Hannah Beech is senior Asia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Bangkok, where she leads enterprise and investigative reporting across the region. She previously served as the Times‘s Southeast Asia bureau chief, beginning in 2017. Before joining the Times, she spent two decades at Time magazine, starting in 1997 as a reporter in Hong Kong and serving as bureau chief in Beijing, Shanghai, and Bangkok. She has reported from more than 40 countries and territories, covering Myanmar’s descent into civil war, the Rohingya refugee crisis, tensions in the South China Sea, a hidden AIDS epidemic in China, Japan’s nuclear meltdown, and the rise of the Taliban. Her honors include Journalist of the Year from the Society of Publishers in Asia, several Human Rights Press Awards, a shared 2020 Gerald Loeb Award, and Boston University’s Hugo Shong Reporting on Asia Award (2025). Born in Hong Kong to a Japanese mother and an American father, she is a graduate of Colby College in Maine and speaks Japanese, Mandarin, and French.
