Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century

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. (July 16)