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Orville Schell

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: 

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Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s Long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s. He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schell is also the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism. Author of more than 20 books, his most recent was Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century with John Delury (Random House). His forthcoming book is a work of historical fiction, My Old Home: A Novel of Exile. It will be published this coming January by Knopf/Pantheon.

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Articles

The Tragedy of Taiwan’s Success

The Tragedy of Taiwan’s Success

Six decades after first spending time in Taiwan, Orville Schell recently went back for a visit and was struck by how much the island has changed — and how little the Chinese Communist Party has. Given both Xi Jinping’s insistence on becoming the latter day...
Changeless China?

Changeless China?

In 1991, Orville Schell undertook an unlikely project for CBS's '60 Minutes': helping Chinese dissident Harry Wu infiltrate some of the prison camps in which he’d languished as a political prisoner for 19 years. Schell kept a diary of the risky endeavor, and by sharing...
The Road to Beijing

The Road to Beijing

Fifty years ago, a hand-delivered letter, a clueless ping-pong team and a series of artful signalling efforts led to a U.S.-China breakthrough and a new international order. With the two countries again at a nadir, would a reprise of Kissinger-esque negotiations work again?
The Soul of Lu Xun

The Soul of Lu Xun

Those looking for China’s national spirit won’t find it in Xi Jinping’s writing. But the works of Lu Xun offer a homegrown example that contemporary Chinese can follow as the country writes a script for its next act.
The Death of Engagement

The Death of Engagement

For almost a half century, the U.S. and China have operated under a fragile policy framework of "engagement." But with the two countries facing their most adversarial state in years, it’s worth revisiting how we got to this moment — and why it didn't have...