vailsymposium

John Pomfret served as a correspondent for The Washington Post for many years. He is the author of the acclaimed book “Chinese Lessons” and has won several awards for his coverage of Asia, including the Osborne Elliot Prize in 2003 by the Asia Society. He holds a BA and MA from Stanford University and was one of the first American students to go to China and study at Nanjing University; he attended Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies as a Fulbright Scholar.

During his 15 year tenure at The Washington Post, Pomfret covered big wars and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. Pomfret spent seven years covering China: one year in the late 1980s during the Tiananmen Square protests and then from 1998 until the end of 2003 as the bureau chief for The Washington Post in Beijing. Pomfret speaks, reads and writes Mandarin; he has been a bartender in Paris and practiced Judo in Japan.