Orville Schell

In 1991, the China analyst and journalist Orville Schell worked on an in-depth 60 Minutes investigation of the People’s Republic of China’s vast prison camp system, revealing that products made with forced labor were being surreptitiously and illegally sold to the United States. Inside China’s Secret Prisons is his gripping account of this milestone exposé—and how its findings still reverberate today. Schell weaves a fast-paced story of high-level journalism while uncovering the duplicity and rule-bending techniques that China uses to sell cheap goods abroad. He takes readers on a hair-raising journey into China’s secretive penal colonies, recounting how he worked with a former prisoner to sneak in and film with a hidden camera. They documented that China compels inmates, including political prisoners, to toil in prison factories and then exports these wares to global markets by disguising their place of origin—and that prison officials would even sell products to CBS correspondents posing as American businessmen. Schell also confesses how he set aside his account of the project, originally written for the New Yorker, out of fear of punitive consequences from the Chinese Communist Party for his Chinese-born wife, her relatives, and his own career, illuminating how Chinese intimidation tactics can drive journalists, scholars, and even businesspeople to self-censorship. This powerful and incisive book shines a light on not only China’s forced labor camps—where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are now incarcerated—but also the moral quandaries faced by reporters and scholars who seek to investigate China’s shrouded and brutal penal system.

A lively and absorbing narrative of China's ascent from imperial doormat to global economic powerhouse.

Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today's foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country's rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation--culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today? Wealth and Power answers this question by examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists, and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China. This fascinating survey begins in the lead-up to the first Opium War with Wei Yuan, the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer who was one of the first to urge China to borrow ideas from the West. It concludes in our time with human-rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, an outspoken opponent of single-party rule. Along the way, we meet such titans of Chinese history as the Empress Dowager Cixi, public intellectuals Feng Guifen, Liang Qichao, and Chen Duxiu, Nationalist stalwarts Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu Rongji. The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, "wealth and power." This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a "century of humiliation" at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. It's what drove both Mao and Deng to embark on root-and-branch transformations of Chinese society, first by means of Marxism-Leninism, then by authoritarian capitalism. And this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of China's actions today. By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of today's resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the country's tortured progression from nineteenth-century decline to twenty-first-century boom. By looking backward into the past to understand forces at work for hundreds of years, they help us understand China today and the future that this singular country is helping shape for all of us. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH "Superb . . . beautifully written and neatly structured."--Financial Times " An] engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China's modern rise."--The New York Times Book Review "Informative and insightful . . . a must-read for anyone with an interest in the world's fastest-rising superpower."--Slate "It does a better job than most other books of answering a basic question the rest of the world naturally asks about China's recent rise: What does China want?"--The Atlantic "The portraits are beautifully written and bring to life not only their subjects but also the mood and intellectual debates of the times in which they lived."--Foreign Affairs "Excellent and erudite . . . The authors] combine scholarly learning with a reportorial appreciation of colorful, revealing details."--The National Interest

On the night of June 3-4, 1989, Chinese troops violently crushed the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in the history of the communist regime. In this extraordinary collection of hundreds of internal government and Communist Party documents, secretly smuggled out of China, we learn how these events came to pass from behind the scenes. The material reveals how the most important decisions were made and how the turmoil split the ruling elite into radically opposed factions. The book includes the minutes of the crucial meetings at which the Elders decided to cashier the pro-reform Party secretary Zhao Ziyang and to replace him with Jiang Zemin, to declare martial law, and finally to send the troops to drive the students from the Square. Just as the Pentagon Papers laid bare the secret American decision making behind the Vietnam War and changed forever our view of the nation's political leaders, so too has The Tiananmen Papers altered our perception of how and why the events of June 4 took the shape they did. Its publication has proven to be a landmark event in Chinese and world history.