JOSH CHIN is an award-winning journalist and author who has spent almost two decades documenting the rise of China, mostly for The Wall Street Journal.
Josh was hired by the Journal to cover the Beijing Olympics as a freelance video journalist in 2008. He later joined the paper full time to run its China blog, China Real Time, which covered the country's development in every facet, from the delightful to the deadly serious. He switched to reporting on Chinese politics in 2013, covering Xi Jinping's crackdown on dissent, the activities of Chinese military hackers, and China's race to build technologies of the future.
In 2017, Josh teamed up with fellow Journal reporter Liza Lin and other colleagues to investigate the Chinese Communist Party's unprecedented experiments with mass digital surveillance, including a previously hidden campaign of forcible assimilation targeting Turkic Muslims in the country's remote Xinjiang region. The resulting series of stories won the Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting, an award for excellence in investigative reporting from the Society of Publishers in Asia, and a Human Rights Press Award for multimedia reporting.
In early 2020, shortly after being promoted to deputy bureau chief, Josh was expelled from China along with two other Journal reporters, in what would turn out to be the opening shot in a media war between the U.S. and China that led to dozens of reporters being expelled from both countries. That same year, Josh was presented with the Don Bolles Medal for courageous China reporting alongside three other expelled reporters. He was also awarded a New America national fellowship for SURVEILLANCE STATE, his first book.
Josh was born in Park City, Utah. As a child, he spent summers working in his grandparents' Asian grocery store in California. He first visited China as a teenager on a family trip in 1991, when horse-drawn carts still competed with cars for space on Beijing's highways. Between stints as a journalist, he spent one year as the sous chef of a French restaurant on a man-made island floating in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Since being expelled from China, he has tried to adapt his kitchen skills to the Sichuan dishes he had to leave behind, with decidedly mixed results. He currently lives with his wife in Seoul.