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.

Pomfret holds a BA and MA from Stanford University. He was one of the first American students to go to China and study at Nanjing University and attended Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies as a Fulbright scholar. Pomfret has won several awards for his journalism, including the Asia Society’s 2003 Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia, the 2007 Shorenstein Award from Harvard and Stanford universities for his lifetime coverage of Asia, and Georgetown University’s 2011 Weintal Award for diplomatic coverage.