John Pomfret

About the Speaker

John Pomfret speaks, reads and writes Mandarin and has lived and worked in China off-and-on for a decade starting in 1980. He was an AP reporter in China during the Tiananmen Square protests in the late 1980s and served as Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1998 until the end of 2003. A foreign correspondent for 15 years, he is currently the editor of the Post’s Outlook section and is the newspaper’s expert on immigration. Selected as one of the best books of the year in 2006 by The Washington Post, his Chinese Lessons won the prestigious Shorenstein Prize for Coverage of Asia in 2007 and was a finalist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize for an Outstanding Book about the Pacific Rim.