Orville Hickock Schell III (born May 20, 1940) is an American writer, academic, and activist. He is 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. Background and education Schell's father Orville Hickok Schell, Jr., was a prominent lawyer who headed the New York City Bar Association and also the New York City Ballet. The senior Schell also 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 took Asian history, culture and politics courses under John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and completed his bachelor's degree in 1964. In 1964-65 Schell worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta, Indonesia. He then pursued Chinese studies at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a master's degree in 1967, becoming researcher for sociology and history professor Franz Schurmann (head of the school's Center for Chinese Studies) on a three-volume work The China Reader (1967, Random House). Schell was named as a co-author, establishing him as a China scholar. Schell continued his graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, reaching an all but dissertation stage. As anti-Vietnam War protests shook the campus, he became involved in anti-war activism and journalism, and in 1967 he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse to pay tax as a protest against the Vietnam War. Journalism career In 1969 Schell and Schurmann co-founded Pacific News Service (PNS) to create and distribute news and commentary from a broader spectrum of voices, especially viewpoints from abroad. The PNS was critical of the United States role in Indochina during the Vietnam War and supportive of establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.