John Ruwitch
John Ruwitch is a correspondent with NPR's international desk. He covers Chinese affairs.
Ruwitch joined NPR in early 2020, and has since chronicled the tectonic shift in America's relations with China, from hopeful engagement to suspicion-fueled competition. He's also reported on a range of other issues, including Beijing's pressure campaign on Taiwan, Hong Kong's National Security Law, Asian-Americans considering guns for self-defense in the face of rising violence and a herd of elephants roaming in the Chinese countryside in search of a home.
Ruwitch joined NPR after more than 19 years with Reuters in Asia, the last eight of which were in Shanghai. There, he first covered a broad beat that took him as far afield as the China-North Korea border and the edge of the South China Sea. Later, he led a team that covered business and financial markets in the world's second biggest economy. Ruwitch has also had postings in Hanoi, Hong Kong and Beijing, reporting on anti-corruption campaigns, elite Communist politics, labor disputes, human rights, currency devaluations, earthquakes, snowstorms, Olympic badminton and everything in between.
Ruwitch studied history at U.C. Santa Cruz and got a master's in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard. He speaks Mandarin and Vietnamese.
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The DNA data of millions of people who used 23andMe's services won't be sold to a pharmaceutical company. A bankruptcy judge greenlighted the sale of the remnants of the firm, including its wealth of genetic data, to a nonprofit led by co-founder Anne Wojcicki. -
Genetic testing company 23andMe never hit on a sustainable business model and went bankrupt. Now, it's being sold to a non-profit launched by the co-founder, delaying addressing data privacy concerns.
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Last year, Congress banned the app in the U.S., citing national security concerns and demanding it spin off from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. Trump has again paused enforcement of the ban. -
The annual event for developers focused on a new 'Liquid Glass' interface for Apple products, but did little to follow up on last year's promise of a bold push into artificial intelligence. -
You no longer need to be a software engineer to build software — you can "vibe code" it by prompting chatbots to build apps and websites. Could that put programmers out of a job? -
The $6.5 billion deal brings together the maker of ChatGPT and one of the world's most famous product designers in a venture to create new AI-enabled devices. -
The car you drive years in the future might run off a battery being invented in a lab today. Companies in China and the United States are racing to perfect and scale up next-generation technologies. -
In this series, NPR takes readers and listeners behind the news and explains how we do our journalism. Here, John Ruwitch talks about his many years of reporting on China, for this week's Reporter's Notebook.
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Development has brought many changes to Vietnam in the 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War.
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Exporters, importers and recent government statistics all suggest that trade in both directions is slowing sharply as a result of the tariffs. Neither side appears willing to be seen giving ground.
