S1E34 - Orville Schell - The Enigma of Xi

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.

Biography

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former Dean at the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. 

He graduated from Harvard University in Far Eastern History; studied Chinese at Stanford University, was a student at National Taiwan University; and did his PhD work at Berkeley in Chinese History. After working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, he covered the war in Indochina and has been in and out of China since the mid-70s. He’s the author of numerous non-fiction works including  Wealth and Power: China’s long March to the 21st Century and My Old Home: A Novel of Exile. 

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Smith Richardson Foundation grant and is the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, a Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism and is a fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and the Annenberg School of Communications at the USC. 

Conversation recorded on April 7, 2023.