New Correspondent Covering China

We are very excited to announce that Lily Kuo, most recently the China bureau chief of The Washington Post, is joining The New York Times as our newest China correspondent, bringing her sharp instincts, creativity and resourcefulness to our coverage of the country and the global reverberations of its rise.

From her base in Taipei at The Post, Lily led a team covering China from the outside, a challenge that calls for ingenuity. She responded by turning to visual storytelling to bring to life pivotal moments in China over the last five years: the controversial lockdown of Shanghai; the subsequent protests across the country against the government's stringent Covid measures; and the government's undercount of deaths from the outbreak. Lily joins us with more than a decade of experience reporting on China and its expanding global footprint. In Jamaica, she described China's bid to control the next generation of critical minerals; in Kazakhstan, she covered the Chinese government's crackdown on Uyghurs and other minorities. Lily also has a knack for finding the human stories that reveal how society is changing. During Taiwan's recent elections, she wrote an essay alongside rich visuals that captured the everyday vibrancy of the island's democracy with scenes from temples, night markets and baseball stadiums, aptly titled, "Life in Taiwan Is Rowdy and Proud, Never Mind China's Threats."

Lily was previously The Guardian's Beijing bureau chief, reporting from China during the Covid pandemic, including traveling to Wuhan to retrace the start of the outbreak by interviewing some of the earliest known Covid patients. Before that, she worked for Quartz in Kenya, where she reported on China's growing footprint across Africa. She also reported for Quartz from Hong Kong, as well as for Reuters from New York and Washington, D.C.

Lily is from North Carolina, and she studied English literature, Spanish literature and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has a dual master's degree in international affairs from The London School of Economics and Political Science and Peking University.

Please join us in giving Lily a very warm welcome.

- Phil, Doug and Gill