Born in New York City in 1940, Schell attended Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut.[3][4] After completing his high school education at Pomfret in 1958, Schell began attending Harvard University initially in its Class of 1962.[4] He left Harvard in 1960 to study Chinese at Stanford University. Then from 1961 to 1962, Schell transferred to National Taiwan University to continue his studies in Chinese.[5] While in Taiwan, Schell began writing "Man in Asia" columns for the Boston Globe.[6] He then returned to Harvard and took Asian history, culture and politics courses under John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1964.[4]
In 1964–65 Schell worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta, 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.
Schell continued his graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, reaching an all but dissertation stage. 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.[7]
Journalism career
In 1969 Schell and Schurmann co-founded Pacific News Service (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 books, The China Reader, Starting Over: A College Reader and Modern China: The Story of a Revolution.[8]
Schell's selection as Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism elicited an attack from right-wing radio talk show host, 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.[citation needed]
In April 2006, Schell announced his intention to resign as dean.[11]
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 oversaw "The China Boom Project", "On Thinner Ice", a joint multimedia project with David Breashears's Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP) and MediaStorm, and a new policy effort to maximize American interest in response to investment from China.[12]
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".[13]
Schell has criticized factory farming.[15] 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.[16] In 1984 he published the book Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm, criticizing meat production in the United States.[17]
Views on China
Schell first visited the People's Republic of China in 1974, during the last years of Mao Zedong. After Mao's death, Schell wrote: "He conceived of the Chinese revolution, and then helped cause it to happen. And, in the process, the thought of Chairman Mao became inculcated in almost every Chinese. The word almost literally became flesh. And it seemed clear, even before Mao died, that his death could not erase the way in which he had almost become transubstantiated in his people."[18]
In 2004 Schell called China's Communist-Capitalist mix "Leninist capitalism".[19]
In an interview with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air broadcast November 19, 2009, Schell stated that whether or not China's "autocratic capitalism" could deliver economic growth better than democracy was a question he faced "with some trepidation." He suggests the Chinese form of government may be more adaptive than democracy[20] because it is not encumbered by the special interest power blocs found in the United States, and can sometimes 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.
After Xi Jinping's ascension to power in 2013, Schell has become increasingly critical of China's authoritarian model of governance, and in 2020 wrote an essay about the "death of engagement" between the US and China.[21]
Pacific News Service (PNS) was an American nonprofit alternative news media organization. PNS ceased operations in 2017.
The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is a graduate professional school on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. It is designed to produce journalists with a two-year Master of Journalism (MJ) degree. It also offers a summer minor in journalism to undergraduates and a journalism certificate option to non–UC Berkeley students.
Jonathan Edward Schell was an American author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily dealt with campaigning against nuclear weapons.
John Leighton Stuart was a missionary educator, the first President of Yenching University and later United States ambassador to China. He was a towering figure in U.S.-China relations in the first half of the 20th century, a man TIME magazine described as "perhaps the most respected American in China." According to one Chinese historian, "there was no other American of his ilk in the 20th century, one who was as deeply involved in Chinese politics, culture, and education and had such an incredible influence in China."
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) was founded in 1968 by a group of graduate students and younger faculty as part of the opposition to the American participation in the Vietnam War. They proposed a "radical critique of the assumptions which got us [The United States] into Indo-China and were keeping us from getting out". The caucus was held at the Association for Asian Studies convention in Philadelphia, but was a radical critique of that professional association's values, organization, and leadership. The group was largely formed due to the Association for Asian Studies lack of public stance on the Vietnam War. Most of the original members were graduate students or junior faculty in Area Studies programs at Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University, although there were also independent scholars and those with no affiliation in the field.
Frederic Evans Wakeman Jr. was an American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along", adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years".
Niman Ranch began in the early 1970s on an eleven-acre ranch in a small coastal town just north of San Francisco. They produce beef, lamb, and pork.
Joseph Richmond Levenson was a scholar of Chinese history and Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
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.
John Pomfret is an American journalist and writer.
Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China (ISBN 0805086641) recounts John Pomfret's experiences and perspectives about the then opening China during his attendance of Nanjing University in 1980, during one of the first student exchange programs between the United States and China. The book received positive reviews in major American newspapers, such as The New York Times. It is widely read among the ethnic Chinese community in the United States.
New America Media (NAM) was a multimedia ethnic news agency and a coalition of ethnic media. Founded in 1996 by the nonprofit Pacific News Service, NAM was headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C.
David Shambaugh is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and director of the China Policy Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington DC. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Joseph W. Esherick is an emeritus professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. He is the holder of the Hwei-chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies. Esherick is a graduate of Harvard College. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (1971), under the supervision of Joseph R. Levenson and Frederic Wakeman.
Geremie R. Barmé is an Australian sinologist and film-maker on modern and traditional China. He was formerly Director, Australian Centre on China in the World and Chair Professor of Chinese History at Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific in Canberra.
Arthur Doak Barnett, known as A. Doak Barnett, was an American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, he organized public outreach programs and lobbied the United States government to put those relations on a new basis.
Ideology and Organization in Communist China is a 1966 book by the American sociologist and sinologist Franz Schurmann that offers a sociological analysis of the Chinese Communist revolution It was first published by University of California Press in 1966, then in enlarged editions in 1968 and 1971. Schurmann used the sociological tools developed by Max Weber to analyze Mao Zedong's "dialectical conception of Chinese society" and how Mao structured his organizational approach to the Chinese Communist Party and the government.
John Delury is an American East Asia scholar, with special interests in the history of China, U.S.-China relations and Korean peninsula affairs. He is professor of history at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America is a 2019 non-fiction autobiographical book by Weijian Shan.
↑ Schell, Orville (April 1984). Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm. Random House. p.337. ISBN978-0-394-51890-9.
↑ Paul Hollander (1983), Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978, Paperback Edition, New York: Harper & Row, Chapter 7, " The Pilgrimage to China: Old Dreams in a New Setting ", p. 328; Orville Schell (1977), In the People's Republic: An American's First-Hand View of Living and Working in China, New York: Random House, pp. vii-viii.
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