A REUNION of classmates isn't unusual - unless you happen to be an American who studied in China in the 1980s. Journalist John Pomfret studied history at Nanjing University in 1980 as part of a Stanford University East Asian Studies course. In 2003, after two lengthy stints working as a reporter in China, Pomfret decided to seek out his former classmates to document how their lives had changed.
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China tells the story of a transitional generation - those who were old enough to bear the scars of the Cultural Revolution, yet young enough to take advantage of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. Pomfret spent time rekindling relationships with five former classmates to find out how the Chinese managed the shift from communism to capitalism.
Pomfret documents what happened to his classmates before and after he was at university with them. The idea is to see how their experiences during the Cultural Revolution influenced the way they reacted to the reforms of the New China. His interviewees all shared hard times under the Red Guards. Some become entrepreneurs, one becomes a Communist Party boss, another moves to the US and becomes a staunch Christian.
This group has often been dismissed as a confused 'lost generation' caught between old China and new China. Pomfret disagrees with this. These people are actually the engines of China's change, he says. 'If you look at who are in the vice-ministerial positions, and who will be the ministers soon, it's clear that this generation are going to be running China in five years,' he says. 'Hu Jintao and his group are a little bit older. But soon these guys are going to be running the show.
'They are China, the ones who turned the county into what it is. The switch to capitalism happened, they made that switch, and they profited. If you look at the decision makers all over the country, it's these people. Every foreigner who does business in China is going to be sitting opposite someone from this generation.'
The idea that New China really belongs to the generation that was born during Deng's post-socialist order may be premature, he says. 'The new generation is actually going to have to wrest power from these people. They are incredibly tough. The young generation in China is not as strong mentally as these people are - they have innards of steel.'
The horrors of the Cultural Revolution steeled them, Pomfret says. The terrible events of those 10 lost years gave his friends an instinct for survival. They developed ways of protecting themselves from the whispering campaigns and the ravages of the Red Guards. These methods have served them just as well in the harsh free-for-all of modern Chinese capitalism.
