Quotes from John Pomfret

The one indication that I got that I was doing the right job in Bosnia was that at different periods of time all the factions came down very hard on me.

I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China.

And then I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to China in 1980, which was quite early.

When you do a job like this you have to like having cold sweat on your back.

I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad.

I went back to the States and started at a small newspaper in Riverside County, California, covering the police; I was making $280 a week covering the police.

Whereas with foreign coverage there's a much broader disconnect between you and your audience.

One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.

When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good.

A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.

But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight.

I think that's the main threat in Bosnia and Rwanda and Zaire. There doesn't seem to be much willingness to engage these problems unless they directly affect national security interests.

I had my life threatened by Bosnian Serbs on numerous occasions.

We live and learn, but not the wiser grow.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

To America's founders, China was a source of inspiration. They saw it as a harmonious society with officials chosen on merit, where the arts and philosophy flourished, and the peasantry labored happily on the land.

If there is a pattern to this baffling complexity, it may be best described as a never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion, and disgust, only to return to fascination once again.

For the United States, however, trading with China not only saved but helped shape the new republic. America's discovery of the China market was integral to the rise of the United States. For the Chinese, America also meant opportunity—for their officials, for their showmen, and for one globally minded businessman.

The idioms also revealed that Chinese shared a barnyard bawdiness with American English. My favorite was "taking off your pants to fart"—wasted effort.

In China's first-ever national parliamentary elections, held in the winter of 1912–1913, Sun's Nationalist Party won a majority of seats.

In the years before the Communist revolution of 1949, the US-educated scholars, scientists, and artists in China made up the backbone of the country's scientific and intellectual elite and served as the conscience of their nation.

I grew up in New York City in the late '70s, at a time when U.S. - China relations were something that was on the front page of The New York Times on a regular basis.

Srebrenica was a horrendous war crime and it had to be uncovered.

In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything.