James Kynge

James left Edinburgh University with an MA in Chinese and Japanese in 1985 and after a few months headed out to China to find a job in journalism. He had bought a one-way ticket on Romanian airlines and had just 60 US dollars in his pocket, so he was lucky that the then Reuters' Beijing Bureau Chief, Graham Earnshaw, gave him a part-time position as a newspaper clipper and feature writer.

He went on to work with Reuters in China, Japan, Mongolia, the five former Soviet Central Asian republics and Taiwan before joining the Financial Times in 1996 and being posted to Malaysia and Singapore. From 1998 to 2005, he worked as China Bureau Chief for the Financial Times, charting the country's extraordinary ascent toward superpower status.

In 2005, he left journalism to head up the Pearson group of companies in China, overseeing a phase of rapid expansion. In the autumn of 2008, he relocated to the UK, where he lives with Lucy, his wife, and three children, Tom, Ella and Ollie. James is the recipient of several international awards for journalism and his book, China Shakes the World, was translated into 19 languages and won the Goldman Sachs/FT "Business Book of the Year" award in 2006.