Senior Staff Editor at The New York Times
Rick Gladstone is a Senior Staff Editor at The New York Times, where he has been an editor and reporter on the International Desk for nearly two decades, covering breaking news on a range of topics that include China and its neighbors. He also is an accredited correspondent for the Times at the United Nations.
Rick began working for the Times as an editor in the business section in 1997, just as the seeds of a global financial crisis took root in Asia. He moved to the International Desk when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Before joining the Times, he was a reporter and editor at The Associated Press for 17 years, moving to the AP Foreign Desk in 1981 and to the AP’s Beijing bureau in 1983. He returned to New York in 1985 to join the AP’s Business Desk.
His time in China coincided with Deng Xiaoping’s effort to open the country, a period when Western journalists could more easily test the boundaries of China’s authoritarian structure. Based in Beijing, he was able to travel many times, including trips to Tibet and Qinghai. He and his wife, Peggy Chan, a fellow Middlebury Chinese School alum whose family is originally from Taishan in Guangdong Province, also traveled there. His articles ranged from the opening of Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, to the China-UK negotiations over the 1997 Hong Kong handover, to the first-ever Western rock concert in China (Wham! in 1985). After the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdowns, he collaborated with AP correspondents John Roderick and Jim Abramson the book: “China: From the Long March to Tiananmen Square (Henry Holt & Co.)
A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., Rick first studied Chinese while attending the University of Michigan. He then attended the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School in Journalism. But it was Middlebury Chinese School that shaped not only his professional but personal life. He attended for two summers (1976 and 1978), met his wife there and considers Helen Lin his favorite instructor.