American Academy Lecture

Are We Right to Be Scared of China?

Award-winning journalist and author John Pomfret will speak about China’s role as a prospective global power and the ramifications of its ambitions for the US, Europe, and the rest of the world.

As a foreign correspondent, Pomfret has covered Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. He has spent seven years covering China – one 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. Returning to the United States in 2004, Pomfret was the paper’s West Coast bureau chief for two years before being appointed the editor of its “Outlook” section, the Post’s weekly commentary section, which he ran from 2007 until September 2009. Pomfret moved back to China in 2011 to undertake research funded by a Fulbright grant and the Smith Richardson Foundation for his new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.