The Takeaway

I landed in Beijing in March of 2016, Ubered around dozens of tech companies a week and had nightly drinks with Chinese and U.S. investors at the Rosewood in Beijing. On the weekends, I visited the startups that worked Saturdays (they all did) and wandered the malls and parks. I hopped to Hong Kong for some parties and hikes and barely stopped eating!

I was in reporting heaven. I was also confused. 

By my count, there were as many tech reporters covering Uber in San Francisco as there were reporters for U.S. publications covering technology in Beijing.

As an entrepreneur, that gap thrilled me. So even as the entire staff of The Information barely filled a tiny San Francisco office, I decided to invest big in Hong Kong just a few months later. Our coverage stood out instantly. 

Our reporting on Uber’s withdrawal from China was followed by our coverage of the rise of ByteDance, when only a few knew its name. We broke ByteDance’s revenue and product plans annually and revealed the secret deals Tim Cook was striking with the Chinese government, a historic scoop.

Our chronicling of China’s crackdown on its own internet companies, was followed by the rise of Shein and Temu and the oft-discussed “decoupling” of the U.S. and China markets. 

And all that before the current era of the AI cold war with Nvidia at the center, the rise of DeepSeek and, just this week, China’s new strides in chips.

Ten years later, even as the U.S. and China tech worlds have changed dramatically, I am in awe of the team that has done this all and keeps on going.

And that same coverage gap—the lack of in-depth reporting about China’s tech businesses—still enthralls me. Other news outlets have pulled back from Hong Kong and Beijing, amid real pressures on the press. We take those threats seriously but are pushing ahead independently.

This week, we are celebrating another milestone in the bureau: welcoming our first team member in Singapore, Claudia Chong. Jing Yang, our Asia bureau chief, is a force and keeps pushing ahead. 

Jing reminds me, 10 years after we first opened the bureau, that the urgency of business leaders globally to understand the China market has never been more intense. And our team is on the front lines. 

It’s funny to look back and remember how it all began: a plane ticket, some phone numbers to try and the naivete that I could pay for things in China with a credit card. 

And as The Information has grown into an 80-person global news organization, I’m a bit nostalgic for traffic-jammed Beijing days when I managed to make it from Tsinghua University to Xiaomi before staying up way too late meeting with entrepreneurs who didn’t leave the office until midnight. 

As a reporter and editor, I’ve been lucky to travel the world. But nothing quite compares to my full China immersion, which looking back was one of the most fruitful periods of my professional life. 

Within a month after my return to the U.S., I was also pregnant with my first son, an ordeal that had taken longer than I had wanted.

Two lessons stand out—both for journalists and entrepreneurs. 

Take the long game and be patient. The Information’s leadership position in Asia tech today dates back more than a decade to my messaging random entrepreneurs on WeChat. While our reporters have done the hard work, without my decision to pack up and get out, I wouldn’t have found the conviction to build a business there—a decision I’ve committed to again and again as the market has changed. 

And, especially when reporters can direct growing armies of bots to gather all sorts of information from the comfort of their desks, remember to leave your office and wander far.

It is then that you are more likely to see something others don’t. And all good stories—and business ideas—come from that.