Lucy Hornby

Senior Associate (Non-resident), Freeman Chair in China Studies
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Lucy Hornby's research focuses on the revival of the Chinese state and the rise of Xi Jinping during the reform era. She lived in China for almost 20 years, working as a journalist for Reuters and the Financial Times, before returning to the United States as a 2020 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She first moved to China in 1995, teaching English in Wuhan thanks to Princeton in Asia, a program that builds bridges between the United States and Asia. She has also reported on Asian energy markets and investment for Dow Jones Newswires and on Latin American energy investment for Energy Intelligence. A fluent Mandarin speaker, Lucy has reported from every Chinese province and region, on topics ranging from elite politics to the trade war and environmental pollution. Her coverage was honored with the 2018 Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for excellence in business reporting, among other awards, for investigations into the ownership and financing of some of China’s largest and most opaque conglomerates. She was previously a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.