George Chen is an award-winning journalist and a 2014 Yale World Fellow. He is the author of two books, This is Hong Kong I Know (2014) and Foreign Banks in China (2011). He has written for the South China Morning Post, Reuters, Dow Jones, Foreign Policy, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and Shanghai Observer, among other international and Chinese publications. Chen has covered China’s political and economic changes since 2002, when he started his media career at an official newspaper in his hometown, Shanghai.
Chen is currently managing editor for the SCMP.com International Edition and a columnist at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's premier English language newspaper. Global political and business leaders interviewed by Chen in recent years include Myanmar’s political leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. His “Mr. Shangkong” column, about the two competing yet linked financial centers Shanghai and Hong Kong, has become an iconic weekly column for the SCMP, which he joined in 2012 after a seven-year career at the international news agency Reuters.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and English, Chen is a strong advocate for freedom of the press, which is also the research focus of his proposed doctoral thesis at the University of Hong Kong. Chen has been interviewed by the BBC, Al Jazeera, The New Yorker, Business Insider, Quartz, and other media outlets on China and Hong Kong affairs. He is one of the most followed Hong Kong social media users on both Twitter and Sina Weibo.
