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Tavis: John Pomfret is an award-winning journalist with 'The Washington Post' who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years, including a stint as the paper's Beijing Bureau Chief. He now serves as the Los Angeles bureau chief for the 'Post.' But his time in China as a college student is the basis for the new book, 'Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.' John, nice to have you on the program.

John Pomfret: Nice to be here, Tavis, thank you.

Tavis: I'm glad to have you. Let me start by asking how one ends, how an American ends up as a student in China to begin with.

Pomfret: Well, this was in, my first application came in 1979. I was studying Chinese history at college. And through a back door, literally, I got the opportunity to go to Beijing and so I jumped at it. It took about six months to get the whole visa thing straightened out back then. Now it will take just a few weeks. But I was among one of the first groups, and so I decided to go, because it was just such an amazing opportunity that I had to take it.

Tavis: You used the phrase back then. Take me to back then, and remind those who perhaps have forgotten, others who never knew, what back then was like with regard to relations, or the lack thereof, between the U.S. and China.

Pomfret: Well, we fought a cold war with them up until the early seventies. And then there was Kissinger's secret trip, and then President Nixon went to China. And then we established relations with them, finally, in 1979. And right after 1979, they began to take American students. And so I was among the first group that got a chance to go.

Tavis: Let me back up and ask why, in the first place, you were studying Chinese history. I was teasing a friend of mine the other day about people who major in things that I would never think of. Like you know what? What kind of job am I gonna get majoring in Chinese history? So I'm glad that you studied that, and not me. (Laugh) But obviously, you got a great job out of it. But why were you studying Chinese history in the first place?

Pomfret: Actually, I went to school, wanted to be a neurophysiologist. I wanted to be a brain researcher. But I confronted college chemistry, and it just blew me away. And so I just took a history class, a Chinese history class, and I just loved it. And the professor was like, 'You're pretty good at this. You should think about studying some more.' And so I studied some more and I got more and more interested. And just then, we established relations with China. And then the opportunity came to go there. So I just kept on doing it, and I came back and got a Masters, and continued.

Tavis: Was there a particular thing about the Chinese people, about the Chinese way of life, about Chinese culture? I'm trying to figure out, other than the fact that you were good at and fascinated by it, what drew you to stay with it.

Pomfret: It was so different from anything that I'd known.

Tavis: Ah, there we go.

Pomfret: Completely different from anything that I'd known. I'd grown up in New York City, nice house, nice family, nice background. And here was China, which was totally poor, at least in 1980, when I went there. And a completely different lifestyle. And I was living, the room I had in our apartment in Brooklyn was bigger than the room I lived in with seven guys at Nanjing University. So it was just a totally foreign environment.

Tavis: All right, so you're in China and you arrive. Tell me what your remembrances are of the country when you first get there.

Pomfret: It was basically two colors, blue and green. All the people wore. And then the sky was brownish, and all the buildings were gray. So it was a completely dull environment. It was really dismal. But you had this sense of this nascent energy there, of the people waiting to be freed, if you will, to pursue their entrepreneurial enterprises. And that happened several years after I left, and then when I went back there in the late eighties and then in the late nineties, you could see the place exploding.

Tavis: There's a great picture, Jonathan, if you could put the book cover back on the screen for me. There's a great picture on the cover of this book. A picture of you and these classmates. Among them one woman. I wanna talk about this in just a moment. Your roommates, the persons that you spent most of your time with. Just tell me about the group to begin with.

Pomfret: Okay, this was a really unusual group in China's history, because you had kids in my entering college class in China who were 17 years old. And you also had people, as you see, one of the guys in the bottom row, he looks relatively old. He was 35. Because the (unintelligible) revolution stopped 10 years of schooling.

So these people didn't have a chance to go to college when they would normally have had the chance. So they took tests in 1977 and '78, and then they got in. so the class was a little bit similar to the G.I. bill in America at the end of the Second World War, where you had 18 year old freshmen, then you had guys who'd fought a war who were 25.

Tavis: Okay, so you look - I hate to say this - you look completely out of place, even more than the older guy on the front row. (Laugh) You look like none of the rest of the folk in this picture. How were you greeted or not greeted as an American when you arrived?

Pomfret: There was complete and total curiosity about us. We'd been shut off, we were completely forbidden, and so people wanted to know everything about us. From how much a refrigerator cost, how much money we made every day, to basically what we thought about everything from religion on down to political changes. It was just enormous curiosity. Some of the people were closed about themselves, but most people were pretty open about themselves, as well.

Tavis: There are two students in here, two classmates, you write about each of them. But for the time that I have today, let me pull out two of them and ask you to tell me about the individual and about the relationship. And I've chosen the following two, in part because they are disparate in the way their lives, two different journeys with regard to how their lives have turned out over the last 20 years or so. One had the nickname of Big Bluffer. Tell me about Big Bluffer.

Pomfret: Big Bluffer was one of my roommates, and we had a very difficult, not difficult relationship. Basically every time I entered the room, he stood up. Every time I got up to leave, he stood up as well. He was very cold with me in the beginning. And his reason for that was because he wanted to enter the Communist party, and he was really concerned that if he had a warm relationship with this round-eye that that would hurt his chances.

Well ultimately, he entered the Communist party and became very powerful in Nanjing. Basically he was like a city councilman, except a city councilman with a lot more authority. And he set about transforming the whole district of Nanjing. And he yanked it into the modern world, and he specifically focused on this one three-block area, which he turned into almost like a Vegas strip of Nanjing.

It's like a hundred-meter long neon light, lots of restaurants, with dragons blowing smoke. It's a very, very extraordinary area that he sort of yanked into the modern world. But he did it at great cost to the average guy in the street. He put three people in jail; he strong-armed banks to get loans. And so his story, I thought, would be a great story for how the Communist party, in a way, has pulled China into the modern world.

Tavis: With regard to his politics, he ends up obviously being a party loyalist, fair to say that?

Pomfret: Right, yeah, very much so.

Tavis: You used this phrase a moment ago, and I thought I heard this. I wanna go back and get this, and I think I get it as well, but just to follow through, did you use the term round-eye?

Pomfret: Yeah. For myself.

Tavis: Yeah. So was that one of the terms that they used to...

Pomfret: The Chinese have a variety of ways of talking about us. The most common one these days is what they call (speaks in Chinese), which means old outsider. And then they have big nose, and they have foreign devil, they have big-nosed devil. A lot of variety...

Tavis: So Chavez isn't the only one.

Pomfret: No, indeed he's not. (Laugh) And actually, they use hegemony all the time, as well, so.

Tavis: So if I ever get called a round-eye, then I'll know what they...

Pomfret: You know he's talking about you.

Tavis: Okay. (Laugh) The female who I chose, in part because she is the only female, but in part also because her life went a different path than being a party loyalist, you called her Little Guan? (sp?)

Pomfret: Little Guan, yeah. For me, what's fascinating about her is just the steel that's inside her. The things that she had to deal with, she was born to a mother who didn't want her. She lived through the who didn't want her. She lived through the (unintelligible) revolution, where her father was basically locked in a gulag for 10 years. And then she gets into university, claws her way out of the countryside to get into university, and then at the end of university, in 1982 when everyone graduated, everyone was assigned a job, and she got this great job.

She got assigned a job in Beijing. And that was the best city in China. Vegetables 365 days a year, the best school once you have kids, etcetera, etcetera. But she rejected that job. She effectively became a non-person, and she did it for love. And I thought that combination of rejecting the Chinese system and embracing Chinese culture, building a family, was an interesting contradiction that she had to live with.

Tavis: You've drawn already now, by my count, two or three parallels between the stories in this book and modern day China. For those watching right now who are saying it sounds like a fascinating book about his experiences but are asking the question Tavis and John, what does this have to do with my life now, why this fascination, why this conversation, why do we need to learn, or be concerned, more, with the lives of those who are in this place called China in a contemporary sense? Why does this matter? Why are we talking about this?

Pomfret: Well, China is a huge country, and it's coming. Very much so. Its commodity appetites, its appetites for coal, steel, everything, are shaking the world. It's affecting America's economy. Its pollution problems are affecting the world's environment. So I think we need to know about China, because we need to know, and we also, not just about China, but also about the Chinese people, which is why I wrote this book.

And the road that they've traveled to get to today is an amazing road. And to understand what they've been through really, I think, will help us understand what this country and the potential for the problems it's gonna face in the future, and also the opportunities in the future, as well.

Tavis: What do you find most amazing, what should Americans find most amazing about this journey that they've taken that you're so fascinated by?

Pomfret: I think there's two things, basically. One is the force, the power; the entrepreneurial spirit of these people is really awe-inspiring. Secondly, the concern I have is that it comes with a lack of a moral compass, in a way. Because they've had so many ideologies thrown at them, they've had so many faiths thrown at them, that they basically reject them all. And they effectively don't believe in anything, although they're still going forward very much grasping for the future, and that's disturbing, in some ways.

Tavis: I wanna close in a moment by asking about what the future of China is. Let me go back to the past first. Is it just me, or is it true that they have not yet, as a country, as a collective, owned up to the atrocities, the mistakes of the past on this journey that they're so fascinated by?

Pomfret: Very much so. There are lots of ghosts in China, if you will. Lots of ghosts of the past. People have not been prosecuted for simple murder, these type of issues, and there's thousands of these type of cases across the country.

Tavis: All right, so finally, what is the future of this place called China?

Pomfret: I think it's a troubled future, in a lot of ways. We think of it by necessity becoming the next super power, but I think that that step for them is going to be very difficult. They definitely want to do that, but there's a lot of constraints. Environment, demographic, also social, political, and cultural that are blocking their road to become the next super power.

Tavis: I said final question, I lied. One final final question. (Laugh) What's the short term versus the long term relationship, you think, of the U.S.' diplomatic relationship with China?

Pomfret: I think short term, and actually long term, very similar. It's never gonna become bosom buddies, but I don't think we're ever gonna get into a war situation with them, there's too many shared interests between our economy and their economy, and also between our geopolitical interests and their geopolitical interests for it ever to come to fighting.

Tavis: The new book by John Pomfret is 'Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.' John, nice to have you on, thanks for your work.

Pomfret: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Up next, author and playwright Eve Ensler, stay with us.