Transcript of From Mao to Xi: An Insider’s Journey Through the US–China Saga

Is the deep split between the two countries inevitable? Has it been hastened by the personalities at the top, as you say, you can often tell more from the people at the top and their interactions than from policy papers drawn up in the seclusion of the White House and Zhongnanhai.

Memories of Mao’s China

JANE PERLEZ: Let’s start with the very first leader of China, Mao. You didn’t personally meet him, but you have this wonderful black and white photograph of yourself in the Shanghai electrical machinery factory in 1975. You’re standing in front of what looks like a very intense industrial machine, and your Chinese colleague seems to be doing most of the work, if I may say. You’re wearing a Mao-like hat and you’re looking quite pleased. The Cultural Revolution was coming to an end. You were there in a delegation sponsored by Zhou Enlai. What was that trip like, and what are the most salient memories from that trip and that experience?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, it’s great to be here with you, Jane. And “Face-Off” is a wonderful podcast you all ought to tune into. So it’s a pleasure to be part of it.

You know, apropos of Chairman Mao and when I went to China, I went on what was called a Qingye, a youth labor brigade, to sort of join the people and work to build a better China. One of the factories that I worked at was a factory that Mao had visited. Because Mao had visited it in the 1950s, it had this huge auditorium with a straw roof. And because he visited it, they never would change the roof and they couldn’t get straw. Nobody knew how to build that kind of roof anymore, but they would be damned if they were going to change it one whit.

JANE PERLEZ: Did it leak?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Not that I remember, but it bespoke the genuflective quality that everybody had towards Chairman Mao, that if he touched something, anointed something with his presence, it was not to be destroyed.

So that was a very strange trip for me. It was the end of the Cultural Revolution. At the time there was this movement to criticize Lin Biao, whose plane had just crashed in Mongolia and he died. And strangely, Confucius. Who was Confucius? Well, Confucius was Zhou Enlai. And so I used to sit in these head-bangingly boring meetings where we’d have to read some document and then all—there’s another expression in Chinese where you have to “state your position,” everybody has to do it. So we’d sit in these meetings, you’d have to read this document and say why you agreed with it and why you thought Confucius was a bad person and go on with the program.

That for me was an incredibly important experience because it anchored me in the period of Mao. I didn’t meet Mao, but everywhere around us it was MAO, MAO, MAO. So you lived in that ethos.

JANE PERLEZ: Could you tell how much the people that you were interacting with, the workers, this guy at the machine, for example, and others, how much did they believe in this stuff by this stage?

ORVILLE SCHELL: You know, it wasn’t even a question. Did they believe and in their hearts have some subversive thoughts? I think yes. But the presence of Mao and the sort of suffocating effect of his orthodoxy was so powerful that you never could get there, particularly with a foreigner. So just to give you an idea—I mean, we were there for several months, but I felt completely isolated.

JANE PERLEZ: Were you the only foreigner?

ORVILLE SCHELL: No, no, no. There was a whole—I think there were like eight people, or I forget how many. There were only one or two of us who spoke any Chinese. But the idea of being able to actually interact with anybody was impossible.

So I remember vividly there was this lovely young woman at the factory, of course, noticed her.

JANE PERLEZ: What did you do about it?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do except notice. But one night we went to this auditorium with the grass roof that was there as a memorial to Chairman Mao. And we were watching a film on an alarm clock factory. Stunningly exciting film. And I came in a little late, and I was ushered into an aisle in the dark and seated. And there next to me was this young woman. My good Lord, how did this happen? So I began to ask her a few little questions about the alarm clock factory as the movie went on. And the next thing I know, two stalwart, very strong young Chinese factory workers had come down the row, picked me up and physically moved me over a couple of seats. Because at that point, there was no possibility of any kind of real interaction, much less with a woman. But even with anyone—it was all very scripted and very programmed.

JANE PERLEZ: How long were you there for that trip?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I was there for two and a half months.

JANE PERLEZ: Did your Chinese improve?

ORVILLE SCHELL: It did, but I came out—I was writing for the New Yorker at the time. And when I came out to try to write the thing up for them, I felt very confused by it because I’d spent two years in Taiwan. I thought I kind of understood fundamentally how to get along with people in Chinese culture. But I got to China and the window was closed. No matter what you did, you were foreign and you were outside. You weren’t going to be let inside. And if you got up early in the morning and started wandering around, they would come and get you. And when I worked at this model, very famous work brigade, the Da Dai Model Agricultural Brigade in Shanxi Province.

JANE PERLEZ: What did you do, hoe the fields?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Oh, we spread manure, hoed fields, you know, one thing and another. But one afternoon, just to give you another example of the insolubility of foreigners in China at that time, even though we were being sponsored by the Friendship Association, after work I decided, well, what the heck, I’ll take a walk. And so I went over to the next village. I’d hardly gotten to the next village, and a car came and picked me up and just scolded me and said, this isn’t in the program, took me back.

So I only say that by way of noting that during that period, the separation between us and them, the inside, the outside—again in Chinese, there’s expressions for that—was pretty extreme, which is interesting because it ultimately did change. And we’ll get to that.

The Deng Xiaoping Era

JANE PERLEZ: Well, let’s fast forward to Deng Xiaoping, who changed everything because he came to the United States in 1979 to normalize relations. And you were there in Texas at the rodeo. You wrote you had a sagging paper plate of barbecue and baked beans as this rodeo was going on. Tell us about what happened with Deng Xiaoping. What was so remarkable about it? And why was Texas on the itinerary for that big visit?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I think that, you know, what I’ve just said about the atmosphere in China was transformed by this visit. When Deng Xiaoping came in 1979, of course, he came to power, back to power after being cashiered twice in 1978, and then began this extraordinary period of reform. And for those who were in China, sort of in between the period when he came back to power and came to Washington and then to Texas, things like Democracy Wall happened, which were stunning moments, where all of a sudden a wall around a very unprepossessing bus lot on Xidan started sprouting up posters and people started gathering and giving speeches.

And Deng Xiaoping said, it’s okay to let the people speak. And why did he say that? Because he was struggling against conservative forces. And Hua Guofeng, who was then the chairman of the party, hadn’t yet been defenestrated. But you could sense this new openness. And I remember being in China just feeling, this is open. Where did this come from?

So Deng Xiaoping shows up when Carter finally was able to work out how to normalize diplomatic relations. And all of a sudden, all of America, which had been in this deep freeze cold locker of cold war for decades, were dressing in Mao suits. Bloomingdale’s was selling Mao suits. And they were all piling down to the National Gallery of the Arts to have the reception with Deng Xiaoping. And suddenly China was in vogue again.

What was so interesting about that moment and Deng Xiaoping was—he was a very practical guy. And I think he had decided that he’d had very great trouble in the Cultural Revolution, that he had to radically change the whole model and that we had to actually begin to interact. So he came to America and it was the first time that the Chinese had ever seen satellite television from America. And the whole trip was covered.

JANE PERLEZ: You mean beamed back to China?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, beamed back to China.

JANE PERLEZ: Live.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Live. And NBC was helping the Chinese set up the satellites, teaching them how to do it. But you had this sudden sense of immense release where everybody had permission to be friends and interact. So we got down to Texas.

JANE PERLEZ: Why was Texas on the itinerary?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, the Johnson Space Center was down there. So we went from Washington, where it was quite an amazing scene at the White House and around Washington, then down to Atlanta, Georgia, where Jimmy Carter, who was the presiding president here, came from. And then we went to Texas.

And after the Johnson Space Center, we went out to a small town about an hour outside of Houston, where there was an enclosed rodeo arena. And when we got there, it was raining and it was night. And we went inside and there were all of the comrades and Deng Xiaoping and Fang Yi, the vice minister of Science and Technology, and all these other well-known Chinese officials sitting there with these groaning paper plates of ribs and beans and the whole nine yards, the Texas barbecue.

And then again, the messaging was quite sublime. And I think this is why, I think that the quality of leaders and their personalities sometimes has more to do with what happens than all the policy discussions and documents. And what I mean to say by that is there was Deng Xiaoping, we had a little barbecue, and we all went out and sat in—

JANE PERLEZ: When you say we all, you mean the White House press corps? I mean hundreds of reporters.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, there weren’t that many. I mean, things in those days were kind of smaller scale. It was probably most of us maybe 25 or 30. I mean, not everybody went on the whole trip. I did, and I went to Disneyland with this other vice minister. That was fun.

So there we are sitting at this rodeo arena. And you may have seen this on video. Two lovely young Texas cowgirls came out on quarter horses. And actually one fell off her horse, but she got back on. And they came up to Deng Xiaoping and they slapped this 10-gallon hat on his head and gave one to other comrades. And of course it came right down over his eyes, but never mind. But that moment was all on television all across America and all across China. And there was, you know, I don’t know who was singing, you know, Merle Haggard, some of the country western songs. And it was a signal. It’s okay, we can start to get together.

JANE PERLEZ: I sometimes wondered, did someone sort of program the rider to put the hat on his head or did she do it spontaneously?

Deng Xiaoping’s Symbolic Gestures

ORVILLE SCHELL: No, no. This is all. I’m sure that the Chinese agreed because there is no greater symbol than a 10-gallon hat from Texas of America. And for Deng Xiaoping to consent to have that put on his head, he was basically being anointed with the crown of Americana saying, Chinese people, I’m here. He’s basically not our enemy now. So it was masterful theater. And then Deng Xiaoping disappeared. A short while later, the stagecoach in the Wells Fargo ad came galloping out around the arena with Deng in it, waving his 10-gallon hat out the window. If you want symbolism, if you want an expression of an internal sentiment of a leader, here it was in its most quintessential form. So when I see Xi Jinping—and we’ll get to him—it’s only to say there’s not a whiff of that kind of bonhomie, that signaling that it’s okay, we like each other.

JANE PERLEZ: So talking about liking each other, what was the chemistry between Carter from Georgia and Deng Xiaoping?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Very receptive. Carter was very restrained, but remember, he was also the human rights president, but they really hugged it out in Washington. And then I think Carter didn’t come to Texas. I can’t remember. I think he came to Atlanta. But there also was a tremendous amount of friendliness between them. And, you know, it was a moment when you knew we were at a historical inflection point.

JANE PERLEZ: So, you know, many years later, actually in 2023, because it was—I broke the news in a former podcast I did. It turns out that Deng Xiaoping spent his last night in Washington at the CIA. He went out to Langley and he met with Stansfield Turner and Frank Carlucci. And he wanted to check out the arrangement that had been agreed to, basically. But he wanted to put the final word on it about the joint spy stations out in Xinjiang.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Kissing Jerry Nixon.

JANE PERLEZ: Well, no, they were set up after that.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, after that.

JANE PERLEZ: But as a result, it was an outcome of that. And he went out to Langley and they talked about these spy stations against Russia.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Against Russia, exactly.

JANE PERLEZ: To spy on the Soviet Union’s testing of its nuclear weapons. That’s basically what the spy stations were for. So Deng must have been—to go to CIA headquarters, first and last time a Chinese leader has been there—he must have been very anti-Soviet. Did you get a sense of that when he was around?

Sino-Soviet Relations

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yes, I mean, I think that there continued at that point to be some real resistance against the Soviet Union. I think not as intense as when Nixon and Kissinger went. But I think also it was a gesture on the American side. I mean, we didn’t know what engagement was. We didn’t have the word engagement. But engagement made a giant leap forward through such gestures as I’ve described. And the trip to the CIA, it basically said that we need to sort of let each other into our inner sanctums of each other’s governments and get along a little better.

JANE PERLEZ: Why do you think Deng was so anti-Soviet? He had visited Russia as a young man, visited the Soviet Union as a young man. What was it that drove it, do you think?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, I mean, there were a lot of border disputes. I think Russia got very upset by Chairman Mao who had said that in effect, he detected the first green shoots of socialism arising in China, whereas Russia had been at it much longer and there was no sign of socialism on the horizon. And they didn’t like Khrushchev. I mean, there were all kinds of complicated ideological issues, as well as a 4,000-mile border between them and a lot of territory that had been handed off to Russia during the Tsar and the Qing dynasty that was in contention. And so it took the United States a long time to kind of actually accept that there wasn’t a unified sort of communist block, that there were these fault lines within it. And that was what Kissinger detected.

JANE PERLEZ: Right. So let’s fast forward again. Deng’s still in power and you’re spending two months on Tiananmen Square during the protests for democracy. What was the message at the time and what do you think drove Deng to really crack down like that?

The 1980s and Tiananmen Square

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, you know, Jane, before we get there, we should at least do a passing comment on the extraordinary decade of the 1980s which led up to 1989 and the massacre, because that was when Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang were in power. And it was one of the most, I think, extraordinary periods of history that I’ve had the privilege to actually live through and watch.

JANE PERLEZ: How long were you there in the 80s?

ORVILLE SCHELL: All the time.

JANE PERLEZ: All the time.

ORVILLE SCHELL: I mean, my wife was Chinese. We had an apartment in China. We were back and forth. And it was precipitated largely by Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, who was actually a colleague of Deng Xiaoping and had undergone similar persecutions during the Cultural Revolution and been re-elevated. And it was Hu Yaobang that actually proposed and Deng affected, a rescinding of all of the charges of being counter-revolutionary bourgeois elements, capitalist rotors, all of the things that had put people in labor camps and defrocked them during The Cultural Revolution, that was a monumental moment.

And to be back in China in the 1980s, every day something happened that just surprised the daylights out of you. I mean, a new publication came out. Students would have salons on campuses, someone would say something, there would be a new exchange program. It was one of the most shockingly different periods when China was, as one British diplomat wrote as the title of his book, “Coming Alive.” And again, it was a very important period, I think, for those of us who were there, because it set a milestone for what could happen and did happen as compared to what’s going on now. But sadly, as you know, you just mentioned it, it ended in the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, which was seven weeks after the death of Hu Yaobang, who was considered the soul of China. And that put an end to some of the more important aspects of reform. And it was an incredibly tragic moment.

JANE PERLEZ: And it made the idea of engagement, made the idea of engagement not have much sense, in a way.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, it was.

JANE PERLEZ: That’s what you wrote later.

Post-Tiananmen Diplomacy

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yes, it was. It really just blew engagement up. But interestingly, right after the massacre, everybody was furious at China and the tensions between China and the rest of the world were just really upsetting the whole Chinese proposition. One interesting thing happened. Bush Sr. was president. He had been in China in the mid-70s before we had an official embassy. And he sent his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, to China. This is days after the massacre, didn’t tell the American ambassador. And I got the transcript of that recently.

JANE PERLEZ: You got the transcript of that recently?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, it’s at Texas A&M in the Bush library. What did Scowcroft do? He said to Deng Xiaoping in hours-long meetings they had, “Please, please, please.”

JANE PERLEZ: He was the one who was pleading.

ORVILLE SCHELL: He was pleading, “Don’t break off this engagement we have. Bush is your friend. Let’s try to keep some of it together.” And Deng Xiaoping was furious. He said, “You caused this demonstration, you caused this crisis in China with your peaceful evolution, your ideological warfare, your pro-democracy lobbying and your anti-China sentiment.” And it’s a heartbreaking document to read because you realize that America really did take seriously an effort to somehow overcome the challenges of getting along with China. But at that moment, Deng Xiaoping was so furious at what had happened, he had to kill his own people.

JANE PERLEZ: And Scowcroft went twice. Did we know?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I think he went back again and that’s the time he got caught with a glass of champagne, toasting. I forget who. And that wasn’t great.

Fang Lizhi and Clandestine Diplomacy

JANE PERLEZ: And then an outgrowth of the crackdown was the situation with Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who you knew very well and who was hidden at the American Embassy the day after the crackdown. And then you got word that he was being awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. And so the Kennedy family wanted you to go and interview him for the award that was being presented here in the United States. So you were taken into the embassy grounds.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, the Kennedys were worried that awarding Fang Lizhi, who was somewhere in the American Embassy. But the American Embassy had three compounds. All were surrounded by People’s Liberation Army. Everyone was afraid they’d run over the walls, run inside, grab Fang Lizhi and drag him out.

JANE PERLEZ: What I thought was fascinating was the ambassador at the time, James Lilley, who was a former CIA station chief, wrote in his memoirs that he brought you in. And in doing so, “I was introducing Schell to some crude clandestine procedures.” What were they? What did you do to get—

ORVILLE SCHELL: So I got sent to China. The Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Solomon, said, “Well, I don’t know if you’re going to get in. You know, we don’t want anyone to know where Fang is. Nobody’s been in to see him.” And he said, “But I’ll tell you what, go to China. Go to your room as soon as you get there, stay by the phone.” So I went to my hotel room, got in that night, and as soon as I got in, the phone rang and it said, “Meet us downstairs at the front door to the lobby.” I went down. There were two guys there, and they didn’t introduce themselves. They said, “Get in the car but don’t talk.”

JANE PERLEZ: Could you tell they were Americans?

ORVILLE SCHELL: They were CIA officials. They were the CIA people at the embassy. They said, “We think all our cars are bugged.” They drove me to the ambassador’s residence. I went in. There was Jim Lilley. We had dinner together. Didn’t talk about anything. And then it looked like dinner was over and the servants were going home. And I said, “Finally, Jim, listen, I’m tired, I guess, good to see you. I think I’ll go home.” And he said, like this [gestures]. And then he said—and we went into the kitchen, which was all dark because the cooks had all gone. He was waiting for the staff to go home.

And we walked down the back stairs of the embassy residence. This wasn’t the embassy itself. It was the ambassador’s residence. And we walked across the courtyard. He knocked a code on the door. Door opened, dark room. There were a bunch of guys, shadowy guys. And walked, banged on another door, another code. The door opened and there was Fang Lizhi. So we spent the whole night talking.

JANE PERLEZ: What did he do when he saw you? Because he knew you.

ORVILLE SCHELL: I think he knew. They told him that they were going to let me in. And he said, “Yes, I want this award.” And so I went and accepted it for him. And Lech Walesa came. This was at Georgetown. And it was a big ceremony and only he got out. And then things began to thaw a little, as I think you all know. Then Jiang Zemin had come to power. And then the Clinton trip happens, and we could talk about that.

Jiang Zemin and Public Diplomacy

JANE PERLEZ: So then we’ll go forward to Jiang Zemin. And television seems to have played a big role in Jiang, both in presenting himself to the American public and also to his own people. So there was this news conference in the late 90s in Beijing when Clinton went to visit, and Jiang spoke a lot in English, and they even touched on, God forbid, Tibet and the Dalai Lama. It’s very interesting. What did Jiang get out of that as far as his own people were concerned?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I think, you know, the thing about Jiang Zemin at the time, and I know there are other correspondents here or historians and scholars who remember that period, we thought Jiang Zemin was a little bit clownish because he loved to do things like recite the Gettysburg Address in English or sing “O Sole Mio” in Italian. It was a little bit, I don’t know, corny. But as I reflect back on it, and I was there with Clinton and watched this extraordinary press conference, I have a totally different view. I think it was Jiang Zemin trying to be a normal leader, a normal person, to show that he did have some knowledge of and appreciation of the West, unlike Xi Jinping.

JANE PERLEZ: And this was broadcast live.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, so we were walking into the Great Hall of the People after the honor guard and the trumpets. And it was announced suddenly that Jiang Zemin decided that the press conference, which was going to have open questions, was going to be broadcast live on radio and television over CCTV all over China. That’s never, never had happened before.

JANE PERLEZ: Hasn’t happened since.

The Evolving U.S.-China Relationship

ORVILLE SCHELL: And there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell it would happen. So again, there’s another kind of really interesting milestone of sort of dramatic signaling that Jiang Zemin sent out that was saying it’s okay, and he and Clinton were like a vaudeville show up there on the stage. They were bantering back and forth.

And you mentioned the discussion of Tibet and how that happened was so mind boggling. Jiang then said to Clinton, “Mr. Clinton, I want to ask you, when I go to America, I see all these people running around who are interested in lamajao,” which is Tibetan Buddhism. “Why is that?” And then Clinton sort of went off on a tear, and he said, “You know, Chairman Jiang, I think if you had a chance to meet the Dalai Lama, you’d really like him.”

Oh, my God, that was a little more than Jiang. He was sort of off script. And he kind of grabbed the podium and then he said, “Well, with the President’s permission, perhaps we’ll turn to some other subject.” But it was again, a suggestion of the openness that those two, they seemed to take pleasure in each other’s company, not just sort of at each other’s throats. And again, it was another moment when you could see that two human beings were… I mean, of course ideology, of course politics, national interests always matter, but also what matters so often is the disposition of each leader and the chemistry between two leaders.

JANE PERLEZ: And what’s extraordinary, Jiang Zemin followed that up with doing a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace. Who’d have ever thought the Chinese leader would do that?

ORVILLE SCHELL: And Deng did the same thing and did an interview with Oriana Fallaci, the great Italian journalist. And I remember to skip a little bit forward here, no backward. 1989, Tom Brokaw took the entire NBC crew to China, the Today show, every other show, for a couple of weeks, and my wife was organizing things for him. He asked if he could interview Zhao Ziyang. So we knew his daughter, and we asked her, and she asked her father, and her father said, “Well, didn’t he just go to Dharamsala and interview the Dalai Lama?” I said, “Yes, indeed he did.” “Well, could we see that tape?”

We got the tape. Zhao Ziyang watched the tape and he said, “Okay, I’ll interview with Tom Brokaw.” And they had the most extraordinary interview where Zhao Ziyang is sitting there with a bottle of beer on the table, which seems just unthinkable now. And they were just talking like two normal people, smiling and back and forth. It’s really interesting to go back and look at that and you see, again, a different kind of chemistry. So that was also the kind of thing that could happen given the relationships between the leaders at that time.

Shifting Power Dynamics

JANE PERLEZ: Well, I’m going to fast forward, if I can, quite a lot to 2011. Hu Jintao was leader, and he was dower. Obama was President. And by that time, I think it was pretty much recognized that China was, after the financial crisis of 2008, China had learned some lessons and was really gunning to be number one. Do you think that Washington understood that? Did Obama understand that or… I sometimes wondered, was Obama just not really that interested in China?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I think we were a bit intoxicated by the idea of engagement. And remember how engagement became engagement? It wasn’t engagement until Bill Clinton, because we had the Soviet Union to gang up against. But when we lost the Soviet Union as the common enemy, what was engagement worth?

Well, Clinton dreamed up a new reason to have engagement, and that was this: More trade will equal more openness. So if you trade, China will slowly evolve towards a more open and soluble society, become more democratic with the unspoken words. So, you know, that was what was going on when Clinton was president. We no longer had the common enemy, but the common supposition wasn’t a common one because we thought our interactions via trade would make China more democratic. China viewed that as what they called “peaceful evolution,” which is an anathema because it was a secret, underhanded way to overthrow the party without ever having to fight a war.

JANE PERLEZ: So Hu Jintao comes along.

ORVILLE SCHELL: So this is where Hu Jintao starts saying, we’re getting a little more powerful. China, US has had an economic crisis. We’d like the South China Sea. Thank you, all ours, get off our ranch. And you get this notion for the first time of what they called “hexin liyi,” or core interests, which are not negotiable. Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

So that really sent a very different message, was that these are our things, whether you like it or not, and you better get used to it. We’re not talking about it. And this meant that we began to have some real hostile elements to the relationship, which we didn’t know how to resolve. And since China didn’t seem to be still reforming, we in America couldn’t imagine they were going to were slowly converging. We began to diverge.

Early Signs of Confrontation

JANE PERLEZ: But there was a moment which was not publicized at the time when it became quite clear what you were saying, which was when Biden was vice president and Xi Jinping was vice president. And as you recall, they had a getting-to-know-you trip. And Biden went to China and Xi Jinping took him to Chengdu. They played a little bit of pretend basketball.

And after that they went on a walk in the woods, so to say. And afterwards, a couple of years later, Biden told some of us at the Press bar at the St. Regis Hotel what Xi Jinping had told him on that walk, which was this: “You, the United States needs to stop sending these surveillance planes over near our coastline because if you keep doing this, we’re going to force them down.” And Biden said, “No, you’re not going to do that because you did a very lousy job of it back in 2001.” But that was a big signal. It seemed to many of us that Xi Jinping really was going to mean business.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yes. And I mean, there were hints of it during the Hu Jintao period. But I mean, Xi Jinping is a very interesting man and I think we do need to understand a lot more about who he actually is as a person as well as his policies, because that’s going to play a very important role.

But you know, it’s interesting. I went to China with Jimmy Carter. I think it was 2015 to just give you a suggestion of how things were beginning to change. The whole atmosphere wasn’t Texas, it wasn’t Clinton and Jiang Zemin. So Carter went. This was his last trip to China and I think he knew it would be. He got there and they really treated him badly. They wouldn’t let people… He had a big little conference in the Great Hall of the People and some of the folks he invited, like myself, weren’t allowed to speak.

JANE PERLEZ: And Xi Jinping was in the Great Hall of the People.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, let me tell you that story because it’s such a horrifying story. There was a farewell dinner for Carter and the only guy who showed up for it was Yuan Cha, who was a lowly vice president.

JANE PERLEZ: A symbol at all.

ORVILLE SCHELL: A symbol. What is more, a man who used to be… His name, Yuan Cha means “support North Korea.” And he changed the character. But anyway, he was there. And it was half full. It was a real insult to Carter. They didn’t let Carter meet anybody. And this was a moment when if they wanted to send a signal to America that things were opening up and let’s be more friendly, Carter was the guy to take the message home.

So I left the banquet. I was just sort of so discouraged and depressed. And I walked down the hallway and I stumbled upon another banquet hall and I peeked my head inside it and you know who was in there? Xi Jinping. And you know who else? Zimbabwe President Mugabe, who is a real thug. And next day I got the speech about eternal friendship between the freedom loving peoples of Zimbabwe and the People’s Republic. And there was Xi Jinping stiffing Carter. That to me said a lot.

America’s Slow Recognition

JANE PERLEZ: But you know, don’t you think Washington was very slow to catch on to the fact that China wasn’t interested anymore in engagement? I mean, you and I were both at a lunch on February 14, 2012.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yes, in the State Department.

JANE PERLEZ: In the State Department. Benjamin Franklin room, 200 people, the whole who’s who of China and the United States. Kissinger, Zoellick, Kevin Rudd, Orville Schell. Many, many, many people. And who was on the stage? Xi Jinping and Vice President Biden. And I’ve never, I was there because I was going out to be correspondent and I’ve never seen so many smiles in my entire life. The room was just wreathed with smiles. And it wasn’t because it was Valentine’s Day. It was because everybody thought that this relationship was just going to be hunky dory, just fantastic. By this stage there were already many, many signals that it wasn’t going to be so hunky dory. Why were the Americans so slow to get China?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I think we were somewhat naive and hopeful. I mean, after all, engagement was, if it had worked, would have been one of the great diplomatic accomplishments of diplomatic history. That one country, America sort of slowly cultivates another and slowly it evolves into something that’s a little less difficult to deal with.

The thing that I noticed about that dinner, that luncheon in the State Department was that, you know, if there is ever a man on earth who could hug something out with another leader, it’s Joe Biden. You know, back slapping, glad handing, smiling, avuncular kind of guy. But Xi Jinping wasn’t having any of it. He was standing there like a prow on a ship. And I went to LA… I don’t know if you went afterwards with them again and just watching him, he wasn’t buying into it.

JANE PERLEZ: But the Americans dressed it up with a Lakers game and signing a document.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Jerry Brown went to the Lakers games with Xi Jinping. Two guys who don’t know anything about…

JANE PERLEZ: Basketball and a Hollywood agreement, you know, 34 films allowed to China, blah blah blah.

ORVILLE SCHELL: It wasn’t magic. I mean, I think there was no leadership chemistry.

The Sunnylands Summit

JANE PERLEZ: Well, talking about leadership chemistry, let’s fast forward again to Sunnylands 18 months later, which was supposed to be, you know, Obama and Xi Jinping getting to know each other. Shirt sleeve summit, martinis were served. The waiter went up to Xi Jinping and said, “What would you like for a cocktail?” “I’ll have whatever the president, whatever Obama’s having.” And a huge martini glass landed in his hand and he apparently didn’t know quite what to do with it, which has probably summarized the whole deal. Do you think that was a turning point? Do you think after that the Americans finally learned that it was slow?

ORVILLE SCHELL: It was slow. I mean, that was the point where they were still hopeful about there might be a G2. Do you remember that?

JANE PERLEZ: I do. And it was many more words than G2, though. Some impossible acronyms, some impossible, many words.

ORVILLE SCHELL: China has ascended, but China wasn’t sort of going for that. But I think there was a huge opportunity. Well, there have been many opportunities lost, I have to say. And now we have the moment we have now with the president we have.

But I mean, even Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, she tried so hard to find some common face. And I remember I occasionally would help her write something or do something. I got one amazing phone call one day from her. I was driving up to see my youngest son at school and the phone rang. It was her. And she said, “What the hell did the Chinese want?” She said, “I’m trying and trying and trying to find a way to be nice and talk to them about their kids and this, that and the other, but I can’t get any traction.”

JANE PERLEZ: What did you tell her?

The Changing U.S.-China Relationship

ORVILLE SCHELL: Oh, my God. I mean, I could go on for the day on that. I think the fundamental problem from Hu Jintao onward was that the leadership began to see the relationship between the US and China as fundamentally embedded with a hostile proposition that we’re different than you are, you don’t respect us, you don’t esteem us, you want us to get rid of our system of governance, and we’re not going to go there. So once you have this notion that there’s a fundamental contradiction in the interaction, it doesn’t matter how friendly, doesn’t matter how much trade you have, how many ballets go back and forth. There’s a fundamental sense that interaction isn’t helpful. In the Chinese perspective, it’s leading to undermining the system. And this is why they closed down all the civil society. This is why we don’t have that much cultural exchange or public diplomacy. Because I think there’s a fundamental supposition that this idea, the idea of peaceful evolution came from John Foster Dulles in the 50s. He said, well, okay, Cold War, let’s not have a hot war, but we can overthrow regimes in the Soviet bloc through peaceful means. And Mao commented on this. And ever since then, it’s been a notion that’s been considered very toxic by the Chinese Communist Party.

JANE PERLEZ: And I guess this was demonstrated in spades in what you call the deep freeze trip when Obama went to Beijing in 2014. Why was it the deep freeze trip?

ORVILLE SCHELL: You know, Obama, I think I still…

JANE PERLEZ: I want to ask you again, do you think he was really that interested in China?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Maybe not, but never mind. It’s an important country. I think he did go there and he did his best, but they treated him unlike any of the previous presidential trips that we’ve discussed, where there was a certain amount of bonhomie and welcome in a sense. I mean, you remember what happened. They didn’t allow him to speak at a university. And then there was that horrible incident in Hangzhou.

JANE PERLEZ: That was a year after.

ORVILLE SCHELL: That was a year after. But it was…

JANE PERLEZ: The horrible incident was that his plane landed and there was a misunderstanding or maybe purposeful mix up with the state. So there weren’t any proper stairs to go up to Air Force One and Obama had to come out of the belly of the plane on the baby stairs.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was sort of. No red carpets. I mean, it was a bit gross. And he did it. And Obama probably could have sustained it, but it was not logical. I mean, there was a message being transmitted in that sort of indiscretion. But then, you know, Obama did begin to get the idea of a pivot to Asia. Began to get talked about.

JANE PERLEZ: Talked about, but never done.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, I have to say, I think Obama was a little slow to appreciate, but so were a lot of people. It wasn’t evident exactly what was happening, but the worm was turning.

Broken Promises and Shifting Relations

JANE PERLEZ: But it became pretty clear after the 2015 trip when Xi Jinping came to Washington and he stood on the lawn of the White House and said, “I’m not going to militarize the islands in the South China Sea.” And he went home and did just that. I mean, how much clearer can you get?

ORVILLE SCHELL: That was Biden. Oh, no, that was Obama.

JANE PERLEZ: Excuse me, Obama.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, it was Obama. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was a pretty clear signal, wasn’t it?

JANE PERLEZ: Definitely.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah. But it took a while for us to understand that that resolution, that he would not militarize the South China Sea was just… was not…

JANE PERLEZ: And by the way, by that stage, the Chinese had hacked into the Office of Personnel Management and stolen the records of 4 million government workers.

ORVILLE SCHELL: So, Jane, you finally have to ask yourself as this evolves into this more hostile relationship where even the most friendly, well-intentioned leader on the American side can’t alter it. Why did it happen? And was this conscious? Was it bad diplomacy? Or had the Chinese just decided, you know, I don’t think we’re going to work this out with the United States. We’re going to have to struggle it out.

JANE PERLEZ: Out, which is probably what happened when Trump went in 2017. And I think you noted very well that Trump would agree with Mao that before you can have construction, you have to have destruction. And so Trump goes to Beijing and Xi Jinping puts on this dance, shows him around all the golden statues in the Forbidden City. And then they have this evening of this formal dinner and Arabella, Trump’s granddaughter, sings by video Chinese songs and so on. But it doesn’t seem to have moved Xi Jinping one iota.

The Failure of Personal Diplomacy

ORVILLE SCHELL: I was on that trip and I got to tell you, there was no chemistry. I mean, if we want to talk chemistry, forget policy. And, you know, Trump is a totally different proposition himself. But, you know, had Xi Jinping wanted to work something out, sort of capo a capo with Trump, that would have been the moment to do it. But there was not a flicker of sort of, you know, we want to get something going here, we want to work this out. You know, this is important. It was very ritualistic, very formalistic, and Xi Jinping was out to impress Trump, which he did, with all the pomp and circumstances, but it was very scripted. There was no press conference like with Johnson. Nothing like that happened. So you could see pretty much that there were no big breakthroughs.

JANE PERLEZ: And then we come to Biden when he’s president. And when you think about it, it seems to me that Biden was very defensive the whole four years, except on the economics, when he went on the offensive and banned the export of high-end chips on October 7, 2022, I believe. Do you think anything more could have been done by Biden to try and bring the Chinese around?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I mean, this raises a really important question, which I think it’s very hard to answer. Do the Chinese want to be brought around now by the United States, or do they think their moment has come where they don’t need any longer to supplicate? They don’t need to release a dissident to get the president to come. They don’t need to make any concessions. Xi Jinping is not a big accommodator. He doesn’t make concessions. It’s sort of his way or the highway. So that’s sort of where we are. And I think it grows out of a sense that China feels it’s entitled, it’s wealthier, it’s more powerful, and it need not sort of accommodate the United States to exist. I understand that. But the trouble is, behind that standoff, there are these two very different political systems. And if they’re both competing for preeminence and influence in the world, and there’s a, you know, whose system do you want to live under? That’s the dilemma the world now confronts, as it looks who is going to fill the leadership vacuum in global geopolitics.

Looking to the Future

JANE PERLEZ: So what do you see ahead, Orville? Do you see war over Taiwan, a rapid decoupling of the economies? What do you see?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, listen, it’s very hard to prognosticate, I have to say, having spent my whole life trying to figure out how to get these two countries closer together, I feel pretty gloomy right now. I don’t see an awful lot of ways in which the two countries are interacting in a way that could lead anywhere that’s less hostile.

JANE PERLEZ: I mean, we’ve had only one congressional delegation, I think, in five years, about 1,000 American students studying in China. Economic relations are in turmoil, to say the very least. The Chinese have a bigger navy than the United States. They have missiles that the United States lacks. Is war on the horizon?

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, I mean, again, I think it’s very difficult to foresee anything in the future, but I will note that we have a laboratory experiment going on in Ukraine, which is rather alarming if you look at the claims of China for Taiwan and the South China Sea. Are we ready to deter? Is there anything short of deterrence? I think, you know, for me, the lesson is nine, almost 10 presidential administrations supported engagement. It was a good arrangement. It worked for decades, and we went through some very friendly periods. And there is a deep and abiding sense, I think, of friendship amongst many Chinese people, for America and for Europe, and there is a whole historical tradition of how to get along, but it’s not the sort of guiding principle now.

JANE PERLEZ: Well, I wanted to close by saying you have a very close personal relationship with China. You speak the language, your wife was Chinese, you have children who are Chinese and American. Do you think you will be able to go back at any point?

Personal Reflections on China

ORVILLE SCHELL: You know, I just read this wonderful essay in our China Books Review, which Alec Ash, who’s here, edits by Perry Link, about when he was banned from going to China, how he reconciled himself with that. It’s very heartfelt and I think a brilliant piece of work. You should read it. More and more people are finding, whether they’re Chinese or Americans, such as myself, that we may not ever go back to this country that we spent our whole lives with. Or in the case of Chinese, whose parents are there, whose friends are there, and life is there because the oil and water has separated.

I think if I was younger, I would be very disturbed and feel completely torn by the two imperatives of my homeland, my family, whatever adopted country you might have. Myself, at my age as an American, I hate to say this, and it’s sort of a sad thing to have to say, well, okay, if I can’t go back. Life doesn’t always give you what you want, and it’s okay. I’d rather live in my own ability to be a writer and say things I think and believe and not be frightened that there will be consequences that will destroy my career, destroy my family. I mean, my wife’s parents live in Beijing. I’ll never see them again. And I accepted that, and that’s the way it is for now.

But I don’t want to end on such a gloomy note because I’ve lived through this for so many decades, and I’ve seen. I mean, China is such an extraordinary country, and despite all the savagery of Mao’s revolution and all the insanity, so many amazing people there. And my experience is there’s a giant aquifer beneath the surface of a totally different world. I see a lot of you who I know out here, who lived it, you know it’s there, and it will reappear. How? When? I don’t know, but it’s not not there. So I think we have to just let history work itself out here. And if we’re cut off, you’re a Chinese person and you can’t go home, or if you’re like me and you can’t go back to the place you spent your whole life on. Life doesn’t always give you what you want. That’s the way it is. And I’d rather say okay and not fret it out, because I remember what it was like trying to get visas and worrying every single time. You too, Jane. You say the wrong thing, you write the wrong thing, they drop the door on you.

JANE PERLEZ: Definitely.

ORVILLE SCHELL: And it is tremendously confining and constraining. And if you believe in open societies, which I do, I don’t want to live there. I don’t want to be under those constraints. Sorry, that’s my choice. May not be everyone’s.

JANE PERLEZ: Well, thank you, Orville, for sharing your deeply felt feelings. It’s very important, I think, that we all understand.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, it’s hard to have any deep wisdom, but I do think this relationship’s gone up and down and we’re at a very, very fraught moment now. All the more so because on our own side of the ledger, if anything, I would say China is the more steady state than the United States. So we’re now in a place where both sides are out of whack. It’s not a very good place to weave a new comprehensive policy that makes sense for anybody.

JANE PERLEZ: And China just said yesterday they’ll fight to the end, basically, what Trump says.

ORVILLE SCHELL: And I think in many ways, if I may just make one final brief remark, you know, I’ve written a little bit about this, I think Trump is very much like Mao. You know, remember what Mao says, “Dan outen Kong, Great disorder under Heaven.” That’s what he wanted to do. He loved the Monkey King from the Journey to the West, you know, Sun Wukong. Why? Because Sun Wukong made Great disorder under heaven. He overturned everything. And Mao loved to do that. He liked nothing more than just bring in the wrecking ball. The bourgeoisie, the landlords, old tradition, old culture, Buddhist monasteries, all get rid of them.

JANE PERLEZ: And Trump is like that, except for the billionaire class. He doesn’t want to destroy them.

The Challenges of Leadership and Global Order

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, he may end up destroying them despite himself. And that’s sort of the tragedy of people like that. But I think we’re in an age where destruction is sort of the hallmark of all too many governments and all too many leaders. And some of the leaders we’ve talked about, they were trying to build, not destroy. And now we have both sides in the chaos mode, in the bring it down chaos mode.

JANE PERLEZ: Down chaos mode, but also entrenched in the chaos mode.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah. And I don’t know, we wouldn’t be the first country to vote authoritarianism into office. Read a few books on the 30s in Germany. I mean, you feel like we’re living it again in this country. So what does that mean for China? I don’t know. I don’t know what the heck Xi Jinping thinks is happening here. I’m sure it’s very unsettling to him.

JANE PERLEZ: He should come and have a look.

ORVILLE SCHELL: I don’t think he needs to have a look. He can just smell it, you know, I mean, the whole world sees it, but what he’s going to do about it, I don’t know. But I expect he’ll try to take advantage of it.

JANE PERLEZ: Well, maybe we should take some questions. I want to thank you all for coming. I want to thank Orville for sharing his deep thoughts. A round of applause for Orville, please.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Thank you, James. Deep thoughts or they’re questions? More than deep thoughts, I would say.

Q&A Session

JANE PERLEZ: Someone has the mic over here. Sure.

DAVID ZWEIG: Hi, Orville. Thank you very much for being so open and sharing so much. My name is David Zweig. I went to China first in 1974 as a Canadian, and have been sort of not had the insight that Orville has had in terms of journalism, but in society. I’ve had those contacts. But I wanted to pick up on… You’re giving very much an elite perspective. So I think we’ve got to think about that.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Right?

DAVID ZWEIG: I mean, this has been set up as the leadership and the leadership views. You know, if you look at Yashang’s book, you know, some of us were cynical back in the late 70s, late 90s. To what extent is the system and one can be the communist system, which I would say the bureaucrats never wanted to give up power. That there’s an entrenched group of bureaucrats in center. We’ve had left and we have the right and the left seems to have won. If you go back to made in China 2025, that in many ways Xi reflects a society force rather than it just being Xi’s view that flips this. Hu Jintao similar started it, but just to sort of flip this around a bit and ask you to think about sort of, you know, China as China. Right, that the Yashang sort of thinks about.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, I mean, good question, David. I think that the reason why leadership is so important in China is that there is millennial experience that leadership… We fancy that the people speak through our leaders. That’s not always true, but I think there’s such a strong tradition of leadership giving signals and permission for things to happen in China that goes back a long, long way. And that’s why I think leadership is so important.

And we can see through the leaders we’ve talked about that when a leader is willing to let people express themselves in China, it’s astounding what comes out. I mean, the brilliance of it, the sort of multitude of things. When they don’t want people to express themselves, you get this sort of suffocated environment which we’re living in now.

So that’s why I would say, yes, you can’t… You do need to know where society is and what its potentials are and what’s happening. But we know and we see it even in this country, when leaders says don’t go there. Corporations don’t go there, the law firms don’t go there, even the university presidents don’t go there sometimes. And so leadership, even in a democracy, particularly if it has punitive retaliatory powers that it’s willing to use, can suffocate society very quickly, at least for the short run.

International Leadership and Global Order

JANE PERLEZ: No, wait a minute. We’re going here to the back. We’re going to the back.

ORVILLE SCHELL: You’ll be next. Well, thank you.

ALLIANCE: My name is Alliance. I was a previous Source Scholar, and then I worked at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, but I’m from Norway now, working for the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. But I wanted to ask you, as you were talking about camaraderie, you were talking about chemistry. So now, as we’re seeing this big fight between China and the US and the US kind of retracting on the international order, especially the international organizations, over your course of your career, for both of you, how do you think China will react to that lack of a global leader in terms of the international organizations in the world, and particularly referring your example on Zimbabwe. Thank you.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Jane, why don’t you start?

JANE PERLEZ: Well, I think China is going to make the most of it. They’re going to make the AIIB even bigger and better than it is. They’re going to do bigger and better at the U.N. I think they’re going to exploit the American retreat as far as they can.

ORVILLE SCHELL: I mean, I think that is logical. And I think Xi Jinping to date has been quite sane. He hasn’t moved too aggressively. He’s threatened more. He actually put 30-40% tariffs out. But he’s been holding his fire for now. That’s probably very smart. But I think you’re right. There’s a huge leadership vacuum. And this is precisely what China would like to see, because starting first with Asia, but then perhaps even on a wider basis, I think he’d like to see China have its day in the sun and, if not just be the hegemon or leader in Asia, perhaps of the world.

Will that come to pass? I don’t know. I think the only other alternative now, and it’s not that likely, frankly, is that Europe and Canada and Japan and Korea and Australia get some kind of understanding that doesn’t depend on the United States, which wouldn’t be a bad thing because all of these countries have always responded to the United States. But now I think they’re beginning to realize maybe they have to do something themselves. Whether they will, whether they can, I don’t know. But I think we’re at a moment that’s similar to what happens after a big war.

Finally, I would only say that I don’t know what the resolution or solution is, but perhaps the best thing that could happen is a depression, a recession. Yes. Because then both governments in the United States and in China and in Russia would then be in question. Now, it could be very chaotic, but the other alternative I like a whole lot less, which is war. And it seems to me if you’re looking for big changes, it often takes a war to cause that or something. That’s where Mao and Trump have a certain sort of wisdom. If you want something new, you have to get rid of what’s old.

Cultural Understanding and Future Relations

JANE PERLEZ: We’ll come to the back of the room soon.

ORVILLE SCHELL: This is wonderful.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you so much for your conversation, and I thank all the questioners. Now, of course, I’m a Chinese person from a Chinese heritage, but of course, I’ve never been to China except for one trip. And, oh, I understand the tribulations of trying to get a visa. However, having said that, it appears to me that the west and east will never meet unless they actually try to understand where they’re coming from. Just as you said Vice President Biden was, you know, hey, hi, good, blah, blah, blah. But the Chinese is like, don’t touch me.

ORVILLE SCHELL: What’s the matter with you?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You know, it’s completely different culture.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Jiang Zemin wasn’t that way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, fine. Having said that, yes, he did sing. And he tried to explain to you, yes, you know, I understand where you’re coming from. I can be as adaptive. But however, let’s bring it now, this moment, which I, as an investment manager, living for the last 35 years in America, an American citizen now, I said, holy macaroni, what is happening to these presidents? And I thought, you know, this is ridiculous. So therefore, help me understand with your insights to Xi Jinping and perhaps to Trump. Nobody can understand him. I know I’m putting you in a spot, but can you think of a way where we can resolve this peacefully without a war, let alone an imminent recession? Over to you, Orville.

ORVILLE SCHELL: So, listen, I’ve just spent the last umpteenth decades of my life trying to answer that question. And I married a Chinese woman. I had a wonderful marriage. So I know China. I mean, you mentioned Xi Jinping says, don’t touch me, but that’s not all Chinese. So we’re stuck with a guy who says, don’t touch me, okay? Nothing new under heaven there.

But I think that I don’t know what the answer is now, except I do think that looking back on the American experience, and I’ve been very critical of my own government in my lifetime, I think they did a pretty damn good job with engagement, starting with Nixon and Kissinger. And it evolved and we stayed out of war. There were periods when we thought we were going to work it out together, even after 1989, but now we haven’t.

And I do think finally there is something very fundamental about a Marxist Leninist system, that when the system finds reform reaches the point where it may reform it out of power, then you get a very strong reaction. So that’s a problem. Now Russia reformed itself out of power and Xi Jinping said that’s the big message, we’re not going there. And nobody had the manhood to stop the Soviet Union from collapsing and that’s not going to happen to China. So I don’t know.

WEI XIN: Hi, thanks so much. Overall, my name is Wei Xin, I’m also a Schwartzman scholar. When it comes to engagement, I would like to reckon Professor Zweig’s idea on elitism. I think when it comes to engagement on a much more civilian level or student level, a person like me, I would say on a relative scale, America has made it much, much harder for Chinese students to obtain visas over all these years.

Regardless of what I think, for all these years China is afraid of peaceful evolution. But right now it’s just a little bit bizarre that America, the insecurities coming from the American side. As a Chinese, at least my university or the China Scholarship Council, they will never question you saying why would you like to study in America? Are you accidentally exposed to capitalist ideas? They don’t ask questions like this. They would say go learn, hopefully you could come back.

You can’t say the same for the American government side. They will say why would you like to go to China? People in my scholarship program can attest that we have American scholars being questioned by FBI upon their return. And most Chinese young people I know, as also a very cliché experience, most young Chinese are very comfortable to own an iPhone or Tesla. But I think many American friends of mine would freak out if they were handed over to Huawei or they were driving a BYD. This unfounded fear is very bizarre, let alone Americans also purging Chinese scholars in their own universities. So I’m also generally curious where does this paranoia coming from and why are Americans being the insecure side right now in its bilateral relationships.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, I will agree with you, it’s very bizarre. But there is a long tradition in America of paranoia, and there’s an even deeper tradition in China of the same. And I would say that your experience, which sort of breaks my heart to acknowledge it, that America was an open country, did welcome immigrants and profited immensely from them, that it’s changed.

And one of the reasons it’s changed, but just one of the reasons is that I think that when you begin to recognize another country, not as a country that you’re making progress in terms of coming to terms with and getting closer to through the reform process or whatever else you want to say, then if you’re pulling apart, you get to the point where you decide, are they an enemy, a competitor? And I think we’re on the precipice of more and more Americans seeing China as a real threat. And that’s why you’re having trouble now. Yes, Americans can overreact, and Americans have a deep paranoid tradition in their own. And that’s come to the form and it’s enthroned in the White House.

JANE PERLEZ: We can do a couple more questions because I’m getting signals to shut it down, but I’d like… There are some interesting people at the back, so can we take these questions in the back, please?

Q&A Session: Understanding China’s Leadership and Society

ORVILLE SCHELL: I do think whether Xi has real chemistry with Putin or not, I think the one thing they share is grievance. Both feel disrespected, disesteemed, looked down upon as the avatars of autocracies and tin pot dictatorships and whatnot. And I think it really and dispossessed of empire. So I think that isn’t so much that they really like each other as friends, like each other openly, but that they share a common resentment to the outside world.

And I should say that I think a lot of this comes from the whole Leninist Narrative, which isn’t entirely untrue, by the way. You imperialized us, you colonialized us, you occupied us, you exploited us. We’re never going to really get together. And don’t forget, Chiang Kai-shek really had a lot of this going, too, back in the 1930s. He starts many of the entries in his diary of Wu Wang Guochi. Never forget the hundred years of humiliation. So this is deep in China’s bloodstream. But America, too, despite its wealth, power and stature, also has a tradition of American paranormal. Read Richard Hofstadter.

JANE PERLEZ: I think I see Peter Bernstein in the back wanting to ask a question.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Microphone. Hi, Orville. Hi, Jane. You had said about something there’s a spirit in China that’s going to well up. I wanted to ask your opinion of how significant you think the White Card revolution was, where you might see that happening again and how as Americans or outside of China, how we can follow this? How do we find out about.

JANE PERLEZ: If you had more journalists in China, we could, but that’s another story.

The White Card Movement and Dissent in China

ORVILLE SCHELL: Well, we may be in this period, you know, where I think the White Card movement after the COVID lockdown was just a faint little glimpse, a glimmer of what lies beneath the surface of people who actually have had to live in China, particularly amongst educated people, professional people, maybe less so in rural China. I think the other place you can stay in touch is there are more and more people coming out of China.

JANE PERLEZ: Go to Singapore.

ORVILLE SCHELL: If you sit down and talk to them, either alone or in groups where people feel safe, oh, my God, when that train gets rolling, you hear some astounding things. So I think it isn’t as the Chinese are just easy to hector and bully and shut up and suppress. But, you know, people have to be realistic, too. If they’re going to be living in China and can’t get out and don’t have money, you know they’re going to be silent. There’s nothing new under heaven here. This happens in country after country after country after country when authoritarian governments move in, even the Germans. Nobody stood up. Nobody stood up against Stalin.

JANE PERLEZ: Well, can I take this young person here, please? And then I’m going to be fired. I’ll never be invited back here again.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Thank you so much for sharing. And I’m Duncan.

JANE PERLEZ: Make it quick.

Xi Jinping’s Personality and Its Impact on US-China Relations

ORVILLE SCHELL: Yeah, just one question real quick about the personality of the leaders you mentioned several times about chemistry or personality. And I’m wondering how much do you think is Xi Jinping’s personality shaping the geopolitical tensions between us and China? Because he does have a pretty special upbringing as a princeling. Also, he does suffer during the Cultural Revolution, but we are now seeing like a going back to the Maoist era. So I was wondering how much do you think is his personality shaping this conflict or how much is really ideological differences between the US and China?

So scholars hate to wallow into the bog of psycho history, psychobabble of gratuitous psychoanalysis of people they don’t know. Fair enough, but that’s why we have literature. So if you want to understand what’s going on in China, read Stephen Greenblatt’s “Tyrants,” about six plays Shakespeare wrote about tyranny. There you get chapter and verse. Read Sophocles, read Euripides, all there thousands of years ago. They nailed it.

So I would say apropos of Xi, there’s a wonderful book about to come out. It’s very dense, by a guy called Joseph Torigian.

JANE PERLEZ: Oh my God.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Who wrote and is writing a book on Xi Jinping’s father. Now, he says he doesn’t want to wallow into the bog of psychobabble, but we all know that human beings have formative years and that their parents are pretty powerful formative agents. So just go get that book when it comes out. It’s coming out soon. I’m reviewing it actually, and I think you’ll understand better why Xi Jinping is who he is.

I’ll just say this last thought. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution when his father was a Lischefang Fanzi, a historical counter revolutionary. The worst of the worst. You have to imagine a 14-year-old kid sent off to the countryside and everybody knows who your father is and you’re trying to be accepted by your peers and your father is a counter revolutionary. What do you do? I think you become more red than anybody else to prove that you aren’t like your father. Even though you may love your father, you may miss your father, you don’t want to be left out on his account. So I think there’s a lot of formative experience that we can learn from this new book. Even though he may not analyze it chapter and verse. But listen, go read some fiction.

JANE PERLEZ: Well, on that note, thank you very much and I’m going to make just one shameless plug. If you want to hear more interesting conversations about China, US relations, tune in to our podcast, “Face Off US vs China.” And you’ll hear lots and lots of stuff, and we hope that you enjoy it. Thank you.

ORVILLE SCHELL: This will be a podcast and this.

JANE PERLEZ: Will be a podcast.

ORVILLE SCHELL: Thank you.

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