Mansfield Center Advisory Board
Dr. Terry Weidner, Board Vice-Chair
Mansfield Fellows
Dexter Roberts
Chinese Economics, Business, and Politics
Contact
- dexter1.roberts@umontana.edu
- Office Hours
Dexter Tiff Roberts is an award-winning journalist and speaker who is a regular commentator on the U.S.-China trade and political relationship. As well as a Mansfield Fellow and adjunct instructor in political science at the University of Montana, he is also a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Asia Security Initiative. Previously he was China bureau chief and Asia News Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, based in Beijing for more than two decades. He has reported from all of China's provinces and regions including Tibet and Xinjiang, covering the rise of companies and entrepreneurs, manufacturing and migrants, demography and civil society. He has also reported from North Korea, Mongolia and Cambodia, on China's growing economic and political influence. His recent reporting has focused on how legacy policies from China's past, including its household registration system, are leading to growing inequality and social tension, and are holding back the country's development.
Roberts has won numerous journalism honors, including Overseas Press Club awards, the Sidney Hillman Foundation prize, Human Rights Press awards, and Society of Publishers in Asia editorial excellence awards. He has a bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was a National Merit Scholar, and a master of international affairs focusing on China and journalism from Columbia University, where he was a recipient of the New York Financial Writers Association Scholarship. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and studied at National Taiwan Normal University's Mandarin Training Center in Taipei, Taiwan. Roberts’ first book, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: the Worker, the Factory and the Future of the World (St. Martin's Press), was chosen as one of The Economist “best books of the year” for 2020. He is represented by Macmillan Speakers Bureau and has launched a China trade newsletter titled Trade War.