– An Evening With The Terracotta Warriors: U.S.-China Relations Through the Scope of History
April 26th, 2017
This April, the Pacific Science Center is featuring a one-of-a-kind exhibit of The Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor. Join the World Affairs Council, The Confucius Institute of Washington, and East Asia Resource Center at the University of Washington for a networking reception with light refreshments and discussion with John Pomfret, former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing and author of the recently published book The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present.
Mr. Pomfret will lead a conversation on U.S.-China relations in a new administration, and will discuss how an examination of history can inform and explain past, present, and future relations between the two nations. Following the program, we invite you to take an after hours tour of The Terracotta Warriors exhibit. Mr. Pomfret will be available to sign copies of his book, which will be available for purchase.
About the speaker:
Raised in New York City and educated at Stanford and Nanjing universities, John Pomfret is an award-winning journalist with The Washington Post. He has been a foreign correspondent for 15 years, covering big wars and small in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey and northeastern Iran. Pomfret has spent seven years covering China – one in the late 1980s during the Tiananmen Square protests and then from 1998 until the end of 2003 as the bureau chief for The Washington Post in Beijing. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia by the Asia Society.
He is the author of the acclaimed book, Chinese Lessons, and has won several awards for his coverage of Asia, including the Osborne Elliot Prize. He holds a BA and MA from Stanford University and was one of the first American students to go to China and study at Nanjing University, and attended Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies as a Fulbright Scholar. Pomfret speaks, reads and writes Mandarin, having spent two years at Nanjing University in the early 1980s as part of one of the first groups of American students to study in China.
About the moderator:
Nelson Dong is a senior partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP, an international law firm, and is head of its National Security Group and co-head of its Asia Group. He is a leading practitioner, author and lecturer on international technology law and business issues, particularly U.S.-China cross-border mergers and acquisitions and investment, national security clearances of foreign investments in the United States, and U.S. export controls and economic sanctions. He is an international legal adviser to many companies, professional groups, research universities and independent research institutes, both in the United States and elsewhere. He is a former adjunct professor of international law at Seattle University Law School.
Nelson was a White House Fellow and special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General and served as Deputy Associate Attorney General, and, during the Carter Administration, he helped to support U.S. normalization of relations with China. He serves on the Executive Committee and is the former board chair of the Washington State China Relations Council and is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Nelson is a member of the Committee of 100 and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School and is a former trustee of Stanford University.