Orville Schell

Orville Schell (b. 1940) is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.–China Relations and Vice-President at the Asia Society and a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

He was born in New York City; graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in far eastern history; studied Chinese language at Stanford University; studied as an exchange student at National Taiwan University; and earned his PhD (abd) at UC Berkeley in Chinese history.

Schell has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and traveled widely in China since the mid-1970s. He is the author of numerous books. His most recent work is My Old Home: A Novel of Exile, published in 2021.

Prior to that, Schell co-authored Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century with John Delury while his own works include Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders, Virtual Tibet: Searching For Shangri-la From the Himalayas to Hollywood, Discos and Democracy: China in The Throes of Reform, Watch Out For the Foreign Guests: China Encounters the West, To Get Rich is Glorious: China in the ’80s, and the four-volume The China Reader.

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a Smith Richardson Foundation grant, and is the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, a Menken Award, and a Harvard–Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.

Schell currently serve as a fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC. He also co-chairs the Task Force on US China Policy with Susan Shirk from UC San Diego.