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 three 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 with David Wessel 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.
Lingling Wei is a senior China correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. That’s the job she wanted since she first went into journalism in the 1990s, an era of greater openness of China to the world.
She learned about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from visiting Fulbright scholars at her university, Shanghai’s Fudan University. A new Center for American Studies at Fudan allowed her access to the Journal, the New York Times, and other American publications. Her subsequent work at a government-owned newspaper strengthened her desire to write stories reflecting real news and the interests of the people.
After she earned a master’s degree in journalism from New York University in 2000, Wei started work at Dow Jones Newswires. Her coverage there of the U.S. housing crisis won her a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award in 2007. Wei joined the Journal in New York in 2008 to cover real estate.
In 2011, Wei, a newly minted U.S. citizen then, got her dream job: she became a China correspondent for the Journal. That’s also when she started to work with Bob Davis, who helped her become a more ambitious journalist. Her coverage includes China’s massive debt problems, tightened state control over the economy, and, most recently, the U.S.-China trade war.
Wei is featured in the Journal’s “Face of Real News” campaign aimed at celebrating quality journalism. She was a finalist at the Society of Publishers in Asia for its 2017 Journalist of the Year award and was cited by the Overseas Press Club in 2016 for best international business reporting. She and Davis were part of a Wall Street Journal team that won a New York Press Club award in 2019 for coverage of “Trump’s Trade Turmoil.”
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