Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China is Washington Post bureau chief John Pomfret’s evocative recounting of the lives of his former classmates in the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. As one of the first American students to live and study with Chinese after the revolution, Pomfret saw the country as few Americans had. Leaving China in 1982, Pomfret returned for the Tiananmen Square protests and the crackdown of June 4, 1989. Expelled by the Chinese government at that point, he again returned to live from 1998-2005 as the Post’s bureau chief in Beijing.
Pomfret uses the lives of his classmates as a vehicle for telling China’s story, one of the most tumultuous the modern world has ever known. His classmates came from villages and cities; some were Red Guards; others were beaten by Red Guards; some siblings starved to death during the calamitous Great Leap Foward. By 1978, Pomfret’s classmates had crawled back from village outposts and labor camps and succeeded in testing into college. They graduated and constituted the first generation in Communist China’s history to become agents of their own fate. Some went into business; many joined the Communist Party; some were exiled for their political views; others went overseas and found other things, among them religion.
By weaving his classmates’ lives into an extraordinary chronicle of the past forty years of China’s reinvention, Pomfret reveals the new China as it has never been seen before. Tracing the stories of Book Idiot Zhou, the widow Little Guan, the sad sack Old Wu, the feckless dissident Daybreak Song, and Party apparatchik Big Bluffer Ye, Pomfret relates their small and large triumphs, and how the Chinese, as individuals and as a society, grapple with the skeletons of their past as they continue to push forward into futures marked by ever-increasing prosperity, opportunity, and unease. Maoism is dead in China, Pomfret reports, but no new beliefs have appeared to replace it.
In addition to his experience as an award-winning reporter in China, Pomfret hasÌ¢â”̢â”since he first arrived in the country at the age of twenty-oneÌ¢â”̢â”harbored a lifelong love and respect for the country and its people, making him the ideal writer to deliver the story of China from the ground up. His riveting portrait of the Chinese people will change how we think of China as well as challenge perceptions of the way fate can reshape the course of nations as surely as it has the extraordinary lives of these five classmates.
John Pomfret is currently Los Angeles Bureau Chief of The Washington Post. Leaving China in 1982, Pomfret returned for the Tiananmen Square protests and the crackdown of June 4, 1989. Expelled by the Chinese government at that point, he again returned to live from 1998-2005 as the Post’s bureau chief in Beijing. Pomfret is the recipient of the Osborn Elliott Prize for Journalism by the Asia Society which is given annually to the best coverage of Asia.