Washington Post hires Tobin to cover China tech and business

At least initially, Tobin will be based in Taiwan while the newspaper seeks to persuade the Chinese authorities to grant visas that would allow Post correspondents to return to Beijing. Tobin will join a Taiwan-based team that includes Lily Kuo, our China bureau chief, and Christian Shepherd, a correspondent, along with researchers Vic Chiang and Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Lyric Li in Seoul and Theodora Wu in Hong Kong. Adding Tobin will allow The Post to devote more attention to the increasingly central role that technology is playing in China and across Asia as an instrument of government power and as a driver of global change.

Tobin is a graduate of New York University, with a bachelor’s degree in food studies and public health, and of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, with a master’s degree in law and diplomacy. She began her journalism career in 2018 as a reporter for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong; she had previously studied Mandarin in Taipei as a Luce Scholar at National Taiwan University and in Beijing as a Boren Fellow at the Stanford-Tsinghua Inter-University Program. She was previously a pastry chef and can still be found cooking at friends’ pop-up restaurants and baking on the weekends.

Tobin will start on Jan. 23 and will spend several weeks in the newsroom before relocating to Taiwan.