Orville is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and a renowned China scholar.

Orville was born in New York City, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern history, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a PhD (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese history. 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.

Orville is the author of 14 books, nine of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are, Virtual Tibet, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers,including The New Yorker, Time, Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, China Quarterly, and the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

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. Orville is 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.