Howard W. French

Howard W. French reported for the New York Times from four continents, running its bureaux in Central America and the Caribbean, in West and Central Africa, in Tokyo and then in Shanghai across the years from 1990 to 2008. Born in Washington DC in 1957, he had joined the paper in 1986, and since 2008 he has taught at Columbia's journalism school. Everything Under the Heavens, published in 2017, takes its title from tianxia, the classical notion that all lands under heaven fell within the Chinese emperor's sphere. French follows that inheritance through the tributary dealings of the imperial centuries and into the present quarrels over the South China Sea and the pressure Beijing applies to its neighbours. His other books include A Continent for the Taking, on Africa, and China's Second Continent, which followed Chinese migrants who had settled there, along with Born in Blackness in 2021.