Philip Pan is an American journalist and author.[1][2][3][4][5] He won the Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal in 2009 for his bestselling book about political change in modern China, Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, which was also named a Best Book of 2008 by the Washington Post and the Economist magazine. The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that the book possessed "both the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novel."[6]
Pan was formerly a reporter for the Washington Post and headed its Beijing and Moscow bureaus. He also received the 2002 Livingston Award for International Reporting for his articles about labor conditions in China, and an Overseas Press Club award for stories about Chinese-style authoritarianism. He started his career working at the Post's Metro Desk "covering crime, education and immigration policy" after graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor's in government in 1995. He was managing editor for The Harvard Crimson and "freelanced for the Boston Globe, and interned with the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the Jersey Journal."[7] He joined the Post's Beijing bureau in 2000.
His book profiles a dozen individuals caught in the struggle over China's political future, including a filmmaker trying to uncover the truth about the execution of a young woman named Lin Zhao during the Cultural Revolution, an elderly surgeon named Jiang Yanyong who blew the whistle on China's cover-up of the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, and a blind rural activist named Chen Guangcheng who was jailed after trying to stop a campaign of forced abortion and sterilization in his village. Other topics covered by his book include China's shourong detention system, investigative journalism in China, and the publication of, and reception of An Investigation of China's Peasantry, which was later released as Will the Boat Sink the Water in English translation.
He now lives in Hong Kong with his wife and son.