Wealth and Power

May 27, 2013
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. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM.

May 15, 2013
From humiliation to glory: A vigorous scouring of the historical record by two crack Chinese scholars fleshes out the troughs and triumphs of Chinese greatness. It's helpful to remember that the rise of China didn't happen overnight, a fact that these elucidating essays demonstrate. Since China's humiliation in the mid-19th century at the hands of the imperialist powers, it has embarked on a path of self-criticism and self-strengthening, which Asia Society Center fellows Schell (Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, 2000, etc.) and Delury find strangely affirming. China's Year 1 was the Treaty of Nanjing on August 11, 1842, signed with Britain after the disastrous three-year Opium War; Wei Yuan, a middle-ranking Qing official, found in its sad aftermath a need for reform of China's defense and international relations, even if it meant learning from the "barbarian" enemy. He refashioned the Confucian motto for the country: "Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused." Feng Guifen, a scholarly administrator in the Qing dynasty based in Shanghai, similarly urged (in Dissenting Views from a Hut Near Bin) the need to "master the secrets of its new adversaries by admitting their superiority and adopting some of their ways, or perishing." Self-strengthening would remain the rallying cry, from Empress Dowager Cixi, aka Dragon Lady, to important reformist leaders Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Chen Duxiu, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Their theme: The Chinese past was rotten, the failures needed to be exposed, and the future demanded new thinking. Deng Xiaoping's bold economic retooling invited China's later opening up by Zhu Rongji yet also unleashed democratic activism by such notable figures as Nobel Prize-winning writer Liu Xiaobo. An astute, knowledgeable and nicely accessible history and assessment of China for all readers.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from June 15, 2013

In the 1970s, China was an economic and international backwater reeling from the Cultural Revolution. Today, China has the second largest economy in the world and is a major player in international affairs. Schell (director, Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Soc.; To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the 80s) and Delury (East Asian studies, Yonsei Univ., Seoul, Korea) explain that this dramatic transformation stretches back to the early 19th century. Their book is essentially 11 minibiographies of important Chinese thinkers and leaders from the early 19th century to the present. Through the stories of these individuals, readers learn about the broader picture of China's recent history, as well as how these figures contributed to the modernization of China. The authors deftly reveal how both Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms had their intellectual origins in the ideas of earlier thinkers. VERDICT This is essential reading for all students of modern Chinese history and those keeping up with international affairs. It is scholarly yet it will also be accessible to the interested general reader. Odd Arne Westad's Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, which covers China's foreign relations over roughly the same era, complements it well.--Joshua Wallace, South Texas Coll. Lib., McAllen

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2013
Many contemporary books examining China's recent gains in wealth and power (often with ominous overtones) have sought out and found answers in recent geopolitical trends. Schell and Delury suggest that we might best understand China's ascendancy by taking a longer view. Although we may not see China's Olympic success or Beijing's massive state-of-the-art Capital Airport as responses to ancient defeats, symbolic or otherwise, China's early formative interactions with the West were humiliating in a way that, over time, would become a source of motivation driving the construction of a new cultural identity. Like a set of genes that is firmly implanted on a genome and is then faithfully transmitted from generation to generation thereafter, they suggest, the urge to see China restored to greatness has been expressing itself over and over since Confucian scholars with legalist tendencies such as Wei Yuan first began fretting over the Qing Dynasty's early nineteenth-century decline. Examining in rich detail the actions of key thinkers and leaders from Wei Yuan and Liang Qichao to Mao and Deng Xiaoping, this selection compellingly reveals a different side of China's trajectory and suggests that it may take several more generations before China's success ultimately salves its insecurity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)