What happens when you spend 60 years watching a superpower transform from the inside?In this sweeping conversation, legendary China scholar and journalist Orville Schell shares his incredible life journey. From a fateful college class with John King Fairbank that changed his life forever, to living under martial law in 1960s Taiwan—and actually drinking tea with Chiang Kai-shek—Orville has had a front-row seat to history.He recounts being among the very first Americans to enter Mainland China when it opened in 1975, the long decades it took for everyday citizens to finally trust foreigners enough to open up, and the seismic shifts of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989.Finally, we dive into the structural paradoxes plaguing the modern authoritarian state. Orville explains why China’s current system may prevent it from ever truly surpassing the West, and why a beautiful, reflective "interior life" remains the single most dangerous threat to a totalitarian regime.

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Orville Schell may be the United States’ greatest chronicler and observer of several decades of U.S.-Chinese relations. Foreign Affairs was extremely lucky to have him in Beijing this week for the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. It was not the first time Schell has had a front-row seat at a meeting of U.S. and Chinese leaders. Editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke to him on Friday, May 15, about how he read the interactions between Xi and Trump, what they did—and did not—say about the hardest and most dangerous issues in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and how this could mark an inflection point for the two countries.

Last week’s meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may have brought a respite in the trade war. But it hardly touched the more fundamental drivers of U.S.-Chinese rivalry, a rivalry that has come to shape more and more dimensions of geopolitics, the global economy, and beyond.

In 2023, Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with the historians Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell about what drives Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin and how they are (and are not) like Mao and Stalin.

In a special bonus episode recorded live at the Asia Society, host Jane Perlez speaks with journalist and scholar Orville Schell about his 50 years covering Chinese leaders and their American counterparts. They attempt to answer the question: how did we get here?

What can Mao Zedong teach us about Donald Trump?

Tik Tok and data acquisition, scary topics on China up ahead. Michael Krasny featured leading Sinologist Orville Schell and began by asking Schell for his response to the Trump administration's imposed tariffs and their potential effects on a possible trade war, fentanyl out of China and U.S. China relations. Schell spoke of Xi Jinping's irrational actions and what appears to bind him and Putin together and Krasny asked Schell if he foresaw a role for Beijing brokering a peace between Russia and Ukraine. Krasny then proceeded to ask Schell about Tik Tok, data acquisition by China, Chinese surveillance and the AI race and Schell spoke of what he called "unequal relationships."

U.S.-China relations have cooled significantly in recent years, defying the expectations of U.S. foreign policy strategists since the 1970s, when there was a prevailing belief that engagement and trade would gradually bring the two countries closer and encourage China to become more open and less authoritarian. That didn't happen.

And the first thing they said was: who are you spying for? Who do you work for? And I thought, holy shit, I'm really in trouble here.

Orville Schell on his experience in China in the 1980s, a magical decade in recent history that brought hope, optimism, dynamism and endless possibilities in China, and ended with Tiananmen Massacre.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs.

It seems that China is in the news every day. To dig in deeper on this issue, we met with Orville Schell - one of the world's foremost experts on China and US/Sino relations - to help us understand the Chinese perspective and to learn more about China's leader, Xi Jinping. We dove deep into China's radical successes, its challenges, its resilience, its leverage, its sense of grievance and victimization, its anti-Western diplomacy, and its troubling aspirations. It has become the strongest member of an autocratic block of nations positioned to resist liberal democracy throughout the world. Despite this worrying preeminence, we know surprisingly little about China's enigmatic party leader, Xi Jinping. Not only is saber-rattling bad for business, actual military conflict could blow the global economy to blazes. Schell leaves us with the understanding that now is the time to conjure "Kissinger-esque" creativity, and summon new approaches to preserve the peace with Asia's Middle Kingdom. Join us to learn more.

Wall Street Journal Editor at Large Gerry Baker speaks this week with author and scholar Orville Schell about whether China can put pressure on Russia to end the invasion of Ukraine and what effect it may have on Xi Jinping's own ambitions to forcibly reclaim Taiwan.

A journalist and renowned expert on China, Schell has penned his first novel, drawing on his knowledge of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and on his conviction that art and love can outlive brutality. Joining him is MacArthur "genius" and award-winning writer Yiyun Li, who came of age during the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, emigrated to the U.S. at 23 as a young scientist, and eventually took the literary world by storm with her fiction, memoir and essays. This talk is moderated by Adam Hochschild.

Veteran China scholar Orville Schell has written a dozen books on China, but his latest book — which Schell published at the age of 80 — is his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile is a bildungsroman that follows the life of Li Wende and his father, Li Shutong, from the early days of the Cultural Revolution to the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989. This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Orville about the windows on China that nonfiction is unable to open but that fiction can; the challenges of writing a novel after a lifetime of publishing nonfiction; and continuity and change in modern Chinese history.

In this episode, we’re going back into the archive all the way to 1997 to bring you journalist and author Orville Schell. Since 1970, Schell has been reporting widely on China for mainstream newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic, to more academic publications like China Quarterly and Foreign Affairs.

In Episode 149 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Orville Schell, Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society about the implications of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's monumental speech at the Nixon Library, the history of engagement with China's Communist Party, and what a New Cold War with China will mean for the future of peace and security.

The Sinica Podcast this week features an exclusive recording of a China Institute event in New York on September 17 that sought to answer this question: How can the United States live with a rising China, an ideologically different country that is home to one-fifth of humanity? Joe Kahn, the managing editor of the New York Times and the paper’s former Beijing bureau chief, moderates the discussion with Ezra Vogel, the eminent Harvard University professor and author, and Orville Schell, author and the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.

This week, while Kaiser is vacationing on the Carolina coast, we are running a March 2014 interview with Orville Schell and David Moser. Orville is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York and formerly served as dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The discussion in this episode centers on the book co-authored by Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century, and the role of select members of the Chinese intelligentsia in the formation of modern China.

A seasoned historian and scholar of China reflects on what it means for a great nation to grapple with its past, and why this is especially important for the Chinese Communist Party to do today.

Next time on Global Ethics Forum, Asia Society's Orville Schell discusses liberalism's decline, China-U.S. relations, and Xi Jinping's worldview. In this excerpt, Schell talks with journalist Stephanie Sy about his own background and how that has shaped his thinking on human rights in China.

This week, Orville Schell and John Delury discuss “Wealth and Power,” their new book about Chinese history; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; Mason B. Williams talks about “City of Ambition”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

Orville Schell, Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, discussing his new book, “Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty First Century.”

NEW YORK— Orville Schell, Director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, discusses the closed-off nature of a China's 2012 change in leadership. (2 min., 37 sec.)