China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Orville Schell (12)

• Orville Schell: China Reluctant to Lead

  

  For Yale Global, Orville Schell writes about China’s role in a global solution to the current economic meltdown:

  As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized during her first trip overseas, the US has great expectations for China’s leadership and help on fixing the economy, and reducing climate change. Following the model of Richard Nixon in the 1970s, who sought to make common cause against the Soviet threat, Clinton emphasized common challenges for the two nations, playing down any differences over trade and human rights. Not so long ago, US and Chinese leaders insisted the other bears a greater share of responsibility for climate change and therefore should be the first to make sacrifice. Now, the Obama-Clinton team acknowledges that the US, as a developed country, contributed to high levels of emissions throughout history and seeks a partnership with China, currently the biggest emitter of green house gases. Orville Schell, director for US-China relations at the Asia Society, points out that, despite China’s tremendous success in overcoming poverty and pursuing development over the last two decades, the country still lags in self-confidence. “The truth is that old psychological mindsets and ways of relating to the world have changed far slower than the urban landscape might suggest, leaving China’s self-confidence lagging behind its actual achievements,” explains Schell, adding that some of China’s reluctance to take leadership may be part of a strategy aimed at not alarming neighboring countries. Solutions to major global problems require thoughtful ideas from all nations, as well as the ability to listen and collaborate on all levels. Compromise can be the first step on the leadership path. However, if China continues to shirk its global responsibility, the US will be left to act alone.

  » Read more
  • March 14, 2009 9:09 PM

• China: Humiliation & the Olympics

  

  Author Orville Schell writes in the New York Review of Books:

  Dark Matter may appear to be simply another film about a mass shooting spree at an American campus, albeit one with a Chinese twist. When Liu Xing arrives at the University of Iowa from Beijing, he optimistically proclaims himself so lucky to come to America, Meiguo, the Beautiful Country. May we all find a dream here!… I’m going to solve the Dark Matter problem, win the Nobel Prize, and marry a blue-eyed American girl!

  But he gradually becomes persuaded that his professors are conspiring to delay his degree and deny him his rightful recognition as a scholar. His growing paranoia is only heightened when his Ph.D. orals committee refuses to sign off on his thesis until he redoes some of his computations, making it impossible for him to win the top dissertation prize he feels he deserves. By the end of the film, his acute sense of humiliation has led to a psychotic state, and in a fit of murderous rage he kills the professors he once idealized.

  But what gives Dark Matter wider significance is the filmmakers’ use of the Iowa incident to explore—indirectly—some important psychological dynamics between China and the West: China’s deeply felt sense of historic injury by foreign nations, and the ways its often thwarted efforts to gain acceptance among leading world powers have exacerbated such sentiments. In the past, feelings of injury have arisen from such events as the Opium Wars and the Japanese occupation; and most recently after the Tibetan demonstrations this spring and during the run-up to this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games.

  By retelling the tragic story of a Chinese graduate student attempting to complete a Ph.D. at a prestigious American university, the film suggests, obliquely, a larger parable about China’s ambivalence toward the developed world, especially the United States.

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  • July 25, 2008 4:03 PM

• Charlie Rose Show on China

  

  Charlie Rose hosted a discussion about China and the 17th Party Congress yesterday, first with an interview with Henry Kissinger:

  followed by a group discussion with Cheng Li, Orville Schell, and Perry Link:

  » Read more
  • October 19, 2007 9:57 AM

• China, the Olympics, and Global Leadership - Orville Schell

  

  From Project Syndicate:

  The whole world, it seems, views China as the next great global power. A trip to Beijing does little to dispel that impression. Out of the welter of dust, noise, welders’ sparks, flotillas of cement mixers and construction cranes, the setting for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games is taking shape. A visitor feels inconsequential in the chaotic vastness of this epic undertaking.

  But looking down on the scene from the half-finished Morgan Centre, the luxury apartment complex (where annual rents are $800,000) and seven-star hotel that is arising beside the Olympic site, one is awestruck not only by the project’s grandeur, but by its design daring. Below, like some latticed popover, is the Herzog & de Meuron-designed “birds nest” Olympic Stadium. Beside it is the stunning “water cube,” or Aquatics Center, of Chinese/Australian design. [Full Text]

  » Read more
  • June 2, 2007 5:30 AM

• Clearing the Air With China - Orville Schell

  

  In the Washington Post, Orville Schell writes about China’s ecological crisis and the role the next president of the United States could play in finding a solution:

  
  
  In today’s China, nature is on the run, and at the heart of this environmental crisis sits coal, from which the country derives 69 percent of its primary energy and 52 percent of its electricity. China uses well over 2.2 billion metric tons of the stuff per year — more than the United States, India and Russia combined — and produces more conventional harmful emissions than the United States.

  Sometime next year, China could surpass the United States in greenhouse gas emissions, but the average person in China still consumes less than one-fifth the energy the average American does. For China to achieve the same living standard as the United States, it would have to triple its use of coal, creating an enormous increase in both conventional pollutants and greenhouse gases. And make no mistake about it, China is angling to catch up. In fact, to keep up with this voracious demand for energy, a new conventional coal-fired power plant comes on-line in China every week. [Full text]

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  • April 14, 2007 8:52 PM

• Great Disorder Under Heaven - Orville Schell

  

  In the Washington Post, Orville Schell reviews Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals:

  It has been enthralling to read Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s exhaustively researched new book on China’s Cultural Revolution — a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond. While it was not difficult to feel the tension, even the fear, aloft in the land when I reported from Mao Zedong’s China for the New Yorker during the mid-1970s, being there gave few intimations of the dark complexity of the political struggle playing out beneath the surface. By making sense out of this opaque decade, MacFarquhar (who teaches at Harvard University) and Schoenhals (who teaches at Lund University in Sweden) have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China’s odyssey through those tumultuous times. [Full text]

  Read more about the book, via CDT.

  » Read more
  • October 30, 2006 9:16 AM

• China: Giant Contradictions - Orville Schell

  

  On O’Reilly Radar, Stewart Brand summarizes a recent talk by Orville Schell about China:

  China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army.

  No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.

  So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term. [Full text]

  Schell’s full talk should be available for download soon here.

  » Read more
  • September 24, 2006 1:55 PM

• Video Report: China-U.S. Climate Change Forum

  

  From Google Video: Opening Session - The University, Scientific Research, and Climate Change

  The China-U.S. Climate Change Forum was organized by the Berkeley China Initiative, which is forging closer ties between U.C. Berkeley and China by bringing together key experts on important international and bilateral issues. Growing concern over climate change makes this topic an obvious choice for the first of this series of annual events. This panel highlights the mutual vulnerability of China and the U.S. to climate change, and the indispensable role of scientific research in understanding the problem and developing solutions. Panelists include: Robert Birgeneau, University of California at Berkeley; Richard Blum, UC Board of Regents; Steve Chu, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; C.S. Kiang, Peking University. The Forum is co-sponsored by Peking University’s College of Environmental Sciences and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, International and Area Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Energy and Resources Group, and Berkeley Institute of the Environment. Financial sponsors include the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, the Energy Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. [Click to see]

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  • August 9, 2006 9:11 PM

• History Majors - Orville Schell

  

  In the New York Times Book Review, Orville Schell reviews “Chinese Lessons” by John Pomfret:

  It is commonplace these days for visitors to be swept away by the breathtaking energy and dazzling high-rise vistas of Shanghai and Beijing. Even for Sinophiles like myself, who have been watching China for decades, the amazing development of this erstwhile People’s Republic can have an intoxicating way of obscuring the contradictions beneath. China’s progress also makes us forget that China did, in fact, undergo a “socialist revolution,” a protracted period of brutalizing class warfare that now can all too easily seem like an irrelevant prelude to a new and invincible future.

  It is, of course, na√Øve to imagine that a nation can escape the gravity of its history. John Pomfret’s “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China” arrives as a timely antidote to this tempting form of amnesia. Why, Pomfret asks, have so “many in China, including some of my classmates, believed that not looking back was good for the country?” [Full text]

  The book has also been reviewed by USA Today and the Deseret Morning News. Read also a CDT interview with Pomfret about “Chinese Lessons” and his views of China.

  » Read more
  • August 8, 2006 6:08 AM

• China: Boom¬†or Boomerang? - Orville Schell

  

  From Truthdig: Perhaps no other country has so many positive and negative trends as the home of a quarter of the world’s population.

  Editor’s Note: First the Terminator, then the president - there’s no shortage of people trekking to China, filled with wonderment and doubt about the future of the world’s most populous nation and fastest-growing economy. It’s a place full of monumental contradictions. There is no one better to make sense of it all in a Dig than Orville Schell, dean of UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and author of nine books on China. He has just returned from a trip to China.

  When on Nov. 13 an explosion in Manchuria rocked a workshop at the No. 101 Chemical Plant at the Jilin Petrochemical Company, the world caught a glimpse of the kind of contradictions that will bedevil China’s continuous “economic miracle.” In this case, the contradiction was a particularly intractable one, namely between high-speed economic development and environmental protection.

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  • December 16, 2005 12:07 PM

• CDT Bookshelf: Orville Schell recommends “The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future”

  

  For the CDT Bookshelf, China Digital Times invites experts on China to recommend a book to CDT readers. This month, Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, recommends “The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future,” by Elizabeth C. Economy, Council on Foreign Relations Books/Cornell University Press, 2004.

  Schell writes: “Of all the problems that weigh on China’s future success or failure, few will be more consequential that the fate of its environment and natural resources. Elizabeth Economy, who is C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written a superb book chronicling both the advancing state of environmental degradation as a result of China’s high-speed development, and the nascent environmental movement that is incubating around these problems.
  
  Her view is bleak, but not necessarily despairing. She sees China as at a critical tipping-point movement in regard to its water, oceans, forests, pasture lands, air and other natural resources. It is Economy’s view that if China does not find a more ecological balance between the forces of industrial development and environment preservation, it will not be too long before it will be “too late” to actually find a systematic remedy.
  
  This may prove to be one of the most important books about the most crucial topic in China today. Only time will tell whether a balance can be found.”

  See also:
  
  -Economy’s testimony before the Congressional Executive Commission on China Roundtable on the Environment, titled “China’s Environmental Challenge: Political, Social and Economic Implications.”
  
  -Lucian W. Pye’s review of “The River Runs Black” in Foreign Affairs.
  
  -An excerpt from the book published in The Globalist,

  » Read more
  • August 15, 2005 9:59 PM

• Orville Schell: Memory, Forgiveness and Forgetting

  

  Orville Schell has published an essay in Time Asia on China’s failure to deal with its history:

  By the time former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary and Premier Zhao Ziyang died in January, he seemed to have already vanished from the consciousness of most citizens of China. Because he had been under house arrest ever since that fateful May night in 1989 when he tearfully appeared in Tiananmen Square, and because the leaders who succeeded him controlled the media, Zhao became a kind of political antimatter.

  Should anyone care if a country’s method for dealing with its inconvenient history and unjustly disgraced leaders is to try to forget them? Are there consequences in failing to heed George Santayana’s warning that those who ignore history are destined to repeat it?

  » Read more
  • March 14, 2005 8:07 PM

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