with Chinese policy.
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Cabinet-level officials from the U.S. and China met for the first time since Biden took office, amid increasingly acrimonious and fraught relations between the world's two largest economies.