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Advisory Board

Melinda
Melinda Liu

Bureau Chief, Newsweek | Vice President, Royal Asiatic Society Beijing (RASBJ)

Award-winning foreign correspondent Melinda Liu has worked in Beijing as Newsweek’s Bureau Chief since November 1998. One of the most experienced foreign correspondents currently based in Beijing, Liu reported firsthand on China’s post-Mao modernization, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and later the fall of the Taliban, the 1991 liberation of Kuwait; and the fall of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. military interventions in Somalia and Haiti. In 2006, Liu won the Shorenstein Journalism Award in recognition of her reporting on Asia.

Liu became Newsweek’s first China-based correspondent in 1949 when she opened the Newsweek Beijing Bureau in early 1980 and lived and worked in the Chinese capital from March 1980 to late 1982. From 1982 to 1998, she was posted in Hong Kong as Newsweek’s Asia Regional Editor and in Washington D.C. as the magazine’s Diplomatic Correspondent. She also traveled widely as a war correspondent. To cover the last days of Saddam Hussein, Liu arrived in Iraq in January 2003 and was one of few American journalists in Baghdad to report firsthand on the US “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad.  Her report “Eyewitness Baghdad,” filed from the Palestine Hotel, was featured in Newsweek’s special war issue, which won a National Magazine Award that year.

After returning to Beijing in 1998, Liu has been involved in an oral history project related to American aviators in WWII China. Liu helped local authorities establish a Doolittle Raid Memorial Hall in the city of Quzhou, Zhejiang Province and took part in curatorial and educational projects in her capacity as a member of the U.S.-based non-profit The Children of the Doolittle Raiders. In 2017, Liu co-directed a short documentary film, “Doolittle Raiders: A China Story.” It’s viewable at this link:  https://vimeo.com/266803924 

Before joining Newsweek’s staff in 1979, Liu was China's Economic Correspondent for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, and a Taipei contributor to the Washington Post and CBS News. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Liu graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. From 2005-2007 she was President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC).