about

Ashley Lo (羅璿) is a writer, journalist and researcher focused on Chinese business, technology, and consumer culture. She spent three years as a business reporter at CommonWealth Magazine (天下雜誌) in Taipei, where she interviewed more than 50 executives from China, Japan, and the US, and reported cover stories on Xiaohongshu, Pop Mart, and US-China trade. Her field investigation of Shein's supplier network in Guangdong traced how Beijing's industrial relocation policy failed to move the city's garment clusters, and how that failure fueled a new model of cross-border e-commerce.

Her work starts from Chinese-language sources: corporate filings, local government documents, and interviews conducted in Mandarin. She is interested in how Chinese companies actually operate, at home and abroad, and in what their behavior reveals that policy debates miss. She trained in open-source investigation with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Her research examines Chinese AI models and US-Taiwan-China relations. At Dartmouth, she co-authored a study measuring national bias in Chinese language models, published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, and first-authored computational work on US media coverage of Taiwan. Earlier, she contributed to Reporters Without Borders' China's New Media Order, an investigation of Beijing's information strategy. Her master's thesis, on Chinese commercial soft power in the United States, was completed with distinction.

Lo holds a BA in English from the University of Notre Dame and a MA in Chinese Politics from the Fletcher School, Tufts University. Born and raised in Taiwan, she has lived in the US, UK, and China, and writes in English and Mandarin.