NEW YORK, November 30, 2016 — John Pomfret of the Washington Post discusses his new book 'The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom', which details the relationship between China and the United States since 1776, with Elizabeth Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. (1 hr., 16 min.)

John Pomfret, a reporter for The Washington Post, will discuss his new book on how the United States and China have been dramatically intertwined since 1776, and what it means going forward, in conversation with Elizabeth Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society.

Pomfret’s new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, is a remarkable history of the two-centuries-old relationship between the United States and China, from the Revolutionary War to the present day. For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America's ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns—rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment—were set in motion hundreds of years earlier.

John Pomfret is a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China. Formerly the Post’s Beijing bureau chief, he is now the Los Angeles bureau chief. In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism by the Asia Society, an annual award for best coverage of Asia.

Elizabeth Economy is the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has published widely on both Chinese domestic and foreign policy, and is the award-winning author of The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future. Her most recent book, with Michael Levi, is By All Means Necessary: How China's Resource Quest is Changing the World.

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, is a long-time China observer, journalist, and former Dean and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books on China, most recently Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century.

The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present will be available for sale and book signing at the event, and can be purchased through the Asia Store website.

Co-organized with the Council on Foreign Relations.