The NCBR is honored to present its annual lifetime achievement award to journalist, author, and educator Orville Schell. In numerous books and articles and in television commentary, Schell has devoted his professional life to reporting on and writing about Asia; he is recognized as one of our preeminent experts on modern China and Tibet. As a concerned and responsible world citizen, he has been an active member of humanitarian, social science, foreign relations and economic organizations with international impact.

Currently the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Schell is the author of fourteen books, nine of them about China. He is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Granta, Mother Jones, Wired, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books. On television, he has served as a commentator for several network news programs, has worked both as a correspondent and consultant for a number PBS "Frontline" documentarie, and was the correspondent for an Emmy award-winning segment on China for "60 minutes." Schell's most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La From the Himalayas To Hollywood; The China Reader: The Reform Era (co-edited by Schell with David Shambaugh); and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders.

Orville Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary Fund jury, and the Social Science Research Council. He is a member of the Pacific Council and the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos. Born in New York City in 1940, Schell graduated from Harvard, where he studied Far Eastern history. An exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, he did graduate work in Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD.