Mary Kay Magistad was, for the past decade, China correspondent for the PRI/BBC radio program The World. She traveled widely throughout China and the region, reporting on the implications of China’s transformation on ordinary Chinese and on the world. Her 2007 series “Young China” won an Overseas Press Club award; her 2009 series on China’s quest for greater innovation, “Created in China,” won a Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists award.
Magistad also opened NPR’s Beijing bureau in 1996, and served as its China correspondent from 1995 to 1999, initially from a Hong Kong base. Previously, she was NPR’s Southeast Asia correspondent (1993-95), after several years (1988-92) as a regular contributor from Southeast Asia for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, NPR, CBC, and other media. While based in Southeast Asia, she especially focused on Cambodia’s civil war and the plight of Cambodian refugees, the Burmese junta’s crackdown on pro-democracy forces and ethnic minorities, and Vietnam’s quest to emerge from its post-war isolation. She also covered the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and has reported more recently in Zambia, Rwanda, and Congo, on the impact of China’s rise.
Magistad has an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Sussex (UK), and a Bachelor’s in Journalism and History from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. She has been a Nieman Fellow and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
