There is hardly any American who knows China as well as Orville Schell. He has been studying the country, visiting it, writing about it, and been fascinated by it, for more than fifty years. He first arrived in Hong Kong, then a British crown colony, in 1961, when China was still an impenetrable, revolutionary nation ruled by Mao Zedong. Even by 1975, when he took his maiden flight into Beijing, China remained, as he would put it, a country lacking advertisements, private cars, fashion magazines, or private property. “There was not a single other aircraft moving on its runways,” he recalled. “It was as silent and dark as a tomb.” The young scholar was able to get a rare glimpse of the isolated country by working for a month at the Communist Party’s model village, Da Zhai.
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