Washington Post hires The Wire China’s Northrop

Washington Post international editor Doug Jehl, deputy international editor Jennifer Amur, and Asia-Pacific editor Anna Fifield sent out the following on Wednesday:

We’re very happy to announce that Katrina Northrop will join The Post as a China correspondent, becoming a key member of a team covering a world power whose path is shaping the 21st century.

With a strong record of reporting on China from inside and outside the country, Katrina possesses the expertise, versatility and ambition that have defined The Post’s coverage. As a Washington-based reporter for The Wire China, Katrina has delivered a steady stream of revelatory work on subjects including the China-Russia semiconductor trade and U.S. private equity firms financing China’s surveillance state. In 2023, she received the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award for Young Journalists for a “standout and impactful body of investigative work on China’s economic influence,” including a two–part investigation on Wynn Resort’s high stakes dealmaking in Macau. Her reporting on a collaborative investigation of secret links between two Chinese billionaires was published this week in The New York Times.

In her new role, Katrina will be based in Taiwan and will work in close partnership with correspondent Christian Shepherd in Singapore and with other members of The Post’s China team, who report from Taipei and Seoul. She will collaborate closely with national security reporters and technology reporters based in the United States.

Katrina has been a staff writer for The Wire China since 2020. She worked previously as a reporting intern at the Beijing bureau of The New York Times and as a member of the investigative team at Inside Climate News. Earlier, while still an undergraduate, she was part of an investigative team at the Providence Journal that examined elder-care abuse in Rhode Island.

Katrina earned a B.A. from Brown University in development studies, with a focus on China and study abroad at Beijing Normal University as part of the Princeton in Beijing program. She was a Schwarzman Scholar at China’s Tsinghua University, where she earned a master’s in global affairs. She is highly proficient in Mandarin. The Post is continuing to seek permission from the Chinese government that would allow Post correspondents to be based in mainland China after three years in which residency visas have not been granted.

Katrina will start work in the D.C. newsroom on Sept. 3 and will relocate to Taipei in early October after getting to know The Post.