MELINDA LIUBeijing Bureau Chief, NewsweekAward-winning foreign correspondent Melinda Liu has reported from China for three decades. She was named Newsweek's Beijing Bureau chief in 1998, returning to a city where 18 years earlier she'd opened Newsweek's first bureau in the Chinese capital since 1949. One of Newsweek’s most experienced foreign correspondents, Liu covered China's post-Mao modernization and the Tiananmen Square bloodshed; the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban; the 1991 liberation of Kuwait; and U.S. military interventions in Somalia and Haiti. In 2003, she was one of few American journalists in Baghdad's Palestine Hotel as a firsthand witness to the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing of the Iraqi capital and the fall of Saddam Hussein. Liu won the 2006 Shorenstein Journalism Award in recognition of her reporting on Asia.