Jasper Becker established
Asia Weekly
, a Hong Kong-based news magazine on
Asia
, in 2005 which had a print run of 20,000 until it closed at the end of 2008. The magazine won a number of awards for design and content. He has written commentaries to the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Spectator, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Irish Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Australian Financial Review and The Globe and Mail. And has contributed features for Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Marie Claire, Prospect and other magazines.
Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
was runner up for the 2006 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The introduction won the Book of the Year Award from the
Academy
of
Political Science
(2005)
Hungry Ghosts
, the first account of
China
’s Great Leap Forward famine (1958-62) won the 4
th
PIOOM Foundation Award for a work on major human rights abuses. Articles on
North Korea
won the Kilpatrick Award for Human Rights and Children and coverage of the Falun Gong crackdown won the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award.
Journalism.
From 2002-2005, he was the
China
correspondent for
The Independent.
Between 1995 to May 2002, he was Beijing Bureau Chief of
Hong Kong
’s English-language
South China Morning Post
(SCMP). Jasper Becker started his career in
Brussels
and worked for the Associated Press in
Geneva
and
Frankfurt
. He joined
The Guardian
and reported from Beijing 1985 to 1989 and notably covering the first pro-independence riots in Lhasa, the pro-democracy movement in South Korea, Taiwan's democracy movement and reporting from North Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia and Japan. After the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations for which the paper nominated him as foreign correspondent of the year, he returned to
London
. Several years later he left
The Guardian
and joined the
BBC World Service
as the Asian Affairs Analyst. He travelled widely throughout the former
Soviet Union
and wrote
The Lost Countr
y
on the fate of the Mongols.
Education
: A British citizen, born
London
19 May 1956, married with three children aged four to eleven. After attending
Mill
Hill
School
, he obtained a BA degree at Goldsmith's College in the
University
of
London
. He also studied at the
Ludwig-Maximilians
University
in
Munich
and later obtained a post-graduate Diploma in Modern Chinese from the
University
of
London
. In addition to Chinese, he speaks French and German.
