Zijuan Zhong

Zijuan Zhong joined The Economist in 2013 as its first Chinese staff member in Shanghai. In the past five years, Zijuan has covered Chinese business and corporate news, collaborating with editors and correspondents. These news stories have closely tracked significant business trends in China, such as the upsurge of mass entrepreneurship, the rise of Chinese tech innovation and the craze of Chinese outbound investment, as well as its recent frustrations. Her responsibilities at The Economist also include news-driven data research and fact-checking.

Zijuan’s journalism career began with an internship at The New York Times when she was a master’s student in 2008. After graduation, she worked for the Shanghai Morning Post, a major metropolitan newspaper in Shanghai, and Phoenix Weekly, a Hong Kong-headquartered magazine, covering foreign news and Chinese-related international news. Zijuan has a particular focus on the interactions between China and the outside world. Her stories range from Chinese merchants in North Korea to Chinese foreign aid in Africa and the Caribbean.

She believes that foreign news coverage is a vital educational tool and that objective reporting is essential to fight ignorance and prejudice towards foreign countries. During her fellowship in Oxford, she plans to study how foreign news coverage has shaped Chinese people’s views towards the outside world in the era of the mobile Internet.

Zijuan holds a Master of International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies and a bachelor’s degree in International Politics from Nanjing University.