Foreign Affairs

by A Conversation With Orville Schell

Episode Details

    Last week’s meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may have brought a respite in the trade war. But it hardly touched the more fundamental drivers of U.S.-Chinese rivalry, a rivalry that has come to shape more and more dimensions of geopolitics, the global economy, and beyond.

    Few have spent as much time observing and chronicling the interactions between Washington and Beijing as Orville Schell. Schell, one of America’s foremost China hands and the author of too many books on China to name, has been in the room for encounters between a slew of American presidents and Chinese leaders. He has also, for decades, interpreted the bitter factional struggles and geopolitical jockeying of the Chinese Communist Party. And as Xi’s attempt to remake the Chinese state continues, Schell has mined China’s history and its present for insight—into how the country thinks of its place in the world, and into the unresolved contradictions that continue to roil the party. “Peek behind the veil,” Schell writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “and a different reality reveals itself: a dog-eat-dog world of power struggles, artifice, hubris, treachery, and duplicity—yet also an enormous amount of sacrifice.”

    Dan Kurtz-Phelan spoke with Schell on Tuesday, November 4, about Trump and Xi, about the state of the United States’ China policy, and about both the past and the future of China itself.

    Sources:

“The Miseducation of Xi Jinping” by Orville Schell

“Life of the Party” by Orville Schell

“China’s Hidden Democratic Legacy” by Orville Schell

    “What Drives Putin and Xi: A Conversation With Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell”

“China Against China” by Jonathan A. Czin

The Party’s Interests Come First by Joseph Torigian

The China Mission by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da

    This episode of The Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Ben Metzner, Elise Burr, and Kanishk Tharoor, with audio engineering by Todd Yeager and Marcus Zakaria and original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks to Irina Hogan.