Joseph Kahn became the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times in July 2003. Previously, he was assigned to Shanghai. Mr. Kahn was also a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering international economics and trade, and he was a reporter on the business desk in New York, writing about Wall Street.

Before joining The Times in January 1998, Mr. Kahn spent four years as a China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He also worked as a city desk reporter and foreign correspondent for The Dallas Morning News, where he was part of a team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for international reporting for their stories on violence against women around the world. In 2004, Mr. Kahn won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting for his series of stories on labor conditions in China's export factories. The same series received a citation from the Overseas Press Club. Last year, Mr. Kahn and his Beijing-based colleague, Jim Yardley, won the Harry Chapin Media Award in the newspaper category for a series of stories on the rising wealth gap and outbreaks of mass protests in China.

Born in Boston on Aug. 19, 1964, Mr. Kahn graduated from Harvard College in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in American history. In 1990, he received a master's degree in East Asian studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Jim Yardley has been a correspondent in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times since August 2003. He has traveled throughout China and written on a wide range of topics, including social unrest, rising inequality and the country's widespread pollution problems. His foreign assignment is his third reporting job at The Times. He joined the paper in 1997 as a metropolitan reporter in New York and moved to the national desk in August 1999 as bureau chief in Houston. He covered presidential politics, the collapse of Enron, the death penalty, water policy and even a town where the mayor is a beer- drinking goat. In the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, he wrote many investigative pieces about the hijackers.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Yardley worked as a national desk reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1990 to 1997. Based in Atlanta, Birmingham and New Orleans, he covered stories in the Deep South as well as regional and national politics.

Mr. Yardley also worked for The Anniston Star in Alabama and The Times Community Newspapers in Fairfax County in Virginia. His magazine articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, Essence and Redbook.

He was born in New York City on June 18, 1964. His family moved to North Carolina six weeks later. He graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mr. Yardley is married and has three children.