John Pomfret (journalist)

John Pomfret is an American journalist and writer.

Pomfret was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and raised in New York City. He attended Stanford University, receiving his B.A. and M.A. in East Asian Studies. In 1980, he was one of the first American students to go to China and study at Nanjing University. Between 1983 and 1984 he attended Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies as a Fulbright Scholar, researching the Cambodian conflict.

He started his journalistic career at the Stanford Daily as a photographer. After that he worked at a newspaper in Riverside County, California, and after a year was hired by the Associated Press to work in New York City, covering the graveyard shift.

After two years with the AP in New York, in 1988, he was sent to China as a foreign correspondent, thanks to his knowledge of Mandarin and his Asian studies background. There he covered the 1989 student protests in Beijing, after which he was expelled from China because of alleged links with student ringleaders. He then worked in Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. For more than 15 years he covered the armed conflicts in these countries and the politics of the post-Cold War era. He later served as the editor of the Washington Post′s weekend opinion section, Outlook.

...
Wikipedia