The Re-education of a China Watcher : Once an Idealist Who Idolized Maoism, Author Orville Schell Now Champions China’s Dissidents

ORVILLE SCHELL begins his latest book about China, “Discos and Democracy,” by describing a stroll he took through Beijing University on a chill winter day in 1987. He recalls discovering a statue of former Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung in front of the main library. Schell finds the placement ironic, for throughout his life Mao was Chinese intellectuals’ nemesis, known for issuing such pronouncements as “the more educated you are, the more reactionary.”

As Schell follows the cement Mao’s gaze across the campus lawn, he notices to his amazement that all the surrounding buildings are covered with barely discernible revolutionary exhortations, emblazoned on the walls during the Cultural Revolution that Mao had inspired two decades earlier. “Painted over hurriedly as political lines changed and the high tide of Maoist revolutionary fervor ebbed, (the slogans) were only now reappearing like figures from a mist. . . . I had . . . stumbled into a reliquary of China’s old revolution, a revolution that, like a disembodied spirit, still hovered over the campus, and indeed . . . over the country as a whole.”

That spirit also hovers over Schell, one of America’s best known China experts. On the one hand, Schell condemns the current Chinese regime for its moral and political bankruptcy, embodied so brutally in the June 4 Beijing massacre in which hundreds, possibly thousands, of demonstrators died. On the other, he continues to express admiration for at least some aspects of the Chinese revolution, which he believes the country’s current leaders have betrayed. Part of what bridges the apparent contradiction is what his friends describe as his romantic strain: Inflamed two decades ago by the Chinese revolution, Schell’s romanticism has been tempered by harsh experiences in China, but it has not been extinguished, just as the slogans at Beijing University have not been fully obscured.

Recently, Schell has had plenty of opportunities to make his views known. The author of five books on China, he received so many requests for comments and interviews in the weeks after the Beijing massacre that Paul Hawken, a Mill Valley, Calif., writer and gardening-tool entrepreneur who is Schell’s friend, says, “All he had to do was put his phone down for it to ring.” Schell made frequent appearances on all three network news programs, as well as on “Nightline,” “Meet the Press,” the “Today” show and National Public Radio.

At the same time, compelled by “an enormous urgency to write, which is what I know how to do better than speak,” Schell wrote articles about China for the New York Review of Books, Mother Jones, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Examiner--often functioning on virtually no sleep. He also organized a benefit concert in Berkeley that raised several thousand dollars for groups investigating human-rights abuses in China, and he began raising money, $160,000 at last count, for a documentary film on China’s traumatic year. While all this was happening, Schell and his wife of two years, Liu Baifang, were fretfully trying to monitor the well-being of Liu’s parents in China.

The country’s turmoil, Schell says, provided him and other China experts with an “amazing Andy Warhol 20 minutes of notoriety,” but his new-found prominence almost certainly will be more enduring. It’s a measure of his stature that three film companies recently asked him to be a consultant for movies about China, and three publishers chose him to write forewords to books on the country. One of the publishers, Steve Wasserman of Hill & Wang, says Schell was chosen because “he has become one of the people best known to a general American readership on questions about China.”

Schell’s fame rankles some China experts, who cite his lack of academic credentials--he failed to write a dissertation to complete his doctoral work in Chinese studies--and his past misjudgments about the country. He readily concedes that he’s not a China scholar. “If I have any pretentions, it’s to being a writer first, who can write about anything that interests me.” Indeed, his curiosity has led him to write books on former California Gov. Jerry Brown, on the use of drugs in meat production in the United States and on efforts to resist development in his hometown of Bolinas, 15 miles northwest of San Francisco. He has written restaurant reviews, travel pieces, book reviews and assorted other articles for nearly every major magazine and newspaper in the country. He recently won a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book profiling a Chinese playwright and the writer’s wife, a former Chinese folk opera star.

What Schell has fashioned for himself is a life unique among China specialists and rare among writers in general. Since resigning two years ago from the New Yorker, where he was a writer for 12 years, he has not been more than nominally affiliated with a publication or university, yet he is able to support himself and to gain access to a vast variety of interesting people. Exhibiting patrician charm and plain generosity, he also manages to befriend his sources: His circle includes Brown, who has spent extended periods at Schell’s ranch; Fang Lizhi, China’s leading dissident; Adam Hochschild, founder of Mother Jones magazine, and actor Peter Coyote. The son of Deng Xiaoping, China’s current leader, has even visited Schell at the ranch.

“Orville’s a delightful free spirit,” says Perry Link, a China expert who recently moved from UCLA to Princeton University. “He just decides to do with his life what he thinks is interesting and important, unlike the rest of us human beings who are caught in our ruts and care about others’ perceptions of us. He just goes to China and knocks on doors, and finds people. He’s warm and generous, so Chinese don’t feel a barrier with him that they might feel with a more shifty type.”

Schell depicts himself as occupying “a very important middle ground somewhere between journalism and academia.” It’s a terrain he has virtually to himself, and he takes advantage of the independence it provides to try to make a political impact: He’s an authentic concerned citizen, doing his best to alert the populace to issues he considers vital. Last fall, for example, he and his friends Coyote and Hawken bought full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times calling for the release of then-vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle’s college transcripts. And in April, Schell and his wife were hosts at a four-day conference in Bolinas of many of China’s best-known dissidents, whose pronouncements took on an eerie resonance after the government crackdown five weeks later.

Schell’s acts of conscience are not limited to the political realm. When he discovered that a Bolinas friend who suffered from multiple sclerosis could not afford health care, he led neighbors in setting up a fund for him. Schell and his wife have also found jobs for Chinese in the United States. “If you have a problem, be it personal or professional, Orville is ready to come to your rescue,” says Hong Huang, a Chinese citizen and New York City resident who helped organize the Bolinas conference. “I don’t find that so readily available from other Sinologists because they always look at Chinese as contacts--it’s more like business to them. Orville is the one American I know who has formed very solid friendships with people in China because they feel he’ll really go out on a limb to help them.”

Schell, an informal man, customarily wears blue jeans and puts on a tie only reluctantly. Some of his friends describe him as an old hippie; a photograph in his 1976 book on Bolinas, “The Town That Fought to Save Itself,” shows him with shoulder-length hair and a beret. A picturesque town on the edge of a lagoon, Bolinas is an outpost for old hippies, still notorious for its residents’ successful efforts to keep tourists away by tearing down highway signs indicating its location.

Schell, who once served as a director of the town’s public utilities commission, gives every evidence of fitting in well: In accord with the townspeople’s predilection for privacy, his book had even used a pseudonym for Bolina. Now, however, at 49, he could pass for a member of the Establishment, which in many respects he is. With his sandy hair trimmed to a respectable length and his Nordic features, he looks distinguished despite himself.

He’s relaxed and dignified at the same time, the kind of man who, short of chairs in his study, lies on a bed with his head propped on his elbow during most of a 90-minute interview.

“He’s cool and self-possessed, but he also has a bizarre sense of humor,” Coyote says. “I went to his house for dinner one night and he was wearing a shocking pink and black jacket that looked like he might have mugged Wayne Newton for, and a green tie which might have been in the shape of a trout. His dress was in complete contradiction to the aesthetics of the meal, the quality of the conversation and his normal reserved and careful demeanor. I must say, he wore this with great elegance.”

GROWING UP IN Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and New York City, Schell learned iconoclasm from his parents. He describes his mother, Marjorie, as “an early Ban-the-Bomber,” who posted photographs of atomic-bomb explosions on the refrigerator door, while his late father, Orville Schell Jr., a prominent Wall Street lawyer, played vital roles in human-rights causes. He says both parents taught him to consider himself part of some larger community that he ought to try to improve. By the time he attended Pomfret School, a Connecticut prep school, he was taking their advice. Hochschild, a Pomfret student two years behind Schell, remembers that he and Schell “constituted the entire left wing of the student council.” Schell went on to Harvard, but his graduation was delayed two years by extended trips to Asia. On his first trip, he traveled to New Guinea by working aboard a Norwegian freighter and ended up in Taiwan, where he studied Chinese for a year and a half. He also visited Southeast Asia and wrote stories about the Vietnam War for two U.S. newspapers. He finally graduated from Harvard in 1964, then got a job working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. A year later, political turmoil in Indonesia led to the expulsion of all Ford Foundation employees, so Schell enrolled in graduate school at UC Berkeley.

By then, Schell was hooked on China. “Just as some remote and possibly unattainable gorgeous woman can have amazing allure,” he says, “so this country, which was so unreceptive to our advances and entreaties, was a tremendously fascinating challenge. Every little shred of insight and information was so precious that one cherished it.”

Informed by his experiences in Indochina, Schell also had become an opponent of the Vietnam War. Hochschild remembers attending a ceremony at a San Francisco church at which Joan Baez sang while Schell and a few other draft-age men announced their decision to return their draft cards to the Selective Service System. As soon as Schell did that, he was drafted. “I told the Army psychiatrist that from his perspective, I was the last person in the universe they really wanted to have in their army,” Schell says. “I said he could expect me to publish a nice anti-war newspaper as soon as I hit the airport in Vietnam. I think they finally classified me 4-F.”

At first, Schell’s political and academic interests commingled. In an effort ultimately aimed at reducing American hostility toward China, which was increasing as a result of the Vietnam War, he and Franz Schurmann, a UC Berkeley professor, edited a four-volume collection of documents called “The China Reader.” Schell also helped found the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, formed in opposition to the war and in support of U.S. diplomatic recognition of China. Even so, Schell was not satisfied with the limited political role he could play as an academician. In 1970, after finishing his oral Ph.D. examination, Schell left Berkeley to help start the Pacific News Service, which provided left-oriented news and analysis about Asia to the American press.

Schell moved to Bolinas, and in 1974 he and his friend Bill Niman started a pig farm there on about 1,000 acres leased from the National Park Service. “I’ve always liked working with my hands,” Schell says, “and I find I go a little crazy if the only thing engaged is my brain.” In 1977, they switched from pigs to cattle, and a few years ago, Schell left Niman in charge of day-to-day activities so that he could devote more time to writing. The business slaughters about 1,000 steers a year, and provides beef to some of the Bay Area’s leading restaurants. The beef’s biggest selling point is that, unlike most commercial meat sold in the United States, it is free of antibiotics and hormones. Schell still lives on the farm, with his wife and 15-year-old son, Ole, in a three-bedroom ranch house he built himself; he calls its style “neo-hippie,” but it is more sophisticated and comfortable than the image that phrase conjures up.

In 1974, Schell joined his younger brother Jonathan (who would later gain prominence as the author of a best-selling book advocating nuclear disarmament called “The Fate of the Earth”) as a writer for the New Yorker. Schell quickly scored a coup by arranging to spend 2 1/2 months in China for the magazine, but the resulting articles, published as a book called “In the People’s Republic,” comprise his least prescient work on China. Schell was in constant conflict with the group’s pro-Maoist American leader; nevertheless the book reflects largely unleavened admiration for China. It is perhaps a sign of Americans’ increased sophistication about China that while U.S. leftists denounced the book when it was published for such sins as describing a drunken Communist Party member, “In the People’s Republic” now appears startlingly naive--so naive, in fact, that an American reporter who was in Beijing during the June 4 massacre says that in ensuing days, he and a few colleagues, exhausted and appalled by the killings, sought comic relief by reading sections of the book aloud to each other.

It’s not hard to find the sort of passages the journalists singled out. Schell writes, for instance, about watching children performing martial-arts exercises at Dazhai, a model farm commune in rustic Shanxi province: “The evenness of talent is astonishing, reflecting the concern of the Chinese with developing the backward as well as the advanced. This has been one of Mao’s passions: all-around equal development of every sector of Chinese life. It is for this reason that he first called attention to this once-impoverished desolate village, which has now succeeded in such a dramatic way. It was a village with no unique talents and no lucky breaks. Yet it transformed itself.”

In truth, Dazhai’s transformation was the luckiest of breaks: The Chinese government later admitted that it had poured resources into the village in an effort to give foreigners a misleadingly salutary impression of farm life in China, and Schell, referring to a well-known Soviet settlement designed for the same purpose, now readily concedes that Dazhai was a “giant Potemkin village.” Although the book does not indicate it, he now says the trip started him on the path to disillusionment with the regime.

Schell says his persistence in asking questions, coupled with a suspicion among the Chinese that he was a CIA spy because he had worked for the Ford Foundation, led to his nearly being expelled from China. “Were I able to rewrite everything, I think I would have wanted to be more skeptical, but I cannot tell you the pressure on any visitor to quash skepticism, coming from both Americans and Chinese,” he says. “All the people on the trip were a bit too ready to buy the Chinese line, and I was in some measure too willing to buy it, but that part of me which wasn’t buying it had a heck of a time.”

SINCE THEN, SCHELL’S books about China have grown successively more complex, his reward for visiting the coun try at least 25 times. It’s indicative of his changing perspective that in his 1980 book about China, “Watch Out for the Foreign Guests!”, Schell recounts an incident at Dazhai that he omitted from “In the People’s Republic.” Using a Polaroid camera, an American begins taking pictures of Chinese children. As soon as they realize that the photographs are processed instantaneously, their decorum, up to that point exemplary, dissolves, and they mob the American. Schell can’t avoid concluding that “something ignoble” has taken place. In his later books, he describes countless variations of the scene, all underscoring the hollow seductiveness of Western consumer goods in China.

By promoting a Western-style free market economy, Schell believes, China’s leaders in the ‘80s have proven their “intellectual poverty.” Part of what he initially found appealing about China was that its leaders tried to escape conventional economic thinking. “They weren’t going to be a poor Third World country with their hand out to foreign aid and the World Bank,” he says. “They were trying something different. It didn’t succeed--too bad--but I still believe that the world would be richer if there could be more support for diversity, so that countries could find the right way for them to develop rather than just trotting like obedient little dogs behind the great powers.”

Schell says that Deng’s economic reforms abandoned many Maoist objectives he considers admirable, including collectivized agriculture, universal literacy and broad public health programs. And while the reforms unleashed private businesses, no institutions existed to restrain their excesses. For example, Schell says, “the environmental destruction of China is monumental. It’s the result of the rather simple-minded notion that if you uncrank a market economy in China, everything will be all right. The point is, China has no Food and Drug Administration, no Environmental Protection Agency. Industry has gotten away from the government, and there are no control mechanisms anyway, so everyone pollutes as much as he wants.”

While Schell believes that China’s economic reforms were misguided, he was “elated” by the increased political freedoms that existed before the Beijing massacre. “Discos and Democracy,” the best-selling of Schell’s books, is probably at its most successful in describing the blossoming of popular culture that accompanied political liberalization. “Because of Orville’s interest in getting to all sorts of classes of people, he’s able to record in fascinating detail the changes that have occurred in China over the last 10 years,” says Geremie Barme a China expert at the Australian National University. “He’s a folk historian.”

Along with Perry Link, Schell is credited with having the best dissident sources of any American writing about China. He was the first Westerner to write at length about Fang Lizhi, the dissident astrophysicist who was granted sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy after the June massacre, and popularized the phrase, “China’s Sakharov,” to describe Fang. Schell’s embrace of Chinese dissidents, most of whom are at the other end of the political spectrum from Mao, has caused a few China experts to mutter that Schell is an opportunist. But it is almost certainly true that his errors of interpretation have been the result of earnestness rather than calculation. Richard Bernstein, a New York Times reporter and the author of “From the Center of the Earth: The Search for the Truth About China,” says that what has remained consistent in the thinking of Schell and other early supporters of the Chinese revolution is that “they thought erroneously that they were on the side of the people and that they were supporting social justice and new forms of democracy. Their commitment to social justice and democracy remains, but they see it now, I think much more accurately, as represented by dissidents.”

In fact, Schell’s intellectual migration, from support for the Communists to condemnation, is common among American China experts of his generation. “As young people coming out of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the civil-rights movement, we wanted it to be true that socialism was a better way,” Link says. “We wanted the face-value representations coming out of China to be true. I think the way to put it is that Orville was carried away by his ideals, and that by the ‘80s his head had caught up with him.”

In one sense, the emergence of the pro-democracy movement in Beijing brought Schell full circle, for he sees a parallel between it and the ‘60s American counterculture. “There was a feeling of liberation in Tian An Men Square which I think Chinese had not felt for 40 years--a feeling of having defied authority and gotten away with it,” Schell says. “This was a particularly sweet feeling because for so many years authority had been beating them up black and blue. And somewhat like the ‘60s, there was a certain naivete, a willingness to believe in the elixir of some new idea that will transform everything. But this is what all idealists are intoxicated by--it’s never as easy as they hope.”

Schell demonstrated his bond to the movement by holding a conference of about 30 leading Chinese dissidents and 20 American China experts at his ranch in April. He raised about $120,000 to stage the conference and, along with his wife and his friend Hong Huang, spent a year organizing it. Many of the Chinese met each other for the first time at the conference and were able to converse with unaccustomed openness. Among those attending were Bei Dao, China’s best-known contemporary poet; Chen Kaige, China’s leading film maker; Wu Tianming, head of China’s most important film studio; Liu Binyan, China’s best-known muckraking journalist, and Wang Ruoshui, a former editor at the Beijing People’s Daily who is considered China’s leading Marxist-humanist theoretician. It is indicative of the wide-ranging nature of the Chinese government crackdown a month later that every Chinese listed above is now in exile except for Wang, who is either under arrest or underground in China.

Though China has already faded from front-page coverage, the dissidents’ predicament continues to impel Schell to action. Having denounced President Bush for his “tepid” response to the crackdown, he recently took a step he wishes Bush had, publishing names of arrested dissidents to prevent the Chinese government from executing them. Some others who once placed hope in the Chinese revolution have become cynics, mocking both the Communist Party and its opponents, but not Schell: If he has erred, he implies, if he has attributed noble motives to people who later disappointed him, the idea of goodness is not itself discredited.