About the Author

Orville Schell is dean of the the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell has dedicated his professional career to reporting on and writing about Asia. Author of 14 books, nine of which are about China, he is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books. Schell has been the recipient of several writing fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center and is the winner of numerous awards, including the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for Asian Journalism, Overseas Press Club of America's Award for The Best Article on a Foreign Subject, a Mencken Award for the Best Feature and a Page One Award for the Best Investigative Story.

Schell graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University, where he studied Far Eastern History. He studied at National Taiwan University as an exchange student in the 1960s, and completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in Chinese History. He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and covered the war in Indochina as a journalist.