John Pomfret

“Chinese Lessons,” … is a highly personal, honest, funny and well-informed account of China’s hyperactive effort to forget its past and reinvent its future. What makes this book particularly rewarding is that Pomfret not only describes China today, he also reminds us what came before, thereby posing the important question: Is it possible for China to avoid reckoning with its past and still become a responsible, possibly great, nation? — Sunday New York Times (click here to read)

At a time when so many books about China are written from a distance — their authors having spent only a short time in the country, if any time at all — thank goodness for “Chinese Lessons.” — Wall Street Journal (click here to read)

CHINESE LESSONS is an extraordinary book. Through telling the intimate stories of his former classmates, John Pomfret reveals a contemporary China where many individual lives have been thwarted and twisted. This is a book full of insights, honesty, and compassion. It touched me deeply.
– Ha Jin, author of War Trash and Waiting

“John Pomfret has written a brilliant, insightful book describing the dark side and human cost of the Chinese economic miracle. His feel for China, based on years of living there, his fluency in Chinese, and his reporting genius cut through the sham and spin of much current coverage and superficial impressions that clog the system.”– James R. Lilley, former U.S. Ambassador to China and Chief of the American Mission in Taiwan

“In this intimate and revealing book, John Pomfret shows why he is one of the great China correspondents of his generation: He has never held himself at a distance, but has plunged in, with vigor and an open mind. His approach to China has no tint of romanticism or awe; the lives he discovers and the stories he tells, including his own, are unvarnished, unexpected, and riveting.”– Steve Coll, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars

“He loves China, and he excels at describing the minutiae that make up Chinese life: the slang, the food, the bathrooms and the explosion of nouveau-riche bad taste in the boom towns and shopping districts. He makes an engaging, expert guide to the changes that have transformed China in the last quarter-century.”– New York Times (click here to read)

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that tells the story of China’s tumultuous change through intimate tales of its people’s lives. Jung Chang’s classic Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is the genre’s point of reference. Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China by Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson is another. Now we have Chinese Lessons by Washington Post reporter John Pomfret.”  — Los Angeles Times (click here to read)