Orville Hickock Schell III (born May 20, 1940) is an American sinologist. He is currently Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. He previously served as dean of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

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.

Born in New York City in 1940, Schell attended Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut. After completing his high school education at Pomfret in 1958, Schell began attending Harvard University initially in its Class of 1962. He left Harvard in 1960 to study Chinese at Stanford University. Then from 1961 to 1962, Schell transferred to National Taiwan University to continue his studies in Chinese. While in Taiwan, Schell began writing "Man in Asia" columns for the Boston Globe. 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.

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.

Before his 1974 departure for China, Schell had already published three books, The China Reader, Starting Over: A College Reader and Modern China: The Story of a Revolution.

In 1975 Schell and his younger brother Jonathan Schell (who later wrote the bestseller The Fate of the Earth, and joined The Nation and the Nation Institute) became correspondents at The New Yorker. Schell has also served as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. He has written widely for many other magazine and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Time magazine, Harper's, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.