Dexter Tiff Roberts is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, which is part of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He also serves as the founder and publisher of Trade War, a weekly newsletter on Chinese business and politics, with over four thousand subscribers from government, finance, and academia. He is an award-winning writer and speaker on the Chinese economy and U.S.-China relations. His analysis, writing, and commentary have been featured in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NPR, the BBC, and CNN. He teaches Chinese politics at the University of Montana and is principal and founder of Cold Mountain LLC.
Roberts served for more than two decades as China Bureau Chief and Asia News Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, based in Beijing, where he covered China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the impact of the Global Financial Crisis, and the rise of authoritarian leader Xi Jinping. He has reported from all of China’s provinces and regions including Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as from Mongolia, Cambodia, and North Korea. Previously, he was Director of China Affairs at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center.
Roberts has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University and a Master of International Affairs focusing on China from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. He studied at National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center in Taipei and speaks fluent Chinese. Roberts’ first book, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2020), was chosen as one of The Economist’s “best books of the year” for 2020, and was a best seller in Chinese, published by Taiwan’s Gusa Publishing.
