Gady Epstein has been covering China and Asia since 2002. As China correspondent for The Economist, he has made a specialty of writing about the Internet, including a fourteen-page special report in 2013. He writes frequently about China's elite politics and about the complex low politics of operating in China. From 2007 to 2011, he wrote for Forbes about the rise of Chinese social media, the travails of private entrepreneurs in China, and awful books on doing business in China. Previously, he was Beijing Bureau Chief and International Projects Reporter for The Baltimore Sun, where he won a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for a series on globalisation. His high point in television was a two-second appearance on HBO's The Wire. In 2006-07, he completed a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. A native of Palo Alto, California, he graduated in 1994 from Harvard.
Amid spreading prosperity, a generation of self-styled also-rans emerges.