John Pomfret

Raised in New York City and educated at Stanford and Nanjing universities, I’m an award-winning journalist who’s worked with the Washington Post for several decades.

I served as a foreign correspondent for 20 years and spent eight years covering big wars and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka and Iraq. I’ve spent decades covering China—in the late 1980s during the Tiananmen Square protests, then in the 1990s as the bureau chief for the Washington Post in Beijing and then back in DC.

I've been lucky enough to win a bunch of journalism awards, I was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for my work in Congo in 1996.

I’m the author of three books. My first book was “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China” (1996). My second book, “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present” (2016), was awarded the 2017 Arthur Ross Award by the Council on Foreign Relations. My new book, “From Warsaw With Love: Polish Spies, the CIA and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance” came out in October 2021.

I live in the SF Bay Area, with my wife, the entrepreneur and founder of WildChina, Zhang Mei, and our three children.

Contact: pomfretjohn@gmail.com

Twitter: @JEPomfret

www.johnpomfret.com