ASIA SOCIETY EXCLUSIVE: Join Jane Perlez, Pulitzer prize-winning co-host of the acclaimed podcast Face-Off: U.S. vs China, for a live event, where she will be in conversation with Orville Schell.

Perlez will discuss with Schell his experiences in the company of Chinese leaders and their American counterparts over the past half-century. Together, they'll look at the ups and downs of U.S.-China relations through these men and discuss how their behavior, habits, personalities, and experiences influenced geopolitical outcomes (a few secrets will be spilled).

Schell spent a week following Deng Xiaoping during his U.S. visit with Jimmy Carter to establish diplomatic relations in 1979 (which included a secret side trip to the CIA!); he watched as Fang Lizhi was prevented from attending George Bush’s state dinner in the Great Wall Hotel in 1988;  he was at Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin’s freewheeling Beijing press conference in the Great Hall of the People in 1998; he watched Barack Obama be frozen out on his presidential visit to China in 2014, and was there in 2017 when Xi Jinping dazzled Donald Trump with the pomp and circumstance of a Forbidden City banquet and Great Hall of the People ceremony. Schell and Perlez were often in the room as history was being made, and their long perspective is much needed today.

Join us for an unforgettable evening where questions of war, peace, dominance, egos, idiosyncrasies, AI, and technology will be addressed. Perlez and Schell will conclude with a second look at Xi and Trump, and how and where things are going.

This event is presented with the FACE-OFF podcast, hosted by Jane Perlez and Rana Mitter.

Jane Perlez is an American journalist and podcaster. She was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in East Africa, Central Europe, Indonesia and Pakistan, chief diplomatic correspondent, and Beijing bureau chief from 2012-2019. In 2009 her team won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She now produces podcasts about the U.S. and China, most recently Face-Off: U.S. vs China with Rana Mitter as co-host. Perlez was born in London, grew up in Australia, and lives in New York.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of 15 books, 10 of them on China, and a frequent contributor to magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and more.