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

Read the full transcript of a conversation between Orville Schell and Jane Perlez, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and co-host of the acclaimed podcast “Face-Off: U.S. vs. China,” on April 8, 2025. Orville Schell is the Vice President and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society.

The interview starts here:

Introduction

JANE PERLEZ: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for being here tonight at the Asia Society. I’m Jane Perlez, the former bureau chief of the New York Times in Beijing. I now host the podcast “Face-Off” about the ups and downs in the US-China relationship. I’m especially pleased to be here with Orville Schell, who, as you know, has covered Chinese leaders and their American counterparts for over the past half century—an unparalleled record. Don’t think anybody’s done it so much and so intensely.

His unique perspective on the arc of the US-China relationship began when he was an exchange student at the National Taiwan University, then he went to Shanghai. He went on to earn a PhD in Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley, and many years later became a journalism professor. Many of his graduates are populated throughout American journalism. He’s written many books on China, including a wonderful novel, “My Old Home,” which I’m reading at the moment and which I highly recommend, even if it is a bit heartbreaking. He currently serves as the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations here at the Asia Society.

Tonight I want you to take us on a journey through the Chinese leaders and their American counterparts. You first went to mainland China in ’75. Mao was still alive, though you didn’t meet him then or ever. But to use one of your favorite phrases, tonight we’ll try to figure out, how did we get here, where we are right now? 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.