Orville Schell

I'm Glenn Tiffert, a distinguished research fellow here at the Hoover Institution, where along with Elizabeth Economy, I co-chair the program on the US, China, and the world.

Today's event with Orville Schell and my Hoover colleagues, Frank Dikötter and Rowena He is entitled Inside China's Secret Prisons.

It's the first in our twenty twenty-six twenty twenty-seven speaker series, and like many prize things, you could say it has been decades in the making.

This event also bears a special connection to Hoover, not just because Orville is a deep dear friend of our program and he partners with us on some of our most impactful work, but also because Harry Wu, the former prisoner and activist, or late prisoner and activist, who did so much a generation ago to shine light on the PRC's system of labor camps and the integration of forced labor into China's export machine, was a scholar here at the Hoover Institution in the nineteen nineties and was really instrumental in the genesis of Orville's book.

We'll then enter a panel discussion and then close with audience Q&A.

Uh, so let me briefly set that up by introducing our panelists.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations and Vice President at Asia Society in New York.

He is a former professor and dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Elizabeth Economy on China.

Uh, Liz, I, I, I wanna, I did this with Orville Schell and Jonathan Spence, and I get goosebumps doing it with you.

That guy came off the plane.

You've written three books about him.

I'm Mina Kim.

Orville Schell has been a leading scholar on China for more than 50 years, visiting the nation since the 1970s.

He's Asia Society's Director of the Center on US-China Relations and former Dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

In 1991, Schell helped CBS's 60 Minutes conduct an expose into China's forced labor camps, where prisoners were making products that were being secretly exported to American markets.

But he shelved the written account he'd promised then to The New Yorker, until now.

Schell's new book, called China's Secret Prisons, recounts the making of the 60 Minutes episode and how forced labor, despite its illegality, still supplies US and other global markets today.

Orville Schell joins me now.

Welcome to Forum.