Reporting China: Tales from the Dragon's Mouth
A conversation with Seth Faison and John Pomfret
Thursday, May 12, 2005
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
State Room
131 Kerckhoff Hall
UCLA
Image courtesy of Renmin bao
Seth Faison was for many years the Shanghai bureau chief for the New York Times. In total, he spent 12 years in China, beginning as student, then working as a reporter for the Hong Kong Standard and later the South China Morning Post, where he covered the Tiananmen student movement of 1989 and the ensuing massacre. In 1991 he joined the New York Times, where he originally covered New York City. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 as a member of the New York Times team covering the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He is the author of South of the Clouds (St. Martin’s Press, 2004), which has been described as “a revealing, intimate portrait of China [told through] the story of an American man who ventures into its hidden realms – romance, politics, the criminal underworld, and Tibet. As he matures from a wide-eyed student into a journalist and a seasoned observer, he develops a passion for uncovering secrets, about China and about himself.”
John Pomfret was the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post for six years. Before that, he covered wars, famines, and other disasters for eight years in Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Gulf, and sub-Saharan Africa. Pomfret is now writing a book on his experience in China, starting with his time there as a student in 1980–82. His book tracks the lives of his classmates, before university (as Red Guards and sent-down youth toiling in the countryside), through graduation, and into the current day as businesspeople, Party cadres, dissidents, and housewives. Through the arc of his classmates' lives, Pomfret hopes to get at a broader story: modern China's journey from a closed Communist society to a nation of ferocious energy heading toward an uncertain future. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Obsorne Elliot Prize for Journalism by the Asia Society, an annual award for the best coverage of Asia.
Cost: Free and open to the public
For more information please contact
Richard Gunde
Tel: 310 825-8683
gunde@ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/ccs
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies
