Robert Keatley has served as editor of three newspapers during his career in journalism in the U.S. and overseas. He now lives in Washington, D.C.
After earning his degree from the University of Washington—where he was editor of the UW Daily during his senior year—he spent two years on active duty as a US Navy officer in the Pentagon. He then earned an MA from Stanford University before joining the Wall Street Journal, where he spent most of his career. He was a staff reporter in San Francisco, New York, London and Hong Kong, and later became the Journal’s diplomatic correspondent in Washington.
In that capacity, he made a lengthy visit to China in the spring of 1971 as the first American reporter to receive an individual journalist’s visa following the advent of Ping-Pong diplomacy; the trip included an interview with Premier Zhou Enlai. He returned the following February with the press group covering the visit of President Nixon. During the 1970s, he also made several trips to China, the Mideast, the (then) Soviet Union and elsewhere with Secretaries of State William Rogers, Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, as well as with Presidents Nixon and Ford—in addition to separate working visits as a Wall Street Journal correspondent.
Mr. Keatley was the paper’s foreign editor in New York in 1978 before becoming editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong in 1979, and concurrently publisher in 1983. In 1984, he was named editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels, Belgium. He returned to Washington in 1992 to serve as a writer and editor specializing in international political and economic issues.
He retired from the Journal in 1998 and returned to Hong Kong to become editor of the South China Morning Post, its leading English-language daily. After completing his tour with the SCMP in 2001, he returned to Washington.
During the fall of 2005, Mr. Keatley taught at the journalism department of Tsinghua University in Beijing, also serving as a guest lecturer and participant in several conferences co-hosted by the department. In 2007, he ran a week-long introductory course for students from three Chinese universities at Fudan University in Shanghai. In addition, he founded and was editor of the Hong Kong Journal from 2006 to 2011, an online quarterly hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was devoted to articles about political, economic and social issues relating to Hong Kong and its neighborhood from a variety of contributors, and provided background information for those interested in the territory and its development. He also contributed articles about Hong Kong and China to publications of the Center for National Interest, a Washington think tank, and others.
At present, he is a consultant to the National Committee on US-China Relations.
Mr. Keatley is married and has three children. He has been a board member of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, and is a member of the Cosmos Club of Washington, the Hong Kong Club and the Ladies Recreation Club of Hong Kong. In 1985 he received the distinguished alumnus award of the University of Washington’s Communications Department and in 2006 was named to the department’s alumni Hall of Fame.