Peking Hotel with Liu He

Arriving at Orville’s place takes you through a scenic drive on the Berkeley Hills. Quintessential to the Bay Area, driving on the steep, winding roads feels like the slow climbing of a rollercoaster. At the summit, glimpses of the Golden Gates Bridge peek through the misty clouds. On a clear day, the urban sprawl of San Francisco, Berkeley and Albany unfolds beneath you; even on a rainy day, the charming neighbourhoods with Berkeley Bungalows more than make up for the long drive from Palo Alto.Orville Schell will be familiar to our returning readers. We have featured him twice before, once on his experience in the 60s, and again in the 80s.  A veteran journalist and currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society, Orville has given us insight into how foreign China watchers navigated the  challenges of the Cold War and how China’s gradual shift from socialism in the 1980s. In this issue, we explore Orville’s experience in the Vietnam War – a transformative event for an entire generation of Americans and a key moment that shaped his consciousness as a China scholar. Orville, as someone deeply embedded in the American China-watching community, sheds light on the often-overlooked impact of the Vietnam War on Western perceptions of China.A brief hiatus in the summer has recharged Peking Hotel well. We now have a new and brilliant editing team, so it’s not just myself sifting through mountains of tapes anymore (hurray!). We will aim to release a new episode every two weeks, and your continued interest is our best accountability measure :)I thank my wonderful editors Yiwen Lu and Caiwei Chen for their support.Enjoy!Leo Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back!My first piece on Orville’s experience in the 80s had good reader reception, many thanks to your support! This piece focuses on Orville's story in the 60s and 70s working on China. Orville Schell is the Director of Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.In this one, you will hear about Orville’s grandfather who taught medicine in Changsha in late qing; his semi-activist mom; studying with John Fairbank at Harvard; drinking tea with Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei; locked in a cave by CCP officials on his first trip to China; and getting chased out of Indonesia by the Indonesian communists. It shines a light on a not-so-distant era. Not sure about you; I certainly hear many echoes with our time.Enjoy!Content- Changsha, Tahiti, and Taiwan- First trip to China and a wake-up call- Living in Taiwan, dreaming of Beijing- John Fairbank and Edgar Snow- ‘Ganyang America!’ (‘Crush America’ in Indonesian)About usThe Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are bilingual online publications that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China’s reality through the personal tales of China experts. We present subjective, opinionated, and coloured views of veterans in the field based on their first-hand experience and direct observations. The project grew out of Leo’s research at Hoover Institution where he collects long oral history of China experts living in America. The stories here are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. We have Substacks in English and Chinese. Do subscribe!RecruitmentI am recruiting a part-time editorial helpers for this Substack. Drop me an email with your CV and a short self-intro at heliu@stanford.edu if you are interested.https://pekinghotel.substack.comhttps://www.the-mayfly.com/s/peking-hotel Get full access to Peking Hotel at pekinghotel.substack.com/subscribe

Orville Schell, China expert from the 1980s, discusses Deng Xiaoping's visit to the US, the Democracy Wall movement, and Tiananmen Massacre. He highlights the economic shifts, political changes, and societal transformations in China during the transformative decade of the 1980s.