China’s rapid development and Sino-American relations have a direct impact on the lives of just about everyone in the United States. CHINA Town Hall: Local Connections, National Reflections, is a national day of programming from the National Committee on U.S. – China Relations (NCUSCR) designed to provide Americans across the United States and beyond the opportunity to discuss issues in the relationship with leading experts. The tenth annual CHINA Town Hall will take place on October 18, 2016 and will feature Dr. Henry A. Kissinger as the national webcast speaker.

In addition to his years as national security advisor (1969-1975) and secretary of state (1973-1977), Dr. Kissinger has also taught at Harvard University and is currently chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.  While national security advisor, Dr. Kissinger played a crucial role in arranging President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, which opened the door to the re-establishment of U.S.-China relations.

The event will also feature Orville Schell speaking in person at Harvard. Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent book is Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century. He is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books, among others.

Schell graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a PhD (Abd) in Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell was a Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.