Orville Schell Discusses China's Penal System and Political Incarceration
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Speaker: Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, and WEAI Senior Scholar
Moderator: Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
On the occasion of the publication of China analyst and journalist Orville Schell's latest book, Inside China's Secret Prisons: An Undercover Exposé and Its Lasting Legacy (Columbia University Press), we welcome you to a conversation with Columbia Professor Andrew J. Nathan on China’s extensive penal system, which is too often used to incarcerate political prisoners. Schell's new book grew out of a year-long 60 Minutes investigation of China’s vast “reform through labor” prison camp system, revealing that products made with forced labor were often surreptitiously and illegally sold to the United States. This milestone exposé shines a light not only on China’s legacy of forced labor camps, but on the hundreds of camps in Xinjiang where more recently tens of thousands of Uyghur Muslims have been incarcerated. Schell also ruminates on the moral quandaries faced by reporters and scholars who seek to investigate China’s shrouded and often brutal penal system.
Speaker's Bio:
Orville Schell 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 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 the 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-70s. He is the author of numerous books. His most recent work is: My Old Home: A Novel of Exile (2021). Prior to that he 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 is a research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California Los Angeles. He also co-chairs the Task Force on US China Policy with Susan Shirk of the University of California San Diego.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Registration:
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