Andrew Jacobs is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times who has been based in Beijing since 2008. Taking a year off from studying Chinese at New York University, Jacobs first stepped foot in China in 1985 and then returned after graduation in 1988 to teach English at Hubei University in Wuhan. He left China abruptly after the campus was shuttered in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
In the ensuing two decades, he made two visits to China, including a 1997 reporting trip to Hong Kong during the former British colony’s official handover to China. His most recent return coincided with a few minor news events: the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, the ethnic rioting in Tibet, and the Olympic Games in Beijing. Since then, he has written about the troubled relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the audacious escape of blind legal dissident Chen Guangcheng, and the dramatic downfall of Bo Xilai and his wife. Over the years, he has also ventured outside the mainland to cover presidential elections in Taiwan, the travails faced by Mongolian nomads, and the Chinese media’s growing influence in Africa.