Sypnosis:
Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of todays foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this countrys rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war,andrevolution,manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creationculminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?
Wealth and Power answers this question by examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China. This fascinating survey begins in the lead - up to the first Opium War with Wei Yuan, the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer who was one of the first to urge China to borrow ideas from the West.
It concludes in our time with human-rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, an outspoken opponent of single-party rule. Along the way, we meet titans of Chinese culture, whose common goal is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, shorthand for 'wealth and power', something that has come to define the modern Chinese character and remains the key to understanding many of China's actions today.
The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit offuqiang,wealth and power. This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a century of humiliation at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. Its what drove both Mao and Deng to embark on root-and-branch transformations of Chinese society, first by means of Marxism-Leninism, then by authoritarian capitalism. And this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of Chinas actions today.
By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of todays resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the countrys 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.