Podcast appearances and mentions of Orville Schell

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 7, 2024 44:31

It was fun seeing Fox Butterfield, the first New York Times correspondent in China since 1949, in Portland, Oregon back in July. I last visited Portland in 2022, and you never quite get over the sight of Mount Hood dominating the horizon on a clear summer day in its awesome fashion.Fox welcomed me to his home, perched on a small hill in a modestly upscale suburb. A history enthusiast, he has lived through and witnessed some of the most pivotal moments in modern history: from meeting Harry Truman as a teenager with his grandfather, to studying under John Fairbank, the progenitor of Chinese studies in America, to reporting on the Vietnam War and helping expose the Pentagon Papers, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Though trained as a China specialist, he only began his reporting inside China in the late '70s, culminating in his book China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. This bestseller set a benchmark for generations of China correspondents. Later in his career, Fox shifted his focus to domestic issues of race and crime, writing acclaimed works like All God's Children and In My Father's House.Talking to Fox was a breeze. I was pleasantly surprised that his spoken Chinese remains impressively sharp — his tones and pronunciations are still spot-on. Of course, we did most of our chatting in English. This piece will explore his early experiences, particularly his family background, his time at Harvard, and his reporting during the Vietnam War. While the bulk of the piece may not focus directly on China, it offers a glimpse into the intellectual formation of one of America's most prominent China watchers and how both domestic and global forces shape U.S. perceptions of China.Enjoy!LeoIndexSeeing China with Joe Biden and John McCain in the 70sCyrus Eaton, Lenin Prize and family legacy in Cold War“Rice Paddies”, and studying under John Fairbank at HarvardFrom Pentagon Papers to VietnamReporting on the frontlines in Vietnam Seeing China with Joe Biden and John McCain in the 70sCould you talk about your first trip to China?I was the Hong Kong correspondent for The New York Times from 1975 to 1979 because that's where we covered China in those days. I couldn't go to China until 1978, when I attended the Canton Trade Fair. That was my first trip to China; I can barely remember it.My second trip to China was much more memorable. In 1979, when the U.S. and China were about to normalize relations, China invited the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to visit, and I was invited as a New York Times correspondent. In those days, China had a shortage of hotel rooms, at least for foreigners, so they made everybody room with somebody else. The Chinese government assigned me to room with the naval liaison to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who was a Navy captain named John McCain.For two weeks, John McCain and I were roommates. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together and traveled everywhere. McCain's best friend on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was Joe Biden. So, the three of us did almost everything together for two weeks. That one is easy to remember. What was your impression of Joe Biden?Joe Biden was a nice man, very earnest, but he was a typical career politician that when he approached somebody, he always grabbed them by the hand. He was tall, had a strong handshake, and would give them a big smile and grab their hands. He kept doing this to the Chinese, who didn't really know what was going on because they're not used to being touched that way, especially not somebody almost breaking their hand.So I finally said to him, “Senator.” And he'd say, “No, call me Joe.” I said, “Okay, Joe, please don't grab Chinese by the hand. It's kind of rude and offensive to them, and they don't understand it.” He would say, “Well, why not?” And I said, “Because that's not their custom.” He'd say, “Okay, thank you very much.” And then, five minutes later, he'd do the same thing over and over again.John McCain and I became good friends, especially because I had seen McCain in prison in Hanoi when I first started working for The New York Times, and we bonded over that shared history during our trip to China. They allowed me to go into his prison in 1969, and I was the first reporter to find out that John McCain was still alive when his jet fighter was shot down over Hanoi.I saw him then and as roommates 10 years later in China. We had a great time, and I would take him out and say, “Let's sneak away from our handlers and see how Chinese really live and what they really say.” We just went out and talked to people, and he thought this was a lot of fun.“He said something straightforward and obvious, but I had never thought about it. He said China is the oldest country in the world with by far the largest population. It's a big, important place.”That's a wonderful tale. What made you initially interested in China?When I was a sophomore at Harvard as an undergraduate in 1958, there was a fear that the United States was going to have to go to war with China over those two little islands, which Americans call ‘Quemoy' and ‘Matsu' and Chinese people call ‘Jinmen' and ‘Mazu'.America's leading sinologist and Harvard professor of Chinese studies, John Fairbank, decided to give a public lecture about the danger of the United States going to war for those two little islands.I attended his lecture. He said something straightforward and obvious, but I had never thought about it. He said China is the oldest country in the world with by far the largest population. It's a big, important place. Why would the United States want to go to war with China over those two little islands? It made no sense logically. And we had just finished the war in Korea. As I listened to him, I realized, “Gee, I don't know anything about that place.”So I began to audit his introductory class on the history of East Asia. And in the spring, I decided to take a second class in Chinese history that Fairbank was teaching. As a Harvard undergraduate, I would find out my exam grades at the end of year from a postcard you put in the exam booklet. When I received my postcard back from the final exam, it said: “please come to see me in my office, tomorrow morning at 10.” “Oh no,” I thought I really screwed up my exam. So I went to see John Fairbank. I was nervous, especially because he was a great man, a big figure on campus, and the Dean of Chinese studies in the United States. So I went in, and he said, “Fox, you wrote a wonderful exam. Have you considered majoring in Chinese history?” I went, “oh, no, I had not considered it.” I was so relieved that I had written a good exam.He said, “Well, if you are, you must immediately begin studying Chinese.” At that time, Harvard did not teach spoken Chinese, only classical written Chinese, and there were just about 10 people, all graduate students.So Fairbank said, “here's what you do. Going down to Yale, they have a special program that teaches spoken Chinese in the summer because they have a contract with the Air Force to teach 18-year-old Air Force recruits how to speak Chinese so they can listen to and monitor Chinese air force traffic.”So I spent the summer at Yale studying Chinese with air force recruits. I took classical written Chinese classes when I returned to Harvard that fall. Luckily, I got a Fulbright Fellowship to go to Taiwan after I graduated, so I studied in the best spoken Chinese program at the time run by Cornell University.Cyrus Eaton, Lenin Prize and family legacy in Cold WarI wonder whether there's any family influence on your China journey. Your father was the historian and editor-in-chief of the Adams Papers, and your maternal grandfather, Cyrus Eaton, was one of the most prominent financiers and philanthropists in the Midwest. Could you speak on the impact of family legacy on your China journey?My father certainly instilled a love of history in me. That was always my favourite subject in school and the one I did best in. Eventually, my major at Harvard was Chinese history. My father didn't know anything about China and never went. My mother visited Taiwan and stayed with me for ten days in the 60s.My maternal grandfather, Cyrus Eaton, would fit the Chinese notion of a rags-to-riches success story. He grew up in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia, Canada, and went to college in Toronto with the help of an older cousin. This cousin went on to become a Baptist minister in Cleveland, Ohio, across the lake. Among the people in his parish was a man named John D. Rockefeller — yes, the original John D. Rockefeller.The cousin invited my grandfather and said he had a job for him. So my grandfather started off as a golf caddy for John D. Rockefeller and then a messenger. Ultimately, he founded his own electric power company in Cleveland — Ohio Electric Power — and became quite influential. He had multiple companies but then lost everything in the Great Depression.During World War II, my grandfather heard about a large iron ore under a lake in Ontario through his Canadian connections. By then, he had already formed connections with President Roosevelt and then Truman, so he said, “If you can give me some money and help underwrite this, I can get Canadian permission to drain the lake for the iron ore deposit,” which became the world's richest iron ore mine, Steep Rock Iron Ore. That's how he got back into business. Truman and my grandfather ended up having a close connection, and he used my grandfather's train to campaign for re-election in 1948. My grandfather was an unusual man. He had a real vision about things.He was trading metals with the Soviet Union as well.I don't know the details, but when Khrushchev came to power, my grandfather became interested in trying to work out some arrangement between the United States and Russia, which is where the Pugwash movement came from. He was inviting Russian and American scientists to meet. They couldn't meet in the U.S. because it was against American law, but he arranged for them to meet in his hometown of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. We had American and Russian nuclear physicists meeting to discuss nuclear weapons in this little village. Eventually, he invited some Chinese people to come.At one of these conferences, I met Harrison Salisbury, an editor of The New York Times and the first NYT Moscow Correspondent. I was just starting out as a stringer for The Washington Post, but Salisbury saw something in me and suggested I send him a story. That connection eventually led to my job at The New York Times.He must have known people pretty high up in China too.I don't know the China connections; he didn't know Mao or Zhou Enlai. He did have a close relationship with Khrushchev, to the extent you could. It started with the Pugwash movement.He just sent a telegram to Khrushchev and became friends?Yes. What do you call that, guanxi?I guess so. Do you remember when he won the Lenin Peace Prize?I do. I think I was in Taiwan at the time. I didn't go to the ceremony.How did you feel about his activities growing up?I was never too sure what was going on. My mother had the intelligence of her father—in fact, she looked remarkably like him—but she was skeptical because she always felt that he was making all these big deals but wasn't looking out for his own family.What was your mom like?My mother was a smart woman. She went to Bryn Mawr during the Depression, but my grandfather refused to let her take a scholarship because it would signal he had no money. She worked full-time while in school and graduated near the top of her class. She was angry at him for making her life difficult for his own pride.My mother worked all her life. By the time I reached college, she was working at Harvard University, which was unusual for the time. She started as a secretary but eventually became the registrar in charge of all the records. When she died in 1978, the Harvard Crimson published a tribute saying she had been the most helpful person to many undergraduates.What did you want to become as a teenager?I wanted to be a baseball player. Yes, for a long time my life revolved around baseball. I thought I was pretty serious. Some time in college, I realized I wasn't going to become a major league baseball player, and I became much more interested in the life of the mind.“Rice Paddies”, and studying under John Fairbank at HarvardDid you think of Asia growing up?There was really almost nothing until I mentioned, in my sophomore year, when I was 19, beginning in 1958 as an undergraduate at Harvard studying with John Fairbank. No courses offered at high school that I could have gone to. Even at Harvard, the Chinese history class was almost all graduate students. Harvard undergraduates could take an introduction class to the history of East Asia, which included China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Harvard students nicknamed this course “Rice Paddies.”That's the famous course by Fairbank and Reischauer. What was it like studying with those two legends?Well, they were both significant people in every way. Fairbank helped start the field of Chinese history in the United States. Reischauer certainly started studying Japanese history.In my first year, they had just finished a textbook for the Rice Patties course. It had not been published as a book yet, just a mimeograph form. They gave us these big books you had to carry around, like carrying one of those old store catalogues with hundreds of pages printed on one side. You would bring these things into class. One was called East Asia: The Great Tradition, and the other East Asia: The Modern Transformation.What was John Fairbank like as a person?Intimidating. He was a tall, bald man, always looking over his glasses at you. But he was charming and friendly, and if he sensed that you were interested in his field, he would do almost anything for you. He reached out to students in a way that few other faculty members did.“He was an academic entrepreneur and missionary for Chinese studies, and was creating the field of Chinese history in the United States. Before him, Chinese history didn't exist for most Americans to study.”And he had regular gatherings at his house.Yes. His house was a little yellow wooden house dating back to the 18th century, right in the middle of the campus. Harvard had given it to him, and every Thursday afternoon, anybody interested in China who was in Cambridge that day was invited. You never knew who you were going to meet. Fairbank was a kind of social secretary. When you walked in, he'd greet you with a handshake and then take you around to introduce you to some people. He did that all the time with people. He was an academic entrepreneur and missionary for Chinese studies and was creating the field of Chinese history in the United States. Before him, Chinese history didn't exist for most Americans to study. I always wanted to major in history. That subject appealed to me and was my strongest area of study. I took some American history and intellectual history classes, but the Chinese history class became the one that I really focused on. I couldn't tell you exactly why, but it was interesting to me. The more I read, the more I liked it. After that first Fairbank class, I signed up for the more intensive modern Chinese history class and whatever else Harvard had. I signed up for a Japanese history class, too. At the end of my senior year, John Kennedy named my professor Edwin Reischauer his ambassador to Tokyo. So, on my way to Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar, I stopped in Tokyo to meet Reischauer at the US Embassy, and two of Reischauer's grown children took me around Tokyo. I reported in Tokyo later in my career.Was Ezra Vogel working on Japan at the time?Yes, Ezra had. Ezra was in my Spanish class in the first year. He hadn't yet decided what he would focus on then. We sat next to each other. We were always personal friends even though he was a bit older. He was a nice man and became a professor later. I sat in the same classroom with several other older people who went on to teach about China, including Dorothy Borg. Even then, she had white hair. She worked for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York but was taking classes at Harvard. When I first went to China, she was still involved with China.So, from that group of Americans studying China at Harvard at that time, many went on to do things related to China, including Orville Schell, Andy Nathan and me. I did not know Perry Link while in Harvard.Many major figures in China studies today were at Harvard with you.Yale had Mary and Arthur Wright, but they were graduate students at Harvard with me and went on to become full professors at Yale. This must be because that was a place where Fairbank was an evangelical figure that people gravitated towards, and he was preaching this new faith of Chinese studies.From Pentagon Papers to VietnamWhat did you do after Harvard?I spent a year in Taiwan when I graduated. I wanted to stay, but Fairbank hurried me up to get back to graduate school.Did you listen to Fairbank?I was going to get my PhD at Harvard and teach Chinese history, but after five years, I became less interested in actually studying Chinese history.During the 1960s, the Vietnam War happened. Vietnam is kind of a cousin of China, so I started reading everything I could about Vietnam. I even started a course on Vietnam so that Harvard undergraduate and graduate students could learn about Vietnam.I got a fellowship to return to Taiwan to work on my dissertation about Hu Hanmin. At that time, many American GIs were coming to Taiwan on what we call R&R — “rest and recreation.” The U.S. government made a deal with the American military that anyone who served in Vietnam for a year had an automatic R&R, a paid week leave to go anywhere in Southeast Asia. Many chose Taiwan to chase pretty young Chinese girls. So, GIs would show up in Taiwan and didn't know what they were doing. I would see them on the street, go up and talk to them.I became more interested in Vietnam over time. A friend told me, “You're spending so much time reading newspapers about Vietnam, you should become a journalist.” It hadn't occurred to me. By chance, I met a correspondent from The Washington Post, Stanley Karnow, who was the Hong Kong correspondent for the Post and covered Vietnam for quite a while. He asked me to be his stringer, a part-time assistant. So I would send my story to him, but he'd never do anything with it.I was discouraged, and that's when I met Harrison Salisbury through my grandfather in Montreal. Salisbury asked me to send stories to The New York Times. I thought I was a traitor to my job with The Washington Post. But it wasn't really a job; it was in my imagination. When I sent Salisbury my first story, I received a cable from the foreign editor of The New York Times saying they had put my story on the front page and given me a byline. My parents at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts saw it that morning, and they wondered, what is Fox doing?” They thought I was working on my PhD dissertation.“Oh, that looked like our son there.”The story was about Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was becoming Chiang Kai-shek's successor. I wrote about how he was going about it. That was a good news story, so The New York Times sent me a message and said, “If you'd like to work for us, we'll be happy to take more stories.”So I started sending them stories once or twice a week, and after four or five months, they gave me a job offer in New York. That was just one of those lucky breaks. I guess The New York Times correspondent who made that initial contact with me, Harrison Salisbury, who had won several Pulitzer Prizes, must have seen something in me.What's your relationship with your editors over the years? Generally pretty good. They certainly intimidated me at the beginning. The person who actually hired me was the foreign editor at The New York Times, James Greenfield. When I returned to New York, it was New Year's Day, the end of 1971. James asked me about my training and asked me to spend the next couple of months sitting at the foreign desk to watch how they do things. I couldn't even write stories for a while; I just handed them the copy that came up. I later got promoted to news assistant and was asked to find something interesting and write one story a week. I wrote some stories about Asia for the newspaper. They wouldn't give me a byline at first as I wasn't a reporter. My first assignment was to Newark, New Jersey, which had gone through a series of terrible race riots in the late 1960s. I was going to be the correspondent in Newark.This was after they hired you and during those two years of training? Yes. One day, I was covering a story. The new mayor of Newark — the first black mayor of a major American city — called a meeting in city hall to see if he could stop the riots.He was trying to bring people together: white, black and Hispanic. Within ten seconds, everybody was having a fistfight. People were knocking each other out with the police and mayor in front of them. The mayor yelled at people to stop, and they still kept punching and hitting each other with big pieces of wood right in City Hall. And I was there. Two very large black men grabbed my arms behind my back. The nasty term for white people in those days was “honky”. They said, “What are you doing here, honky?” They began punching me in the stomach and hitting me in the head. I thought I was going to die right there before I finally broke free. I got to my office to send my story of the city hall by telephone across New York City. And they put that story on the front page.Your second front page at The New York Times. So the editor of The New York Times was a very intimidating man, Abe Rosenthal, a gifted correspondent who'd won several Pulitzer Prizes. He won a Pulitzer Prize in Poland and Germany. I got this message saying, “Mr. Rosenthal wants to see you in his office immediately.”I thought, “oh jeez I'm getting fired.” I just got beaten up in City Hall and they're going to fire me. So I walked in, and he said, “Fox, that was a really nice story.” He said, “you did a really good job on that story. We have another assignment for you. I want you to go over to the New York Hilton Hotel”, which was about ten blocks away.He told me that one of our correspondents, Neil Sheehan, had gotten a secret government document, the Pentagon Papers, which were boxes and boxes of government documents. Neil couldn't read all that by himself, so I had to go and read it with him. Besides, I knew about Asia. By that point, I had read as much as I could about Vietnam. I also knew Neil Sheen because I had helped him come to Harvard to give a talk about Vietnam while I was a graduate student. So we actually had a good relationship. I spent the next two months in Neil's hotel room reading documents, but two of us were not enough, so a third and eventually a fourth correspondent were brought in. Did you understand the risk you were taking working with the classifieds? You could be arrested. Right, yes. I had to tell my parents, “I can't tell you anything about what I'm doing.”When we finally started publishing, I wrote three of the seven installments, which was amazing because I was a junior person. Abe Rosenthal called me back into his office after we finished, and said, “Fox, you did a nice job on this, so we're sending you somewhere. We're sending you to Vietnam.” He said, “I want you to go immediately.” So I went from the Pentagon Papers to Saigon. That was a surprise. That was not where I wanted to go. In fact, what I really wanted was to go to cover China, but that would have meant Hong Kong. But Vietnam turned out to be fascinating. There was always something happening.Reporting on the frontlines in VietnamCan you talk about your Vietnam experience?It was an experience at many levels. Intellectually, it was seductive because there was so much going on, people getting shot every day. The only way to truly understand it was to be there.You could divide the correspondents into those who stayed in Saigon and those who went out to the field. I wanted to be in the field as much as possible. I spent time on Navy ships and even in a fighter plane, hitting what appeared to be factories.The GIs, or “grunts”, wanted to know what we wrote about them, and some would come to our office in Saigon. Sometimes they were angry. A few correspondents received threats, but we mostly had a good relationship. The more you were willing to go out into the field, the more respect you earned. I was out there from the beginning.Vietnam was more complicated than I initially thought. If you were strictly anti-war or pro-government, you missed the full picture.You had been against the war before. How did you feel once you were there?I was part of the anti-war movement and then found myself in the middle of the war. I got to know many ordinary Vietnamese who were actually happy to have Americans there because the communist soldiers would threaten to confiscate their property. Vietnam was more complicated than I initially thought. If you were strictly anti-war or pro-government, you missed the full picture.What was the relevance of the Pentagon Papers then?The Pentagon Papers showed that the U.S. government was deceiving the public, but we were also helping some people. It was more complex than the extreme positions made it seem.Were you at risk of being arrested for the Pentagon Papers?Possibly, yes. My name was on the case, but by that time, I was in Vietnam. I put it out of my mind.How long were you in Vietnam?I was in Vietnam from 1971 to 1975, with breaks in Japan. The New York Times didn't let anyone stay more than two years at a time because of the exhaustion of war. But I kept going back and stayed until the last day of the war in 1975 when I left on a helicopter to a Navy ship.I took the place of a brilliant female correspondent, Gloria Emerson. I inherited her apartment, and Vietnam was as exciting a place as it could be. There was always something to do, something to see, something that you shouldn't see but wanted to see. Vietnam was all that I talked about for four years. I stayed until the last day of the war, April 30th, 1975.Did you get hurt during the war?I was hit by mortar fragments and lost my hearing for almost a month. Once, I was left behind after the unit I accompanied ran into an ambush. I had to walk three hours to get back to safety.Vietnam absorbed all parts of your brain, your mind, your body, and your psyche. It just took over.How did the war experience change you?It depends on the individual. Some correspondents loved Vietnam and never wanted to leave. Others were terrified and left without a word. Even today, I still belong to an online Google group of ex-correspondents in Vietnam, and I still get dozens of messages every day. They always want to discuss Vietnam.Back in the day, some got afraid and just left. I had several friends who would literally just leave a message at their desk saying, “Please pack my belongings and send them back to New York.” It's hard to generalise and have an ironclad rule about. It was different from regular assignments in most other countries.Well, Vietnam was certainly special.Vietnam absorbed all parts of your brain, your mind, your body, and your psyche. It just took over. When the war ended, I came out on a helicopter that landed on a Navy ship. The captain said I could make one phone call. I called my editor in New York and said, “I'm out, I'm safe.” He replied, “Good, because we're sending you to Hong Kong.”Recommended ReadingsFox Butterfield, 1982, China: Alive in the Bitter SeaJohn Fairbank, Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig, 1965, East Asia: The Modern Transformation, George Allen & UnwinEdwin Reischauer & John Fairbank, 1958, East Asia: The Great Tradition, Houghton MifflinAcknowledgementThis newsletter is edited by Caiwei Chen. The transcription and podcast editing is by Aorui Pi. I thank them for their support!About usPeking Hotel is a bilingual online publication that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China's reality through the personal tales of China experts. Through biweekly podcasts and newsletters, we present colourful first-person accounts of seasoned China experts. The project grew out of Leo's research at Hoover Institution where he collects oral history of prominent China watchers in the west. Peking Hotel is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Lastly…We also have a Chinese-language Substack. It has been a privilege to speak to these thoughtful individuals and share their stories with you. The stories they share often remind me of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. I hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!Correction note: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly referred to sinologists Mary and Henry Wright as "Fords." We thank reader Robert Kapp for bringing this to our attention. Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

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Real Ideals and False Hopes: Seeing China in the Vietnam War with Orville Schell

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2024 55:51

Arriving at Orville's place takes you through a scenic drive on the Berkeley Hills. Quintessential to the Bay Area, driving on the steep, winding roads feels like the slow climbing of a rollercoaster. At the summit, glimpses of the Golden Gates Bridge peek through the misty clouds. On a clear day, the urban sprawl of San Francisco, Berkeley and Albany unfolds beneath you; even on a rainy day, the charming neighbourhoods with Berkeley Bungalows more than make up for the long drive from Palo Alto.Orville Schell will be familiar to our returning readers. We have featured him twice before, once on his experience in the 60s, and again in the 80s. A veteran journalist and currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society, Orville has given us insight into how foreign China watchers navigated the challenges of the Cold War and how China's gradual shift from socialism in the 1980s. In this issue, we explore Orville's experience in the Vietnam War – a transformative event for an entire generation of Americans and a key moment that shaped his consciousness as a China scholar. Orville, as someone deeply embedded in the American China-watching community, sheds light on the often-overlooked impact of the Vietnam War on Western perceptions of China.A brief hiatus in the summer has recharged Peking Hotel well. We now have a new and brilliant editing team, so it's not just myself sifting through mountains of tapes anymore (hurray!). We will aim to release a new episode every two weeks, and your continued interest is our best accountability measure :)I thank my wonderful editors Yiwen Lu and Caiwei Chen for their support.Enjoy!Leo Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

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Ep. 12: China's evolving art scene

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2024 59:16 Transcription Available

China's edgy contemporary art exploded into global view over decades of China's meteoric economic growth. Gone were the days of Mao Zedong insisting that art had to “serve the people", by which he meant, the Communist Party, with socialist realist propaganda. Freed from those contraints with Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, successive generations of contemporary artists in China worked through political trauma, explored Chinese identity, experimented with the styles of modern masters in other parts of the world, and found their own voices, in ways that drew global attention, and drove a hot art market in the early 2000s and 2010s. How did that all happen, and what's happened to it now, under Xi Jinping's reassertion of the idea that art – and journalism, and film, and pretty much everything – should serve the Party's interests? In this episode, Barbara Pollack, an art critic, curator, and author who has focused on contemporary Chinese art since the late 1990s, shares her thinking and experience. Barbara Pollack, author of The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic's Adventures in China (2010) and Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (2018), is an award-winning writer, art critic, and curator, and a respected voice on contemporary Chinese art for a quarter century. As a curator, she created My Generation: Young Chinese Artists (Tampa Museum of Art and Orange County Museum of Art, 2014-2015); Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity (Asia Society Museum New York, 2022), and Multiply: Strength in Numbers (Modern Art Museum Shanghai, 2024). She is cofounder of Art at a Time Like This, a nonprofit organization that provides platforms for artists and curators to respond to current events and social crises. The China Books podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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August 21, 2024 - Bill Scher | Lincoln Mitchell | Orville Schell

secretary preview last night democratic national convention inside look orville schell bill scher lincoln mitchell

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2024 58:29

A Review of Last Night's Democratic National Convention and a Preview of Tonight's | The Generational Change Underway in the Harris/Walz Democratic Party | China Sues Stanford For Mao's Secretary's Diaries With an Inside Look at the CCP From 1935 to 2018 backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

Ep. 11: Beijing in Short Fiction

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 6, 2024 40:34 Transcription Available

Beijing is many things to many people, sometimes all at once – a mecca for migrants and artists, a tech hub, a proving ground for young graduates, a capital of politics and power, a smoggy, traffic-choked dystopia, a charming collection of lakes, leafy parks, narrow lanes and courtyard houses, an enduring city with 800 years of history and lore, and millions of stories to tell. Ten such stories are told in The Book of Beijing: A City in Short Fiction, an anthology in English translation by 10 Chinese writers, many of them award-winning, all of whom live in Beijing or have a close and enduring connection to it. The stories were all previously published in Chinese in China, including one in which a young woman wonders what her older boyfriend saw in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and another, in which a pre-teen boy – left alone after his older siblings are sent to the countryside – gets caught stealing, and fears the consequences. Other stories include speculative fiction from Gu Shi, who's shortlisted for a 2024 Hugo Award for a different story, and a tale from Xu Zechen, translated by Paper Republic founder Eric Abrahamsen, about how a counterfeiter who sells fake IDs gets smitten with a fellow seller of fake IDs and toys with the idea of settling down into a normal life. The book is part of the acclaimed "A City in Short Fiction" series by Comma Press in the UK, which has included The Book of Jakarta, The Book of Istanbul, and The Book of Gaza. The Book of Beijing brings a reader in to this complex city through intimate, textured, and at times jarring tales, of ordinary people navigating extraordinary times.In this episode of the China Books podcast, The Book of Beijing ‘s editor, Bingbing Shi, shares her thoughts on Beijing, on how she brought the book together, and on the impact she hopes it will have on readers outside of China.Bingbing Shi earned her PhD from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, adaptation studies, memory studies, translation studies, and feminist writing. She has a BA and MA in Chinese literature from Beijing Normal University. Her fiction in Chinese has appeared in People's Literature and Youth Literature. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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I Was Locked In A Cave On My First Trip to China - with Orville Schell

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 3, 2024 59:27

Welcome back!My first piece on Orville's experience in the 80s had good reader reception, many thanks to your support! This piece focuses on Orville's story in the 60s and 70s working on China. Orville Schell is the Director of Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.In this one, you will hear about Orville's grandfather who taught medicine in Changsha in late qing; his semi-activist mom; studying with John Fairbank at Harvard; drinking tea with Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei; locked in a cave by CCP officials on his first trip to China; and getting chased out of Indonesia by the Indonesian communists. It shines a light on a not-so-distant era. Not sure about you; I certainly hear many echoes with our time.Enjoy!Content- Changsha, Tahiti, and Taiwan- First trip to China and a wake-up call- Living in Taiwan, dreaming of Beijing- John Fairbank and Edgar Snow- ‘Ganyang America!' (‘Crush America' in Indonesian)About usThe Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are bilingual online publications that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China's reality through the personal tales of China experts. We present subjective, opinionated, and coloured views of veterans in the field based on their first-hand experience and direct observations. The project grew out of Leo's research at Hoover Institution where he collects long oral history of China experts living in America. The stories here are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. We have Substacks in English and Chinese. Do subscribe!RecruitmentI am recruiting a part-time editorial helpers for this Substack. Drop me an email with your CV and a short self-intro at heliu@stanford.edu if you are interested.https://pekinghotel.substack.comhttps://www.the-mayfly.com/s/peking-hotel Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

Ep. 10: Rethinking U.S.-China trade

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2024 55:11 Transcription Available

Who are the winners and losers in U.S.-China trade over recent decades, and what's a better way forward? Laying out a compelling argument in this episode is Peter Goodman, a former correspondent in China, current global economics correspondent at The New York Times, and author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. He takes the supply chain snarls at the peak of the COVID pandemic as a jumping-off point to explore how China became the world's top exporter and top trading partner of most countries, why "just in time" outsourcing to China long made irresistible sense to U.S. companies and investors but came with steep hidden costs to workers and a dangerously widening wealth gap, and how the answer is not a wholesale U.S. 'decoupling' from China's efficient supply chains, but making better choices at home to build resilience and restore faith among disillusioned Americans in the U.S. economy and democracy.Peter Goodman, the global economics correspondent atThe New York Times, has also been the Times' London-based Europe economics correspondent, and U.S. national economics correspondent. He was earlier the Washington Post's China-based Asia economics correspondent (2001-06), and its telecommunications reporter. His other books are Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (2022) and Past Due: The End of Easy money and the Renewal of the American Economy (2009). The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Ep. 9: Tiananmen remembered

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2024 59:57

Tiananmen -- the place, the protests, the crackdown -- reverberates in memories and imaginations around the world, even 35 years after tanks rolled in Beijing's streets, and the Chinese military's crackdown on student demonstrators in the week hours of June 4, 1989, killed at least hundreds and wounded thousands of people. The protesters had been calling for political reforms, for a more open and less corrupt society, after decades of political upheaval under Mao Zedong's leadership. What they got instead from Deng Xiaoping was a brutal ‘no' to the call for political reform, but with a green light to instead focus on making money and growing China's economy. China's Communist Party leaders insist to this day that China's economic rise couldn't have happened without the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, and the hopes for political reform of many Chinese people. Still, the Party has tried to erase the Tiananmen crackdown from public memory in China, even as many Chinese remember the protests and all they stood for, with some dedicating their lives to working toward those same goals. The guest for this episode, Xiao Qiang, is one such person. He talks about his life before, during, and after the protests, and recommends books for anyone interested in better understanding what the Tiananmen demonstrations and crackdown meant, and still mean, in China and beyond. Xiao Qiang is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website launched in 2003 to aggregate, organize, and recommend online information from and about China. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Information, University of California at Berkeley, and director of the school's Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on the intersection of digital media, counter-censorship technology and cyber-activism.The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Deng Xiaoping, Democracy Wall, and the Dialetics of China - with Orville Schell

Play Episode Listen Later May 25, 2024 39:38

Orville Schell on his experience in China in the 1980s, a magical decade in recent history that brought hope, optimism, dynamism and endless possibilities in China, and ended with Tiananmen Massacre.The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are a bilingual online publication that takes you down memory lane of recent history in China, and narrates China's reality through the personal tales of China experts. We present subjective, opinionated, and coloured views of veterans in the field based on their first-hand experience and direct observations. The project grew out of Leo's research at Hoover Institution where he collects long oral history of China experts living in America. The stories here are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. This episode is co-produced with China Books Review, a new digital magazine about everything China and bookish. A special shoutout to the editor, Alec, for supporting the Peking Hotel and to Taili Ni for sound-editing.Since this is only my first episode, any feedback from our audience (you!) is warmly appreciated. We also have Substacks in English and Chinese. I hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!I am recruiting a producer and editor to help me run this publication. Email heliu@stanford.edu if you are interested. Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

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May 16, 2024 - Orville Schell | Kim Lane Scheppele | James Zirin

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2024 60:09

The Murky Ties to the Poet and Would-be Assassin of Slovakia's PM Robert Fico | At their 40th Meeting, Xi and Putin Pledge to Deepen Defense and Military Ties | Trump's Lawyer Attacks Michael Cohen as a Liar Even Though Trump's Fixer Lied in the Service of the Liar-in-Chief backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

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Ep. 8: Uyghur Women Speaking Out

united states china writer engagement us china schell orville schell

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2024 51:14 Transcription Available

Genocide is not a word thrown around lightly by the U.S. government, but it uses that term to describe the Chinese government's ongoing assaults on Uyghurs' distinct culture, identity, rights, and freedom in China's far western region of Xinjiang. China's government has long had an uneasy relationship with Uyghurs' distinct Turkic Muslim identity, and has tried in various ways over time to control them, reduce and dilute their population, and make them assimilate.But lately, it's gotten much worse. Within the past decade, about a million Uyghurs – almost one in 10 – were sent to reeducation camps. Under international pressure, the PRC says it closed the camps in 2019, because the "trainees" graduated. But it transferred many of the Uyghurs in the camps to prison or forced labor, sending some to other provinces as part of a policy meant to reduce the concentration of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Those still in Xinjiang are under constant high-tech surveillance, with some forced to let security personnel live in their homes, to better indoctrinate and surveil them.In the midst of all this, a few Uyghur women in exile have proven especially effective at speaking out on their people's plight, and advocating for international action . This episode is a conversation with two of them, about their experiences growing up Uyghur in China, going into exile in the United States, and becoming advocates for Uyghur rights.Gulchehra Hoja is the author of A Stone is Most Precious Where It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope and Survival, named by The New Yorker as a best book of 2023. An award-winning Uyghur American journalist who has worked with Radio Free Asia since 2001, she grew up in Urumqi, studied Uyghur language and literature and, working for state-run Xinjiang TV, created and hosted China's first Uyghur language children's television program for five years. Jewher Ilham's two memoirs, Jewher Ilham: A Uyghur's Fight to Free Her Father (2015) and Because I Have To: The Path to Survival, The Uyghur Struggle (2022), tell the story of how a Uyghur teenager who grew up in Beijing as the daughter of prominent economics professor and Uyghur rights advocate Ilham Tohti, went into exile in the United States and became an effective advocate for her father's release from a life sentence in prison in China. She now also works with the Worker Rights Consortium in Washington, D.C. as forced labor project coordinator and spokesperson for the Coalition to End Uyghur Forced Labor. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now a senior fellow at Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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The end of U.S.-China engagement

White House Chronicle

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2024 27:43

Writer and scholar Orville Schell began his study of China well before President Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972, ending 25 years of isolation between the United States and China, and resulting in establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979. Schell discusses "the end of U.S.-China engagement" with Host Llewellyn King and Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III.

Ep. 7: Why China's ahead in the green energy 'gold rush'

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Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2024 49:08 Transcription Available

China has bet big over the past couple of decades on how building up its renewable energy sector -- solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and their batteries, and the metals and minerals that make them all possible -- will help China achieve a dominant global position in an essential field. So far, with intensifying climate change making the need to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewables ever more urgent, China is winning that bet. China's efforts, with fierce competition within its private sector spurred by government incentives, have driven down the global cost of solar panels and electric vehicles, and have given China a near-monopoly globally on processing rare earths, and in mining and processing nickel, cobalt, magnesium and more. This episode focuses on the story of how China achieved this lead in the green energy 'gold rush', and what the West is now doing to try to catch up, with guest Henry Sanderson, author of VoltRush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green. A former correspondent in China for the Associated Press and Bloomberg, a commodities reporter for The Financial Times and current executive editor for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, Sanderson reported on the ground for from lithium fields in Chile to cobalt mines in the Congo, on the environmental trade-offs of mining minerals for renewable energy, on promising alternatives, and on what the West and the rest of the world can learn from China's experience as an early leader in green energy. Sanderson is also co-author, with The New York Times' Michael Forsythe, of China's Super Bank: Debt, Oil, and Influence -- How China Development Bank is Rewriting the Rules of Finance. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Inside Beijing with China Scholar Orville Schell

GeoTech Wars

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2024 24:04

In this episode of GeoTech Wars, Kirt is joined by Orville Schell, Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. The conversation examines Xi Jinping's worldview and why China has shifted course after decades of economic growth driven by globalization.

The United States, China, and the Future of the Global Order with Kishore Mahbubani and Orville Schell

Asia In-Depth

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2024 70:37

NEW YORK, March 21, 2024 — Asia Society Policy Institute, in partnership with Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, hosts a discussion on the U.S.-China relationship and how it impacts global trends. Speakers include Kishore Mahbubani, 2023-24 Schlager visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House; and Orville Schell, Arthur Ross director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. Rorry Daniels, managing director of Asia Society Policy Institute, moderates the conversation.Asia Inside Out brings together our team and special guests to take you beyond the latest policy headlines and provide an insider's view on regional and global affairs. Each month we'll deliver an interview with informed experts, analysts, and decision-makers from across the Asia-Pacific region. If you want to dig into the details of how policy works, this is the podcast for you. This podcast is produced by the Asia Society Policy Institute, a “think-and-do tank” working on the cutting edge of current policy trends by incorporating the best ideas from our experts and contributors into recommendations for policy makers to put these plans into practice.

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The United States, China, and the Future of the Global Order with Kishore Mahbubani and Orville Schell

Asia Inside Out

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 29, 2024 70:37

Ep. 6: Spy novels, a real-life thriller, and the BBC

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2024 56:05 Transcription Available

Acclaimed spy novelist Adam Brookes started out in China as a languge student in the mid-'80s, skipping class to travel in trucks and buses to Tibet and other parts of China that had just opened up after being shut off to foreign visitors for decades. He want back as a BBC China correspondent, informed by his earlier experiences in remote parts of China, and informing a huge global audience about China's transformation. He has since parlayed both of those early chapters in China into vivid and thought-provoking writing, both in his spy novel triology Night Heron, Spy Games, and The Spy's Daughter, and in his narrative non-fiction thriller Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City. In this episode, he talks about how, with each form of writing, he has tried to bring China to life for his audiences, and deepen understanding of a complex place and people, and China's impact on the world. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Ep. 5: China's Economic Challenges, Explained

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2024 69:47 Transcription Available

The sizzle has come off of China's decades of economic growth, as the country contends with deflation, slumping consumer confidence, plummeting foreign investment, a cratered urban property sector, high local government debt, overcapacity in manufacturing, and a private sector cowed by government crackdowns, as well as a shrinking workforce and an aging population.For all that, China is still the world's second largest economy, the largest trading partner of most of the world's countries, and one of the world's biggest bilateral lenders. And China listed its economic growth rate in 2023 as a respectable 5.2 percent, causing more than one economist to raise a eyebrow. How to make sense of all this, and get an idea of what China's options are to sustain a future path of comfortable economic growth? Settle back, put your earbuds in, and listen as the two respected China-born economists in this episode lay out the challenges, choices, and possibilities that could shape China's future.Tao Wang, author of Making Sense of China's Economy (2023) is chief China economist, managing director, and Head of Asia Economic Research at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong, and was formerly an economist at the International Monetary Fund. Her research on China covers a wide range of topics including monetary policy, the debt problem, shadow banking, local government finance, US-China trade disputes, supply chain shifts, RMB internationalization, the property bubble, the demographic challenge, the urban-rural divide, and the long-term growth potential. Dr. Wang has been consistently ranked as one of the top China economists by institutional investors. She is an invited fellow of the China Finance (CF) 40 Forum and a member of the China Global Economic Governance 50 Forum. Yasheng Huang, author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008, now being updated), The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline (2023) , and nine other books in English and in Chinese, holds the Epoch Foundation Professorship of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management, and founded and runs MIT's China Lab, India Lab, and ASEAN Lab. Dr. Huang is a 2023-24 visiting fellow at the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. The National Asia Research Program named him one of the most outstanding scholars in the United States conducting research on issues of policy importance to the United States. He has served as a consultant at World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and OECD.The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

Year-End Review of Global Democracy with Larry Diamond

Democracy IRL

Play Episode Play 25 sec Highlight Listen Later Jan 5, 2024 53:37

Larry Diamond once again joins Francis Fukuyama for a year-end review to discuss the state of global democracy as 2023 draws to a close. Diamond also recounts his Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture, the 20th iteration of the annual lecture series named in honor of the famed political scientist and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and the Canadian Embassy.Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also a professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest edited book (with Orville Schell), China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), urges a posture of constructive vigilance toward China's global projection of “sharp power,” which it sees as a rising threat to democratic norms and institutions. He offers a massive open online course (MOOC) on Comparative Democratic Development through the edX platform and is now writing a textbook to accompany it.Diamond's book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has also edited or coedited more than forty books on democratic development around the world, most recently, Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years.Democracy IRL is produced by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University.To learn more, visit our website or follow us on social media.

Ep. 4: How "Leftover Women" may reshape China's future

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 2, 2024 47:29 Transcription Available

A funny thing happened at the height of China's economic boom, as more and more Chinese women were getting college degrees, good jobs, and promising careers. The government launched a propaganda campaign, urging women to get married young, before they became "yellowed pearls". Leta Hong-Fincher captured that phenomenon in her book Leftover Women (2014). A decade later, with a new updated edition of Leftover Women just out, Leta joins the China Books podcast to talk about why China's Communist Party leaders are still so focused on micro-managing the personal lives of women. President Xi Jinping himself made an explicit appeal at China's National Women's Congress in November 2023, calling on China's women to stay home and have babies. The draconian one-child policy, enforced from 1979 to 2016, had led to a plummeting birthrate, a contracting workforce and an aging population. Now the government is urging women to marry early and have three children. But many of China's women -- about one in five now have college degrees -- seem none too keen on giving up on dreams to have a career, and perhaps more independence than they would in a marriage. China's fertility rate continues to plummet, and is now about half the replacement rate. The number of marriage licenses granted per year in China has dropped for nine straight years, and is now half of what it was a decade ago. Faced with inequality of opportunity and of protection under the law when it comes to marriage, property rights, and domestic abuse, women in China are engaged demographic revolution voting with their feet, with potentially profound implications for China's economic and political future.Leta Hong Fincher is the author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2023, 10th Anniversary Edition) and Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (2018). She is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University's Department of Sociology in Beijing and is currently a Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Ep. 3: How China's Future Looked in the Past

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2023 47:46 Transcription Available

Dreams of a better future have driven many a revolution, but not all have turned out the way the dreamers imagined. China's early revolutionaries, a century ago, aimed to rid the country of what they saw as corrupt capitalism and the world of colonialism and imperialism. Instead, they said, socialism would bring a future of peace, prosperity, equality, and social justice. Not all of that worked out. One of the dreamers was Chen Hansheng, a prominent Western-educated public intellectual who wrote, lectured, and taught in the United States while secretly working for the Soviet Comintern and Communist Party of China, who worked over time with Zhou Enlai and more briefly with Soviet spy Richard Sorge, and who was close friends Agnes Smedley, an American journalist who supported China's Communist revolution, and with Soong Ching-Ling, the widow of Sun Yat-Sen. Chen's comprehensive surveys of rural regions of China in the 1930s painted a vivid picture of the realities on the ground for China's farmers and villagers, who China's Communist revolution ended up helping in some ways and hurting in others, particularly in the preventable Great Famine of the late '50s and early '60s, when as many as 50 million people starved to death. Chen died in 2004 at age 107. He lived through a century of epic change in China and in the world that brought some of what he wanted, but not in the way he expected, and a lot of disillusionment. In this episode, Chen's biographer Stephen R. MacKinnon, lays it all out. Stephen R. MacKinnon is an emeritus professor of 20th Century Chinese history and former director of the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University. He has lived and worked in the People's Republic of China, and has focused on China in his work since the early 1960s. He has written dozens of articles and edited volumes, and is the author of five books on China, including Chen Hansheng: China's Last Romantic Revolutionary (2023), Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (2008), and Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (1987). The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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November 12, 2023 - Lisa Graves | Orville Schell | James Van Nostrand

james van orville schell lisa graves

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 12, 2023 60:58

Senate Republicans Protect the Powerful From the Public | A Preview of the Biden/Xi Summit in San Francisco | Will the Saboteur Joe Manchin Deliver Biden a Fatal Blow? backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

Ep. 2: American Correspondents in China

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2023 45:44

China's rise is one of the great stories of the past century, and China correspondents have told that story in myriad ways -- as a story of transformation, of falling poverty rates and rising power, of new wealth and old political elites, of new opportunities and unintended consequences, of abuses of rights and of power, of surveillance and censorship. Together, these different pieces formed a complex and sometimes contradictory picture -- shaping understandings, and sometimes misunderstandings -- about how China is changing, and is changing the world. American correspondents have been a big part of this effort. In this episode, former CNN China correspondent Mike Chinoy talks his book and documentary film series Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republic, about how the work of American China correspondents has changed over seven decades, about why China correspondents matter, and what we lose when fewer are in the field. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Ep. 1: Chinese Fiction in the Reform & Opening Up Era

Play Episode Play 29 sec Highlight Listen Later Oct 10, 2023 54:18 Transcription Available

China's epic transformation over the past four decades has seen cities expand, fortunes rise, and expectations change. It has left Chinese people to either ride the waves of change, or scramble -- perhaps struggle -- to keep up. In the midst of it all, Chinese fiction has reflected and riffed on life on the ground, with humor, satire, pathos, and good old-fashioned story-telling. At times in the Reform and Opening Up era, Chinese fiction has even driven a national conversation.This episode offers a conversation on all of this with two deeply knowledgeable guests: Jianying Zha is a contributor to The New Yorker, and the critically acclaimed author of China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers are Transforming a Culture (1996), Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (2011), and other books and writing, both fiction and non-fiction, in both English and Chinese. Jianying was born and raised in Beijing, where she studied Chinese literature before moving to the United States in the early 1980s to study English literature. She has, in most of the years since, split time between China and the United States.Perry Link is a deeply respected expert in Chinese language and literature, Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, and an emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University. His books include Stubborn Weeds: Popular and Controversial Chinese Literature After the Cultural Revolution (Chinese Literature in Translation) (1984), Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (1992), The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (2000), An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (2013), and I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo (2023). The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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Chinese activist Ai WeiWei on art, exile and politics

Berkeley Talks

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2023 89:40

In Berkeley Talks episode 181, renowned artist and human rights activist Ai WeiWei discusses art, exile and politics in a conversation with noted theater director and UCLA professor Peter Sellars and Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.Ai, who grew up in northwest China under harsh conditions because of his poet father's exile, is openly critical of the Chinese government's stance on democracy and human rights. He is well-known for his provocative works, including his 2014-15 installation on San Francisco Bay's Alcatraz Island, @Large, that the LA Times called, "an always-poignant, often-powerful meditation on soul-deadening repressions of human thought and feeling.""Normally, people call me an artist or activist, and I am often forced into one condition," he says. "It's not that I intentionally try to create something or to crystallize something, but rather I've been put in extreme conditions, and I have to focus on dealing with those situations. Normally, I don't accept the easy answer. "So I think I have to find a language to illustrate my expression, and it comes out in certain ideas or materials. We can call it art. I don't think my art really looks like art, but still, it's hard to categorize it. I'm a bit ashamed about it because everything in real life, it has a purpose. It has clear problems and solutions. But the art is not really about that. It rather creates problems after problems. So yeah, that's what I do."This Sept. 24 event was co-presented by Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.Read about 10 of Ai WeiWei's adventurous works on Cal Performances' blog Beyond the Stage.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu)Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo courtesy of Ai WeiWei. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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China Books, Trailer

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2023 3:49

Fresh ideas and thought-provoking conversations on fiction and non-fiction, about China and from China, with host Mary Kay Magistad, a former China correspondent for NPR and PRX's The World. The China Books podcast is a companion of the China Books Review (chinabooksreview.com), co-published by Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations (where Mary Kay is deputy director) and The Wire China. The China Books podcast is hosted and produced by Mary Kay Magistad, a former award-winning China correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's The World, now deputy director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. This podcast is a companion of the China Books Review, which offers incisive essays, interviews, and reviews on all things China books-related. Co-publishers are Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and The Wire China, co-founded by David Barboza, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times China correspondent. The Review's editor is Alec Ash, who can be reached at editor@chinabooksreview.com.

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China's Dream of Global Dominance

WorldAffairs

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2023 53:01

The aftermath of the Chinese surveillance balloon saga reveals a growing diplomatic divide between the US and China. Where does this mistrust come from? In “Wealth and Power,” authors Orville Schell and John Delury argue that foreign humiliation over the past century and a half is the story that holds China together. They join host Ray Suarez to discuss China's quest for global dominance. Guests: John Delury, US Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China relations at the Asia Society Host: Ray Suarez, host of World Affairs If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

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August 9, 2023 - Carol Sanger | Orville Schell | Josh Kurlantzick

The Foreign Affairs Interview

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2023 59:01

A Resounding Defeat of an Anti-Abortion Power Grab in Ohio | What Genuine Peace Efforts Can be Taken Following Revelations in the NY Times That An American Peace Group Appears to be Shilling for the Chinese Communist Party | An Examination of the Chinese Government's Global Influence Campaigns backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

chinese government shilling orville schell carol sanger

What Drives Putin and Xi (Part Two)

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 13, 2023 52:21

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs. Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In part two of our conversation, which we taped on June 16, we discussed how the leaders of China and Russia see the West and how that worldview is reshaping geopolitics. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

What Drives Putin and Xi, Part 1

The Foreign Affairs Interview

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2023 31:07

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin loom over geopolitics in a way that few leaders have in decades. Not even Mao and Stalin drove global events the way Xi and Putin do today. Who they are, how they view the world, and what they want are some of the most important and pressing questions in foreign policy and international affairs. Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell are two of the best scholars to explore these issues. Kotkin is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of Stalin. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China. He is also a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In part one of our conversation, we discuss the early lives of Putin and Xi and how history has shaped their worldviews. You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.

Fareed Zakaria on Where Russia's War in Ukraine Stands — and Much More

The Ezra Klein Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2023 90:26

A lot about the world has changed since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The war itself has brought a number of surprises, from the tenacity of Ukraine's resistance to the limits of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, competition between the United States and China has escalated into something resembling a new Cold War, India just surpassed China as the most populous country in the world and countries representing about two-thirds of the world's population have chosen not to align themselves with the U.S. position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.Those shifts raise a number of important questions: Where does the Russia-Ukraine war stand today? Are U.S.-China relations headed in the right direction? How will the rise of “nonaligned” countries like India alter the global balance of power? Is America's longtime global dominance waning?Fareed Zakaria is host of the CNN show “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” a columnist for The Washington Post, and one of the sharpest foreign policy thinkers of our time. We discuss what possible outcomes of the Russia-Ukraine conflict seem likeliest at this moment, why the U.S.-led sanctions on Russia haven't been nearly as effective as expected, how the Republican Party's stance on Ukraine could influence the outcome of the war, why tensions between the United States and China have intensified over the last year, the dangerous implications of the Chinese spy balloon debacle, whether the United States should ban TikTok, how America's hypocrisy about foreign invasions looks to the rest of the world, why so many Global South countries don't support the West's sanctions regime on Russia, what India's rise means for the future global balance of power, what President Biden's foreign policy should look like moving forward and more.Mentioned:Foreign Affairs' May/June 2023 issue“The Upside of Rivalry” by Nirupama RaoThe Internationalists by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. ShapiroBook Recommendations:Imagined Communities by Benedict AndersonWealth and Power by Orville Schell and John DeluryThe Idea of India by Sunil KhilnaniListen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioappThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. The show's production team is Emefa Agawu, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.

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May 14, 2023 - Miles Taylor | Orville Schell | James Risen

china war ukraine champion democracy work together miles taylor orville schell james risen

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2023 63:04

The First White House Insider to Expose Trump on How Trump Will be Even More Dangerous Next Time | After Top Officials Met For 8 Hours, Could China and the U.S. Work Together to End the War in Ukraine? | A Champion of Democracy and Transparency Who Took on Powerful Interests and Won backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

Orville Schell - The Enigma of Xi

Grey Matter with Michael Krasny

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2023 57:18

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.

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Schell on The Long Arc of US-China and Long Reach of Leninism

ChinaTalk

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2023 80:45

How did Xi Jinping's formative years influence how he views the world today? Veteran China scholar Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, looks back at decades of writing and working on China, weathering the cycles of the country opening up and shutting down and gives his two cents on what's going on in Xi's head. We also discuss — Why Mao Zedong is a better read than Xi — China's reciprocity problem on the international stage — How US officials reacted to Tiananmen in a secret meeting with Deng Xiaoping — A history of accessing China for academics, businesspeople and journalists — Xi and victim culture Outro Music: Glenn Gould performing Contrapunctus, I, IV from Bach's amazing Art of the Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqDCieiDWAE Check out the newsletter at ChinaTalk.media! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Schell on The Long Arc of US-China and Long Reach of Leninism

ChinaEconTalk

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2023 80:45

art china iv bach xi xi jinping us china fugue schell china relations tiananmen longreach leninism orville schell arthur ross director contrapunctus

Why China Can't Forget the Century of Humiliation

WorldAffairs

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2023 51:05

The aftermath of the Chinese surveillance balloon saga reveals a growing diplomatic divide between the US and China. Where does this mistrust come from? And why would Beijing take the risk of high-stakes state espionage? In “Wealth and Power,” authors Orville Schell and John Delury argue that foreign humiliation over the past century and a half is the story that holds China together. They join host Ray Suarez to discuss China's quest for global dominance. Guests: John Delury, US Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China relations at the Asia Society Host: Ray Suarez If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

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Orville Schell on China in 2022: A Crack in Xi Jinping's Leninist Authoritarianism?

Keen On Democracy

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2022 33:35

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Orville Schell, author of My Old Home: A Novel of Exile. Orville Schell is the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. From 1996 to 2007 he was the dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He has written ten nonfiction books on China and contributed to many publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books. He is also an Emmy Award-winning producer for PBS, NBC Nightly News, and 60 Minutes. He divides his time between New York City and Berkeley, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Year-End Wrap-Up: The State of Global Democracy, with Larry Diamond

Democracy IRL

Play Episode Play 49 sec Highlight Listen Later Dec 16, 2022 62:45

As 2022 comes to a close, Francis Fukuyama sits down with his CDDRL colleague and democracy expert Larry Diamond for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of global democracy and the year's dramatic political developments in China, Iran, and the United States.Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also a professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest edited book (with Orville Schell), China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), urges a posture of constructive vigilance toward China's global projection of “sharp power,” which it sees as a rising threat to democratic norms and institutions. He offers a massive open online course (MOOC) on Comparative Democratic Development through the edX platform and is now writing a textbook to accompany it.Diamond's book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has also edited or coedited more than forty books on democratic development around the world, most recently, Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years.

There's More to Life Than Politics: Orville Schell's Fictional Message to Xi Jinping

Keen On Democracy

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2022 44:27

Democracy Now! 2022-11-14 Monday

Democracy Now! Audio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2022 59:00

Democracy Now! is in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, at COP27. We speak with climate justice activist Asad Rehman on what’s at stake at the U.N. climate conference; China scholars Michael Klare and Orville Schell on President Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping; Examining the effects of the climate crisis on Egypt and the wider region. Democracy Now! is broadcasting live this week from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, at the COP27 U.N. climate conference.

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Democracy Now! 2022-11-14 Monday

Democracy Now! Video

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2022 59:00

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November 14, 2022 - Orville Schell | Darrell West | Molly White