Orville Schell

Orville Hickock Schell III (Chinese: 夏伟; pinyin: Xià Wěi; born May 20, 1940 in New York City) is an American writer, academic, and activist. He is well known for his works on China, and is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He previously served as Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell's father Orville Hickok Schell, Jr., was a prominent lawyer who headed the New York City Bar Association, chaired the human rights group Americas Watch from its founding in 1981 until his death in 1987, co-founded Helsinki Watch, forerunner to Human Rights Watch, and became the namesake of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Orville Schell III is the older brother of writer Jonathan Schell.

Schell attended Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut, after which he attended Harvard University, leaving in 1960 after his junior year to study Chinese, first at Stanford University and then at National Taiwan University from 1961 to 1964. While in Taiwan, Schell began writing columns for the Boston Globe as its "Man in Asia". He then returned to Harvard and studied Asian history, culture and politics under John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1964.