Orville Schell
Encyclopedia
Orville Hickock Schell III (born May 20, 1940 in New York City
) is an activist and writer working on China
, and is the Arthus Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
in New York. He previously served as Dean
of the University of California, Berkeley
Graduate School of Journalism
.
, forerunner to Human Rights Watch
, and became the namesake of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale University Law School. Orville Schell III is the older brother of writer Jonathan Schell
.
Schell attended Pomfret School
in Connecticut, after which he attended Harvard University
, leaving in 1960 after his junior year to study Chinese, first at Stanford University
and then at National Taiwan University
from 1961-1964. While in Taiwan, Schell began writing columns for the Boston Globe as its "Man in Asia." He then returned to Harvard and studied Asian history, culture and politics under John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1964.
In 1964-65 Schell worked for the Ford Foundation
in Djakarta, Indonesia. He then pursued Chinese studies at the University of California, Berkeley
, earning a master's degree in 1967, becoming researcher for sociology and history professor Franz Schurmann
(head of the school's Center for Chinese Studies) on a three-volume work The China Reader (1967, Random House). Schell was named as a co-author, establishing him as a China scholar, expert and pundit on Asia.
Schell continued his academic studies at University of California, Berkeley
, completing all but his Ph.D. dissertation. As anti-Vietnam War protests shook the campus, he became involved in anti-war activism and journalism, and in 1967 he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse to pay tax as a protest against the Vietnam War.
(PNS) to create and distribute news and commentary from a broader spectrum of voices, especially viewpoints from abroad. The PNS was critical of the United States role in Indochina during the Vietnam War and supportive of establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.
Before his 1974 departure for China, Schell had already published three scholarly books, The China Reader, Starting Over: A College Reader and Modern China: The Story of a Revolution.
In 1975 Schell and his younger brother Jonathan Schell
(who would later write the bestseller The Fate of the Earth
, and join The Nation
and the Nation Institute) became correspondents at The New Yorker
. Schell has also served as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic
. He has written widely for many other magazine and newspapers, including The New Yorker
, Time Magazine, Harper's, The Nation
, The New York Review of Books
, Wired, Foreign Affairs
, Newsweek
, the China Quarterly, and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times
.
In 1980 Schell won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to research and write about the reliance on drugs in the U.S. meat industry.
He has also been a co-producer for the Public Broadcasting Service
(PBS) production center WGBH-TV
in Boston (1984), NBC Nightly News
(1987), CBS' 60 Minutes
(1991), and helped produce Peter Jennings
' specials at ABC Television. In 1994 he worked for the PBS documentary program Frontline.
In 1992 Schell won an Emmy Award
and an Alfred I. duPont Award - Columbia University Silver Baton for producing 60 Minutes
' Made in China
, a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1997, Schell won a George Peabody Award for his production of Frontline's documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Schell's selection as Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
elicited one unusual attack from right-wing radio talk show hose and health guru, Michael Savage, who alleged the head of the search committee, sociology professor Troy Duster
, had refused to interview him. Savage considered himself a qualified conservative journalist for the job, and claimed that Schell's appointment constituted political patronage, which is illegal under California's labor laws. The suit also argued that a political litmus test for the deanship illegally denied public employment and First Amendment rights to a conservative applicant. The lawsuit was dropped as having little merit and when all conservative applicants withdrew from consideration.
During his tenure at UC Berkeley, Schell was responsible for the hirings of Christopher Hitchens
, Michael Lewis
, Cynthia Gorney, Michael Pollan
, Louis Rossetto
, Charles Ferguson
, Barbara Ehrenreich
, Mark Danner
, Steve Wasserman, Stephen Talbot
and Tom Engelhardt
, among others.
In April 2006, Schell announced his intention to resign as dean.
Schell is now the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
in New York, which focuses on multimedia journalism, original research and public events to bring attention to areas of mutual interest to the United States and China. Since its inception, the Center has focused primarily on issues of energy and global climate change. Schell is currently overseeing "The China Boom Project", "On Thinner Ice", a joint multimedia project with David Breashears
' Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP) and MediaStorm
, and a new policy effort to maximize American interest in response to investment from China.
A frequent participant in the World Economic Forum, Schell is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
, The Climate Policy Initiative, GE's Eco Imagination Advisory Board and the Council on the Future of Media, which claims to be "championing a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world-one that would take advantage of all platforms of content delivery
from mobile to satellite and online to create a new global network."
. In 1976 he published The Town That Fought to Save Itself, about the San Francisco suburb of Bolinas, where he has a ranch. In 1978 he co-founded the company Niman Ranch
(then named "Niman-Schell") with Bill Niman with the objective of raising cattle in a humane and environmentally sound manner. He left the company in 1999. In 1984 he published the book Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm, criticizing meat production in the United States.
in 1974, during the last years of Mao Zedong
. His sorrow at the excesses of Mao's socialist regime was evident in a winter 1988 interview with the magazine Whole Earth Review
:
"China was one model in the '60s and '70s for Westerners looking for new credos and new alternative belief systems. Well, it turned out that China consumed itself. It did not necessarily disprove that certain socialist models are completely inappropriate for Third World developing countries. Rather it simply showed that the extremism of the Maoist experiment sabotaged that model... It's a great shame that Mao screwed up. His megalomania overpowered his efforts to see if China could be the first country that would find some different way to put itself together and to develop."
"There isn't much I'd recommend anybody imitate in China now, because China is becoming an imitation of us... Now among the young there's enormous amounts of crime and disaffection and skepticism and cynicism, along with disillusionment, and its analogue, a greed for money. People always reach for money when everything else fails."
In a September/October 1997 interview with Mother Jones
magazine, he described Deng Xiaoping
as "the counterrevolutionary par excellence in history", and China's capitalist bloc in the Communist Party as "using their positions both in the party and in the government to make money."
Asked if China is ready for democracy, Schell answered "No... Some of [Deng Xiaoping's successors] fought for almost 50 years for the Marxist revolution, and I think it's very naïve for Westerners to assume that that experience, that mindset, that whole ideology just simply vanished with Deng's reforms."
In 2004 Schell called China's Communist-Capitalist mix "Leninist capitalism".
In an interview with Terri Gross of NPR's Fresh Air
broadcast November 19, 2009, Schell stated that there are two types of democracy. The first is the U.S. form, which has become increasingly unable to adapt or react to the challenges that the world is now facing, Global Warming
being the most urgent. The second is the Chinese form, "Autocratic Democracy", where the people are willing to delegate authority to their autocratic government to act in ways that guarantee economic growth. He suggests the Chinese form of democracy may be more adaptive because it is not encumbered by the special/single-interest power blocks found in the U.S., and appears to be able to act more decisively to deal with the complexities of the world of today, although it can also more quickly implement poor decisions. But, he emphasized that he personally preferred living in an open society.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
) is an activist and writer working on China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, and is the Arthus Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
Asia Society
The Asia Society is a non-profit organization that focuses on educating the world about Asia. It has several centers in the United States and around the world Hong Kong, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, and Melbourne...
in New York. He previously served as Dean
Dean (education)
In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...
of the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
Graduate School of Journalism
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is a graduate professional school on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. It is among the top graduate journalism schools in the United States, and is designed to produce journalists with a two-year Master of Journalism degree.The program...
.
Background and education
Schell's father Orville Hickok Schell, Jr., was a prominent lawyer who headed the New York City Bar Association, chaired the human rights group Americas Watch from its founding in 1981 until his death in 1987, co-founded Helsinki WatchHelsinki Watch
Helsinki Watch was a private American NGO devoted to monitoring Helsinki implementation throughout the Soviet bloc. It was created in 1978 to monitor compliance to the Helsinki Final Act...
, forerunner to Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
, and became the namesake of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale University Law School. Orville Schell III is the older brother of writer Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Edward Schell is an author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily deals with nuclear weapons.-Career:His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch...
.
Schell attended Pomfret School
Pomfret School
Pomfret School is an independent coeducational boarding and day school in Pomfret, Connecticut, United States for grades 9 through 12 plus a post-graduate year. Pomfret School was founded in 1894, on the principles of intellectual rigor and the development of character...
in Connecticut, after which he attended Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, leaving in 1960 after his junior year to study Chinese, first at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and then at National Taiwan University
National Taiwan University
National Taiwan University is a national co-educational university located in Taipei, Republic of China . In Taiwan, it is colloquially known as "Táidà" . Its main campus is set upon 1,086,167 square meters in Taipei's Da'an District. In addition, the university has 6 other campuses in Taiwan,...
from 1961-1964. While in Taiwan, Schell began writing columns for the Boston Globe as its "Man in Asia." He then returned to Harvard and studied Asian history, culture and politics under John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1964.
In 1964-65 Schell worked for the Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....
in Djakarta, Indonesia. He then pursued Chinese studies at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, earning a master's degree in 1967, becoming researcher for sociology and history professor Franz Schurmann
Franz Schurmann
Herbert Franz Schurmann was an American sociologist and historian who was best known for his research and writings about Communist China during the Cold War period. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley in the Departments of Sociology and History for 38 years, and he also served a...
(head of the school's Center for Chinese Studies) on a three-volume work The China Reader (1967, Random House). Schell was named as a co-author, establishing him as a China scholar, expert and pundit on Asia.
Schell continued his academic studies at University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, completing all but his Ph.D. dissertation. As anti-Vietnam War protests shook the campus, he became involved in anti-war activism and journalism, and in 1967 he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse to pay tax as a protest against the Vietnam War.
Journalism career
In 1969 Schell and Schurmann co-founded Pacific News ServicePacific News Service
Pacific News Service is a nonprofit media organization founded in 1969 by Franz Schurmann, the historian, and Orville Schell, a noted author, journalist and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley...
(PNS) to create and distribute news and commentary from a broader spectrum of voices, especially viewpoints from abroad. The PNS was critical of the United States role in Indochina during the Vietnam War and supportive of establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.
Before his 1974 departure for China, Schell had already published three scholarly books, The China Reader, Starting Over: A College Reader and Modern China: The Story of a Revolution.
In 1975 Schell and his younger brother Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Edward Schell is an author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily deals with nuclear weapons.-Career:His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch...
(who would later write the bestseller The Fate of the Earth
The Fate of the Earth
The Fate of the Earth is a 1982 book by Jonathan Schell. This "seminal" description of the consequences of nuclear war "forces even the most reluctant person to confront the unthinkable: the destruction of humanity and possibly most life on Earth". The book revitalized the anti-nuclear movement ...
, and join The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
and the Nation Institute) became correspondents at The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. Schell has also served as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
. He has written widely for many other magazine and newspapers, including The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Time Magazine, Harper's, The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, Wired, Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...
, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, the China Quarterly, and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
.
In 1980 Schell won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to research and write about the reliance on drugs in the U.S. meat industry.
He has also been a co-producer for the Public Broadcasting Service
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
(PBS) production center WGBH-TV
WGBH-TV
WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...
in Boston (1984), NBC Nightly News
NBC Nightly News
NBC Nightly News is the flagship daily evening television news program for NBC News and broadcasts. NBC Nightly News has aired from Studio 3B, located on floors 3 of the NBC Studios is the headquarters of the GE Building forms the centerpiece of 30th Rockefeller Center it is located in the center...
(1987), CBS' 60 Minutes
60 Minutes
60 Minutes is an American television news magazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation....
(1991), and helped produce Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM was a Canadian American journalist and news anchor. He was the sole anchor of ABC's World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005 of complications from lung cancer...
' specials at ABC Television. In 1994 he worked for the PBS documentary program Frontline.
In 1992 Schell won an Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
and an Alfred I. duPont Award - Columbia University Silver Baton for producing 60 Minutes
60 Minutes
60 Minutes is an American television news magazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation....
' Made in China
Made in China
Made in China or Made in PRC is a country of origin label affixed to products manufactured in the mainland China, the People's Republic of China , excluding Hong Kong and Macau where all products made in those regions are labeled as "Made in Hong Kong" and "Made in Macau", respectively...
, a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1997, Schell won a George Peabody Award for his production of Frontline's documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Schell's selection as Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is a graduate professional school on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. It is among the top graduate journalism schools in the United States, and is designed to produce journalists with a two-year Master of Journalism degree.The program...
elicited one unusual attack from right-wing radio talk show hose and health guru, Michael Savage, who alleged the head of the search committee, sociology professor Troy Duster
Troy Duster
Troy Duster is a sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at...
, had refused to interview him. Savage considered himself a qualified conservative journalist for the job, and claimed that Schell's appointment constituted political patronage, which is illegal under California's labor laws. The suit also argued that a political litmus test for the deanship illegally denied public employment and First Amendment rights to a conservative applicant. The lawsuit was dropped as having little merit and when all conservative applicants withdrew from consideration.
During his tenure at UC Berkeley, Schell was responsible for the hirings of Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
, Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis may refer to:*Michael Lewis , American non-fiction author and financial journalist*Michael Lewis , Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf*Michael Lewis , Belizean racing cyclist...
, Cynthia Gorney, Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. A 2006 New York Times book review describes him as a "liberal foodie intellectual."...
, Louis Rossetto
Louis Rossetto
Louis Rossetto is an American journalist and "radical libertarian." He is best known as the founder and former publisher of Wired magazine.- Early life and career :Rossetto was born and grew up on Long Island, New York....
, Charles Ferguson
Charles Ferguson
Charles Ferguson may refer to:*Charles A. Ferguson , Stanford University linguist*Charles H. Ferguson, film director and co-founder of Vermeer Technologies Inc.*Charles Frederick Ferguson Charles Ferguson may refer to:*Charles A. Ferguson (1921–1998), Stanford University linguist*Charles H....
, Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich
-Early life:Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town."...
, Mark Danner
Mark Danner
Mark David Danner is a prominent American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written extensively on Haiti, Central America,...
, Steve Wasserman, Stephen Talbot
Stephen Talbot
Stephen Henderson Talbot is an award-winning TV reporter, writer, and producer who began his career as a television child actor of the late 1950s and early 1960s...
and Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt is the creator of the Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com, an online blog. He is also the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of the 1998 book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation.Engelhardt graduated from Yale...
, among others.
In April 2006, Schell announced his intention to resign as dean.
Schell is now the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society
Asia Society
The Asia Society is a non-profit organization that focuses on educating the world about Asia. It has several centers in the United States and around the world Hong Kong, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, and Melbourne...
in New York, which focuses on multimedia journalism, original research and public events to bring attention to areas of mutual interest to the United States and China. Since its inception, the Center has focused primarily on issues of energy and global climate change. Schell is currently overseeing "The China Boom Project", "On Thinner Ice", a joint multimedia project with David Breashears
David Breashears
David Breashears is an American mountaineer and filmmaker. In 1985, he became the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest twice...
' Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP) and MediaStorm
MediaStorm
MediaStorm is a New York City-based multimedia production and publishing company. The company produces online news stories using high-quality photography, audio, interactivity, and video, and consults on interactive web projects...
, and a new policy effort to maximize American interest in response to investment from China.
A frequent participant in the World Economic Forum, Schell is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
The Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...
, The Climate Policy Initiative, GE's Eco Imagination Advisory Board and the Council on the Future of Media, which claims to be "championing a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world-one that would take advantage of all platforms of content delivery
from mobile to satellite and online to create a new global network."
Farming career
Schell has criticized factory farmingFactory farming
Factory farming is a term referring to the process of raising livestock in confinement at high stocking density, where a farm operates as a factory — a practice typical in industrial farming by agribusinesses. The main products of this industry are meat, milk and eggs for human consumption...
. In 1976 he published The Town That Fought to Save Itself, about the San Francisco suburb of Bolinas, where he has a ranch. In 1978 he co-founded the company Niman Ranch
Niman Ranch
Niman Ranch is an Alameda, California based network of more than 680 U.S. family farmers and ranchers who raise livestock traditionally, humanely and sustainably to deliver the finest-tasting proteins in the world. The Independent family farmers practive the highest standards of animal husbandry...
(then named "Niman-Schell") with Bill Niman with the objective of raising cattle in a humane and environmentally sound manner. He left the company in 1999. In 1984 he published the book Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm, criticizing meat production in the United States.
Views on China
Schell first visited the People's Republic of ChinaPeople's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
in 1974, during the last years of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
. His sorrow at the excesses of Mao's socialist regime was evident in a winter 1988 interview with the magazine Whole Earth Review
Whole Earth Review
Whole Earth was a magazine which was founded in January 1985 after the merger of the Whole Earth Software Review and the CoEvolution Quarterly. All of these periodicals are descendants of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog...
:
"China was one model in the '60s and '70s for Westerners looking for new credos and new alternative belief systems. Well, it turned out that China consumed itself. It did not necessarily disprove that certain socialist models are completely inappropriate for Third World developing countries. Rather it simply showed that the extremism of the Maoist experiment sabotaged that model... It's a great shame that Mao screwed up. His megalomania overpowered his efforts to see if China could be the first country that would find some different way to put itself together and to develop."
"There isn't much I'd recommend anybody imitate in China now, because China is becoming an imitation of us... Now among the young there's enormous amounts of crime and disaffection and skepticism and cynicism, along with disillusionment, and its analogue, a greed for money. People always reach for money when everything else fails."
In a September/October 1997 interview with Mother Jones
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
magazine, he described Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...
as "the counterrevolutionary par excellence in history", and China's capitalist bloc in the Communist Party as "using their positions both in the party and in the government to make money."
Asked if China is ready for democracy, Schell answered "No... Some of [Deng Xiaoping's successors] fought for almost 50 years for the Marxist revolution, and I think it's very naïve for Westerners to assume that that experience, that mindset, that whole ideology just simply vanished with Deng's reforms."
In 2004 Schell called China's Communist-Capitalist mix "Leninist capitalism".
In an interview with Terri Gross of NPR's Fresh Air
Fresh Air
Fresh Air is an American radio talk show broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the United States. The show is produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its longtime host is Terry Gross. , the show was syndicated to 450 stations and claimed 4.5 million listeners. The show...
broadcast November 19, 2009, Schell stated that there are two types of democracy. The first is the U.S. form, which has become increasingly unable to adapt or react to the challenges that the world is now facing, Global Warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
being the most urgent. The second is the Chinese form, "Autocratic Democracy", where the people are willing to delegate authority to their autocratic government to act in ways that guarantee economic growth. He suggests the Chinese form of democracy may be more adaptive because it is not encumbered by the special/single-interest power blocks found in the U.S., and appears to be able to act more decisively to deal with the complexities of the world of today, although it can also more quickly implement poor decisions. But, he emphasized that he personally preferred living in an open society.
Publications
- The China Reader (with Franz Schurmann) (1967).
- Starting Over: A College Reader (1970) (with Frederick Crews).
- Modern China: The Story of a Revolution (with Joseph W. Esherick) (1972)
- Modern China: The Making of a New Society from 1839 to the Present (with Joseph W. Esherick) (1972)
- The Town That Fought to Save Itself (1976)
- In the People's Republic: An American's First-Hand View of Living and Working in China (1977)
- BrownBrownBrown is a color term, denoting a range of composite colors produced by a mixture of orange, red, rose, or yellow with black or gray. The term is from Old English brún, in origin for any dusky or dark shade of color....
(1978) (biography of California governor Jerry BrownJerry BrownEdmund Gerald "Jerry" Brown, Jr. is an American politician. Brown served as the 34th Governor of California , and is currently serving as the 39th California Governor...
) - Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!: China Encounters the West (1980)
- Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm (1984)
- To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the Eighties (1984)
- Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (1988)
- Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Bohemians, and Technocrats Lays Claim to China's Future (1994)
- Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders (1995)
- Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (2000)
- The China Reader: The Reform Years (co-edited with David ShambaughDavid ShambaughDavid Shambaugh is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University in Washington DC, as well as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is regarded as an authority on China’s foreign policy, military and security issues in East...
) (1999) - Empire: Impressions of China (2004).
External links
- Orville Schell's personal web site
- China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term? - Summary of talk, mp3, and video, at the Long Now Foundation, September 2006
- Radio interview on Philosophy TalkPhilosophy TalkPhilosophy Talk is a talk radio program co-hosted by John Perry and Ken Taylor, who are professors at Stanford University. The show is also available as a podcast, available for purchase. The program deals both with fundamental problems of philosophy and with the works of famous philosophers,...
- About the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations
- Schell archive from The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
- Homepage of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations
- World Economic Forum Global Agenda 2009
- Orville Schell's Curriculum Vitae