About the Author

Leaving behind a farming childhood for a career in journalism, McBeth went straight from high school into his hometown newspaper at the age of 17. He left his native New Zealand in 1970 and arrived in Asia by ship, intending to travel
overland to London and try his hand on Fleet Street. He got as far as Thailand, where he spent several years on the Bangkok Post before plunging into freelance work. In 1979, McBeth joined the Far Eastern Economic Review. It was a time of rapid expansion and over the next quarter-century, he became the magazine’s longest-serving correspondent, heading its bureaus in Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia. When the Review was closed in 2004, he went
back to freelancing, first as a columnist for the Singapore’s Straits Times and later as a correspondent for the on-line Asia Times. He remains one of the last of a generation of foreign journalists who lived the story and made Asia their home.