Orville Schell - Views On China

Views On China

Schell first visited the People's Republic of China in 1974, during the last years of Mao Zedong. His sorrow at the excesses of Mao's socialist regime was evident in a winter 1988 interview with the magazine Whole Earth Review:

"China was one model in the '60s and '70s for Westerners looking for new credos and new alternative belief systems. Well, it turned out that China consumed itself. It did not necessarily disprove that certain socialist models are completely inappropriate for Third World developing countries. Rather it simply showed that the extremism of the Maoist experiment sabotaged that model... It's a great shame that Mao screwed up. His megalomania overpowered his efforts to see if China could be the first country that would find some different way to put itself together and to develop."

"There isn't much I'd recommend anybody imitate in China now, because China is becoming an imitation of us... Now among the young there's enormous amounts of crime and disaffection and skepticism and cynicism, along with disillusionment, and its analogue, a greed for money. People always reach for money when everything else fails."

In a September/October 1997 interview with Mother Jones magazine, he described Deng Xiaoping as "the counterrevolutionary par excellence in history", and China's capitalist bloc in the Communist Party as "using their positions both in the party and in the government to make money."

Asked if China is ready for democracy, Schell answered "No... Some of fought for almost 50 years for the Marxist revolution, and I think it's very naïve for Westerners to assume that that experience, that mindset, that whole ideology just simply vanished with Deng's reforms."

In 2004 Schell called China's Communist-Capitalist mix "Leninist capitalism".

In an interview with Terri Gross of NPR's Fresh Air broadcast November 19, 2009, Schell stated that there are two types of democracy. The first is the U.S. form, which has become increasingly unable to adapt or react to the challenges that the world is now facing, Global Warming being the most urgent. The second is the Chinese form, "Autocratic Democracy", where the people are willing to delegate authority to their autocratic government to act in ways that guarantee economic growth. He suggests the Chinese form of democracy may be more adaptive because it is not encumbered by the special/single-interest power blocks found in the U.S., and appears to be able to act more decisively to deal with the complexities of the world of today, although it can also more quickly implement poor decisions. But, he emphasized that he personally preferred living in an open society.