Wealth and Power
China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century
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Descrizione dell’editore
By now everyone knows the basic facts of China's rise to pre-eminence over the past three decades. But how did this erstwhile sleeping giant finally manage to arrive at its current phase of dynamic growth? How did a century-long succession of failures to change somehow culminate in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?
By examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China, Wealth and Power addresses these questions. This fascinating survey moves from the lead-up to the first Opium War through to contemporary opposition to single-party rule. Along the way, we meet titans of Chinese history, intellectuals and political figures.
By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of today's resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the country's tortured progression from nineteenth-century decline to twenty-first-century boom. By looking backward into the past to understand forces at work for hundreds of years, they help us understand China today and the future that this singular country is helping shape for all of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schell and Delury, both experts on China (the latter is the director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations; the former is a senior fellow there), track the intellectual and political pursuit of fuqiang, or wealth and power, by Chinese thinkers and leaders in response to the humiliations heaped upon their country by Western powers, beginning with the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. The work comprises chronologically ordered minibiographies, stretching from Ming "scholar-official" Wei Yuan to present-day Nobel Peace Prize laureate and outspoken dissident Liu Xiaobo, with long sections devoted to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The heart of the book follows the path from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 through the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, to the beginnings of economic prosperity under Deng. In the authors' view, Mao's "demolition of old structures and strictures" cleared the Chinese conceptual landscape, "making it shovel-ready' for Deng's own great enterprise' of reform and opening up." All along the road to fuqiang, the leading lights of China have been ideologically pragmatic, trading one concept for another as circumstances dictated. Considering China's quickening ascendancy, this is a timely and crucial volume. Photos.
