Melinda Liu has been the Beijing Bureau Chief for Newsweek since 1998, returning to a city in which she had resided from 1980 to 1982 as Newsweek’s first China-based correspondent since 1949. Liu won the 2006 Shorenstein Journalism Award in recognition of her reporting on Asia.
For Newsweek, Liu reported firsthand China’s post-Mao modernization and the Tiananmen Square bloodshed, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban, the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, and U.S. military interventions in Somalia and Haiti. To report on the last days of Saddam Hussein, Liu arrived in Iraq in January 2003 and was one of few American journalists in Baghdad during the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing of the Iraqi capital. Her report, “Eyewitness Baghdad,” filed from the Palestine Hotel, featured in Newsweek’s special war issue which won the National Magazine Award that year. As Newsweek’s Asia Regional Editor based in Hong Kong from 1983 to 1992, in 1989 Liu led on-the-ground coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent bloodletting. Months earlier, in September 1988, she was the only Western staff correspondent in Rangoon when Burmese soldiers launched a violent crackdown. While covering civil unrest leading to the 1986 fall of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, Liu received a gunshot wound in the leg. In addition to her overseas assignments, Liu was a diplomatic correspondent based in Washington, D.C. from 1992 to 1998, and also reported on law enforcement, global organized crime, and terrorism.
Prior to joining Newsweek full-time in 1979, Liu was China Economic Correspondent for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review from 1977 to 1979, and Taipei contributor to the Washington Post, Newsweek, and CBS News from 1975 to 1977. Liu graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1973 and was awarded a Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Traveling Fellowship that brought her to Asia.
