Commonwealth Club: Inside China's Secret Prisons with Veteran China Expert Orville Schell

For decades, scholar and journalist Orville Schell has been one of the nation’s leading experts on China. The author of numerous books on China, Schell runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.  In his new book, Inside China’s Secret Prisons, Schell recounts the extraordinary investigation that uncovered China’s prison labor network, and the personal cost of reporting the truth.  Schell delivers the first behind-the-scenes account of the landmark 1991 “60 Minutes” investigation that revealed China’s vast “reform through labor” prison system and documented how prison-made goods were illegally entering the United States disguised as legitimate exports. The investigation took Schell and his colleagues deep inside China’s hidden penal colonies, where they worked alongside a former political prisoner and used hidden cameras to document forced labor inside prison factories. In one of the investigation’s most startling moments, Chinese prison officials openly attempted to sell prison-made products to CBS journalists posing as American buyers. For the first time, Schell explains why he chose not to publish his original account of the investigation for The New Yorker. Concerned that the Chinese government could retaliate against his Chinese-born wife, her family, their friends, and even jeopardize his own ability to continue reporting from China, Schell made the painful decision to remain silent—offering a rare and deeply personal examination of how authoritarian governments can foster self-censorship far beyond their own borders.  Join us to hear Schell discuss the book as well as the latest political developments in China and U.S.-China relations.