I am an award-winning journalist based in Taiwan, where I focus on foreign policy, national security, technology, and geoeconomics in the region. I am known for my ability to publish high-impact scoops and investigations, which I balance with quick-breaking news and analysis. I am deeply sourced in government agencies related to foreign policy and national security in the U.S., Europe, Taiwan and several other East Asian countries.

I previously served as the China reporter at Axios, where I focused on how China projects power and influence beyond its own borders.

I am the author of the book Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World (HarperCollins), named by the Financial Times as one of the Best Books of 2023.

In 2023 I received a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to fund a reporting series at Axios called "China's Shadow Empires," which explored Beijing's attempts to curry favor in Tanzania, Okinawa and Micronesia.

Before joining Axios, I served as the lead reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' China Cables project, a major leak of classified Chinese government documents revealing the inner workings of mass internment camps in Xinjiang. For my work on the China Cables project, I received the Robert D. G. Lewis Watchdog Award, the top prize awarded annually by the Society of Professional Journalists DC Dateline Awards, as well as the Investigative Journalism prize in the online category. The China Cables project was also a finalist for the Batten Medal for Courage in Journalism.

My scoops & investigations have driven national debate in the U.S. and around the world. A small sampling of other scoops I have published:

• In November 2021, I published a data-based investigation revealing that Airbnb hosts rentals in Xinjiang located on land owned by a paramilitary group sanctioned by the U.S. The listings expose Airbnb to regulatory risk under U.S. law. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have since written letters to AirBnb urging it to delist those rentals.
• In December 2020, a colleague and I published an extensive investigation into a suspected Chinese intelligence operative in California who had developed close ties to the office of Rep. Eric Swalwell — a story which became a major national controversy and dominated headlines for weeks, and which resulted in a failed Republican attempt to remove Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee.
• In July 2020, I broke the story about how China's consulate in San Francisco had spent the past 6 weeks secretly harboring a Chinese military researcher wanted by the FBI.
• In June 2020, I broke the story about Zoom suspending the accounts of U.S.-based activists after they held events commemorating Tiananmen, resulting in calls from Congress for greater accountability in the U.S. tech sector. After my report, the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into Zoom, which resulted in a ground-breaking indictment of a Zoom employee based in China who had been secretly working with China's Ministry of State Security to shut down global speech on Zoom.
• In May 2020, I obtained a Chinese government extradition request sent to the Turkish government targeting a Uighur man who had fled Xinjiang after helping send information about police abuses to the outside world. Though Uighurs abroad have long suspected that China was approaching host governments with requests to deport Uighurs, this was the first such extradition document to ever be made public.
• In January 2020, through the examination of Chinese-language court documents, I discovered that a University of Minnesota student had been arrested and served 6 months in a Chinese jail for criticizing Xi Jinping in Twitter posts written while the student was in the U.S. — the first time that a Chinese student abroad has been convicted and jailed back in China for social media posts written while abroad, a troubling instance of extraterritoriality.

Other major stories I have published over the past few years:

• My Foreign Policy colleague James Palmer and I broke the story about China threatening U.S. airlines over Taiwan, a major story with global ramifications that prompted a statement by the White House.
• I was the first journalist to write about the exit bans the Chinese government is increasingly using to hold American citizens “hostage” as a form of political coercion.
• I've broken numerous major stories about China's growing influence at the World Bank, including an investigation revealing that China tried to get the World Bank to fund surveillance in Xinjiang.
• I was also the first to report on Huawei’s attempt to gain a security clearance in the Czech Republic, which would allow it to bid on a NATO ally’s sensitive infrastructure contracts.

I’ve also published numerous exclusives about veiled Chinese Communist Party-linked funding given to U.S. universities and think tanks, as well as lobbying in Washington.

I was previously a staff editor and contributing reporter at Foreign Policy magazine, where I wrote investigations, deeply reported narratives, and analysis related to China.

I covered the 2017 German federal elections as a correspondent in Berlin, writing for Foreign Policy and The Washington Post. I have also reported from Russia, Germany, Austria, Turkey, China, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Washington, DC, where I was based for 8 years. I was a 2017 Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Germany and a 2016 Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center.

My writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and I have appeared as a guest on NPR, CNN, C-SPAN, the BBC, PRI, Al Jazeera, ABC Radio, and elsewhere. I've been invited to speak at CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, Atlantic Council, Asia Society, German Marshall Fund, Center for a New American Security, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Tufts, Georgetown, and in India, Canada, and Taiwan.

I previously lived in China for four years. I hold a masters degree in East Asian studies from Yale University and a graduate certificate from the Johns Hopkins SAIS-Nanjing Center. I speak and read Chinese fluently.

You can reach me by using the "Contact" form on this website.

Read my work at Axios here.

And at Foreign Policy here.

And at The Daily Beast here.

And for The Atlantic here.