What is the nature of the vast part of China’s penal system that has long been dedicated to extra-judicial detention, imprisonment, and compulsory “forced labor” in the PRC? What sort of effects did this system have on its victims, their families, friendships, marriages, and communities in terms of physical, psychological and social damage? Finally, what will the lingering effects be of these many decades of abuse against society and the body politic?
About the Speakers
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations and Vice President at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor at and dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He authored more than numerous, including Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century (with John Delury, Random House, 2013) and his latest book Inside China’s Secret Prisons: An Undercover Exposé and its Lasting Legacy (Columbia University Press, 2026). He contributed to numerous edited volumes and written widely for magazines, newspapers, and websites, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, The China Quarterly, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Frank Dikötter lives in Palo Alto, California, where he is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His books have changed the way historians view China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his award-winning People's Trilogy documenting the lives of ordinary people under Mao. His last book, published n February, is Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity.
Rowena He is author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China and a three-time recipient of the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence. Her op-eds have appeared in The Washington Post, The DIPLOMAT, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and The Nation. She has testified before U.S. Congressional Hearings and delivered lectures for the U.S. State Department and Global Affairs Canada. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016. Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
Glenn Tiffert is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs Hoover’s program on the US, China, and the World, and also leads Stanford’s participation in the National Science Foundation’s SECURE program, a $67 million effort authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 to enhance the security and integrity of the US research enterprise.
