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Bob Davis

Bob Davis has been covering international economics for the Wall Street Journal since the early 1990s when his Washington, D.C., bureau chief, Al Hunt, assigned him to cover international competitiveness,” whatever that was. Pretty quickly that turned into a focus on trade and globalization, especially U.S.-China relations.

Davis covered President Clinton’s negotiations with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji in 1998 over China’s…

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Bob Davis has been covering international economics for the Wall Street Journal since the early 1990s when his Washington, D.C., bureau chief, Al Hunt, assigned him to cover international competitiveness,” whatever that was. Pretty quickly that turned into a focus on trade and globalization, especially U.S.-China relations.

Davis covered President Clinton’s negotiations with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji in 1998 over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. After that, he was Brussels bureau chief from 2001 to 2002, Latin America bureau chief from 2004 to 2007, and China economics correspondent based in Beijing from 2011 to 2014. For the past two years, he has focused on the Washington, D.C., part of President Trump’s China trade war, while Lingling Wei handled the China part.

Along the way, he won a Raymond Clapper Award for Washington reporting in 2000 for his coverage of Clinton’s China deal. He was also part of Wall Street Journal teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1999 for coverage of the Asian and Russian financial crisis, and the Overseas Press Club award in 2005 for Latin American coverage.

In 2014, he and his wife, Debra Bruno, wrote an e-book about their China experiences, Beijing from A-to-Z. In 1998, he coauthored a book on the future of the American economy, called Prosperity, which Business Week named one of the year’s ten best business books.

He began his journalism career in 1975 when he founded an alternative newspaper in Oneonta, New York, The Susquehanna Sentinel, and a newspaper printing business.

Follow him on Twitter @bobdavis187, and visit his website, www.bobdavisreports.com.

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Articles

Broken Engagement

Our series of interviews with top U.S. policy makers of the last 30 years has revealed how and why the American approach towards China has morphed from seeking closer ties to a desire for estrangement.

Jay Shambaugh on Getting China to Change Course

The Treasury’s top international official gives an inside-the-room account of the latest talks between Treasury Secretary Yellen and the Chinese leadership, including the U.S.’s efforts to get Beijing to address overcapacity and economic imbalances, how the two countries would deal with any future financial crisis,...

Sarah Bianchi on Setting the Trade Agenda

The recently departed deputy U.S. trade representative discusses why the U.S. needs to be on high alert when dealing with China, and how the Biden administration's approach has differed from its predecessor.

Back on Track?

Could a recent flurry of "track-two" activity be a sign that relations between Beijing and Washington are stabilizing? Informal meetings on critical topics like AI arms control and military-to-military communications have picked up recently, and both U.S. officials and the track-two participants say the impact...