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Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

Schell, Orville; Delury, John

 
9780812976250: Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812976258 ISBN 13: 9780812976250
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s 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, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating 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 such titans of Chinese history as the Empress Dowager Cixi, public intellectuals Feng Guifen, Liang Qichao, and Chen Duxiu, Nationalist stalwarts Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu Rongji.
 
The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, “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. It’s 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 China’s actions today.
 
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.
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
  
“Superb . . . beautifully written and neatly structured.”—Financial Times
 
“[An] engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China’s modern rise.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Informative and insightful . . . a must-read for anyone with an interest in the world’s fastest-rising superpower.”—Slate
 
“It does a better job than most other books of answering a basic question the rest of the world naturally asks about China’s recent rise: What does China want?”—The Atlantic
 
“The portraits are beautifully written and bring to life not only their subjects but also the mood and intellectual debates of the times in which they lived.”—Foreign Affairs
 
“Excellent and erudite . . . [The authors] combine scholarly learning with a reportorial appreciation of colorful, revealing details.”—The National Interest

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Orville Schell was educated at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of numerous books and articles on China. The former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, he is presently the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City.
 
John Delury received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history at Yale University, where he wrote his dissertation on the Ming-Qing Confucian scholar Gu Yanwu. He taught at Brown, Columbia, and Peking University, and was associate director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. He is currently an assistant professor of East Asian studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

Wealth and Power (富国强兵)

The Burden of Dreams

As the Chinese empire was unraveling at the beginning of the twentieth century under the combined pressures of internal decay and foreign assault, political essayist and reformer Liang Qichao began writing an unlikely novel, The Future of New China. Published serially in a popular journal, it was a strange blend of patriotic reverie and science fiction conjuring up what a rejuvenated China might look like sixty years hence—after it had reemerged as a strong, prosperous, and respected country once again. Although Liang, the most influential public intellectual of his generation, completed only a few chapters, his fictional exercise allowed his many readers, distraught by the Qing Dynasty’s inability to adapt to modern times, to dream a little about what their benighted country might be like in an idealized future, circa 1962. As he imagined it then, the world’s leading scholars, statesmen, and merchants would all clamor to visit and pay tribute both to China’s modern present and its Confucian past at an international exposition to be held in Shanghai—strangely like the World Expo the city actually did hold in 2010. “I truly believe that this type of book can be a great help to China’s future,” Liang wrote.

The Future of New China was not exactly great literature, and Liang admitted as much, commenting self-deprecatingly that the work-in-progress made him “laugh at myself.” But reading the novel’s chapters today, when China is, in fact, ever more wealthy, powerful, and respected, imbues that long-ago moment with a triste sense of just how passionately Chinese then yearned to escape the bitter reality of their country’s humiliating decline, even if only by projecting themselves for a moment into an imaginary future.

Such fantasies were an all too understandable antidote to China’s century-long decline, and Liang was not the last to indulge in dreaming of remote triumphs. Four decades later, another well-known writer, Lin Yutang, contemplating a China largely occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army and steeped in even deeper misery, experienced a similar wishful prefiguration of the future. In his 1942 book Between Tears and Laughter, Lin described being visited by an “intuition,” almost “mystic” in nature, which “blew like a whiff of clean air through the tortuous maze in which my will and my mind were imprisoned and paralyzed.” He wrote defiantly how, even with backwardness and despair everywhere around him, he nonetheless “saw China growing strong.” “I know that this nation of 450,000,000 people, united and awakened and purged by the war-fire, is coming up,” he insisted against all evidence. “The strength lies in her and nothing the western nations can do can stop her or keep her down.”

Such improbable dreams of a wealthy, strong, and proud China gave expression to widespread but frustrated yearnings for a revival of national greatness that arose in the nineteenth century, when for the first time in centuries Chinese could no longer think automatically and indisputably of their empire as Zhongguo (中国), the “Central Kingdom.” Today, however, after three decades of dynamic economic growth on a scale and speed beyond anything the modern world has ever known, the fantasies of Liang Qichao and Lin Yutang seem prophetic.

Such a starkly unexpected ending to modern China’s torturous developmental story compels us to reexamine the narrative of endless modernization failure with which we have all grown up. How did China’s modern history of relentless humiliation and backwardness, of failed reform and disastrous revolution—the curse of generation after generation of would-be activists trying to create a “new China”—suddenly morph into such a story of triumph? Was it really just a sudden post-Mao miracle conjured up by Deng Xiaoping, or were the seeds of the present planted long ago, only germinating so slowly that at the time it was difficult to see, or even imagine the shape of things to come . . . ​except in a few fictional dreamscapes?

This is not another book heralding or bemoaning China’s rise. Instead, we have chosen to engage in what is more of a historical reflection on the backstory to China’s “economic miracle,” an attempt to use history to find a new vantage point on its progress, emphasizing the perspectives of the Chinese themselves. In short, our goal has been to embark on a somewhat different kind of explanation for how, after over a century of decline, occupation, civil war, state repression, and socialist revolution, China finally did manage to catapult itself into an era of stunning dynamism and economic growth. To do this, we have chosen to primarily rely not on new archival material, but instead on preexisting scholarship—both the older classics in the field and some more recent research—works in which both of us have been immersed over our many collective decades of studying China’s history. By standing on the shoulders of this collective body of work we hope to see a bit further toward the horizon of China’s future, so bound up as it is with China’s past. For it is these works that shaped, and continue to shape, our own thinking and understanding. And since both of us have also had long personal odysseys studying, living, and working in China, we have also drawn on some of these more immediate experiences that have also played an important role in helping us make sense out of how and why things have worked out as they have in this most singular of countries.

In reading through historical accounts of the lives, writings, and speeches of the diverse group of iconic political and intellectual figures presented in this book, a common chord rings through all their work—the abiding quest for fuqiang (富强), “wealth and power.” Our account of modern China is thus the story of how these national leaders marched their people down the long road to fuxing (复兴), rejuvenation, and, by doing so, made Chinese society finally more ready than ever before for the possibility of a more open and democratic future.

The couplet of characters fuqiang has most commonly been translated as “wealth and power,” and as a result the term—a shorthand version of the ancient adage fuguo qiangbing (富国强兵), “enrich the state and strengthen its military power”—has thus worked its way into historical literature in the English language. The expression was coined during the Warring States Period more than two millennia ago, as when the Legalist philosopher Han Feizi explained bluntly, “If a wise ruler masters wealth and power, he can have whatever he desires.” For Chinese reformers since the early nineteenth century, these two characters have repeatedly stood in for the profound desire among China’s cognoscenti to see their country restored to the kind of greatness their ancestors had once taken for granted. Above all, these patriotic Chinese yearned for their nation to be able to defend itself against foreign incursion. Although in classical times these two characters conveyed a certain sense of aggressiveness, when the phrase was revived in the nineteenth century in a context of an empire in decline and struggling to maintain its territorial integrity, the subtext of “wealth and power” was self-defense rather than foreign conquest. A more fitting translation might actually have been: “prosperity and strength.”

As China’s humiliation deepened through...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812976258
ISBN 13 
9780812976250
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Libri GmbH
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
Hessen
Deutschland