Fred Schneiter starting writing in his late teens as an East Oregonian reporter, and went on to a University of Oregon Journalism degree while working as a University News Bureau reporter.

He worked for three more major West Coast newspapers before Korean War service in troop information and education, editing an amy paper during the occupation of Germany while freelancing a column in the US on the lighter side of army life. He’s won national awards in communication and management, lectured at Stanford, the University of Santa Clara and was a member of a small group of China Hands invited to testify on US-China trade on Capitol Hill shortly after China’s opening to the West.

Whetting an early appetite for adventure by riding freight trains across America from San Francisco during high school vacations, he’s lived and worked overseas for more than 30 years, covering more than 40 countries in the process, and every province of China. He was in Tiananmen Square the day the tanks moved in, lived in Hong Kong during its final years as a British colony, and witnessed first-hand modern China’s monumental rise after opening to the West.

Two decades into pseudo-retirement, the Schneiters live in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, where he endorses the Ogden Nash view that progress has gone too far.