James Palmer is the Asia Editor at Foreign Policy. Palmer is the author of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia (Faber, 2008), short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China (Faber, 2012). He won the Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul Prize for travel writing in 2003. He lives in Beijing.