China Expert

GAMBIER, Ohio (September 8, 2006) Noted journalist and author Orville Schell, one of America's best-informed and most thoughtful observers on China and Tibet, will present the Storer Lecture in Asian Studies on Tuesday, September 12, at 7:30 p.m. in Higley Hall Auditorium. Schell, who is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and has written nine books about China, will speak on "The China Miracle: Can the Center Hold?" The event is free and open to the public.

Kenyon Professor of Religious Studies Joseph Adler says, "Schell's talk will cover some of the most recent developments in the People's Republic of China, focusing on the challenges to political stability that the government finds so threatening. He will probably address such issues as the increasing restrictions on the Chinese press, local resistance to government takeovers of land, the growing wealth gap, and the revival of religion."

Schell was one of the first American journalists to report from the People's Republic of China, making his first trip there in 1975, a year before Mao Zedong died and the Cultural Revolution ended. In the following years, his fluency in Chinese enabled him to write a series of books chronicling the earth-shaking changes that transformed China, especially after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping liberalized the economic system and opened China to the West.

He has also written or co-authored a number of reports on human rights in China, Tibet, and North Korea; and coedited a series of anthologies of primary documents covering Imperial China, Republican China, Communist China, and most recently, China in the reform era (1980s and 1990s).

The Storer Lectureship Fund was established at Kenyon in 1990 to enable the College to bring outside experts and authorities to campus to enrich the program in Asian studies. It is a gift of James P. Storer, a 1949 graduate of Kenyon, who also served as a trustee of the College.