Reviews
Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century by Orville Schell, John Delury
fictionfan's review against another edition
5.0
“When the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.” Wei Yuan, 1842
“From ‘Our technology is not as good as other people’s,’ to ‘Our political system is not as good as other people’s,’ and on to ‘Our culture is not as good as other people’s,’ Chinese reflections on our own defects probed ever deeper. But the primary mind-set that guided the probing was neither ‘liberation of humanity,’ nor even ‘enriching people,’ but rather a sense of shame at China’s loss of sovereignty and other national humiliations.”
These words of Nobel Prize winning dissident, Liu Xiaobo, give a rather neat summary of the arguments put forward in this fascinating and thought-provoking study of the Chinese psyche over the last 150 years or so, as evidenced and influenced by its greatest intellectuals, writers and leaders. The aim of the authors is to shed some light on how, in the last three decades, China has risen out of the poverty and political turmoil of the preceding century to become one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.
The authors show how the encroachment of the Western empires and defeats at the hands of enemies within and without led, not just to the fall of the empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, but to the creation of a national mind-set that has kept the aim of achieving ‘wealth and power’ at the heart of Chinese politics ever since. The succession of military defeats and subsequent ‘unequal treaties’, which forced China to pay punitive reparations and give territory and access to foreign states, led to a spirit of ‘national humiliation’. Far from allowing this to become a negative factor, however, successive intellectuals and leaders used it as a spur to galvanise China into a process of ‘self-strengthening’. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the main thrust was to borrow what was needed from the West in terms of technical and scientific knowledge, while maintaining the existing Confucian culture. But the authors show how, as that failed to make China strong enough to defy the many circling predators, gradually some intellectuals began to believe that there must be a period of ‘destruction’ of cultural sacred cows before ‘construction’ of a new and stronger state could begin.
Each chapter focuses on one man, a leading intellectual or politician, taking us gradually through the decades from the end of the Opium wars to the present day. The emphasis is not on the events of any given period, although of course they are referenced and highlighted. Rather, the authors concentrate on the writings and speeches of each man, showing how each generation of political thought adopted, rejected or built on the ideas of the one before. Many of the people who are discussed were entirely unknown to me, especially those prior to WW2, but the authors create a continuous chain of intellectual development, clearly showing how and why ideas were influenced by, and adjusted in reaction to, events at home or abroad.
The authors take a sympathetic approach to their subject – in the afterword they tell us that the book is part of a project undertaken by the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York to examine China’s reform movement and transition to modernity. They attempt, successfully in my view, to explain to a Western audience the cultural differences that have enabled China to follow a path that seems, to our eyes, doomed to fail – to build a society that values the acquisition of ‘wealth and power’ above things that we see as essential for progress: intellectual freedom, human rights, democracy. While in no way condoning the horrors of the era of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, they suggest that this period of destructiveness may in fact have cleared the way, culturally, for the creation under Deng Xiaoping of the ‘Leninist capitalist’ system that has enabled China to become the powerhouse it is today. An unequal society, yes, and with repression still at its core, but a country governed largely with the consent of its people nonetheless.
They end with some informed speculation about where next for China - having gained ‘wealth and power’ will they use that power to bully other nations as they were bullied in their nineteenth century weakness? Or will they, from a position of strength, continue to open up their society and perhaps gradually move towards an intellectual position and political system more closely aligned with the West?
I found this a lengthier read than its size would necessarily suggest, since after every few pages I would discover that I was staring at a wall and thinking. It has challenged and changed my pre-existing assumptions, certainly about China’s culture and system of government but perhaps also about our own. It has gone a long way towards answering the question why China, alone of all the major states that adopted authoritarian non-democratic systems during the twentieth century, seems eventually to have made a relative success of it while retaining the support of the majority of its citizens.
Apologies for the length of this review, but I still feel I’ve given the merest glimpse into this highly illuminating and thought-provoking read. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who is interested in understanding the national psyche of a nation that seems destined soon to be the wealthiest and most powerful of all.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
“From ‘Our technology is not as good as other people’s,’ to ‘Our political system is not as good as other people’s,’ and on to ‘Our culture is not as good as other people’s,’ Chinese reflections on our own defects probed ever deeper. But the primary mind-set that guided the probing was neither ‘liberation of humanity,’ nor even ‘enriching people,’ but rather a sense of shame at China’s loss of sovereignty and other national humiliations.”
These words of Nobel Prize winning dissident, Liu Xiaobo, give a rather neat summary of the arguments put forward in this fascinating and thought-provoking study of the Chinese psyche over the last 150 years or so, as evidenced and influenced by its greatest intellectuals, writers and leaders. The aim of the authors is to shed some light on how, in the last three decades, China has risen out of the poverty and political turmoil of the preceding century to become one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.
The authors show how the encroachment of the Western empires and defeats at the hands of enemies within and without led, not just to the fall of the empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, but to the creation of a national mind-set that has kept the aim of achieving ‘wealth and power’ at the heart of Chinese politics ever since. The succession of military defeats and subsequent ‘unequal treaties’, which forced China to pay punitive reparations and give territory and access to foreign states, led to a spirit of ‘national humiliation’. Far from allowing this to become a negative factor, however, successive intellectuals and leaders used it as a spur to galvanise China into a process of ‘self-strengthening’. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the main thrust was to borrow what was needed from the West in terms of technical and scientific knowledge, while maintaining the existing Confucian culture. But the authors show how, as that failed to make China strong enough to defy the many circling predators, gradually some intellectuals began to believe that there must be a period of ‘destruction’ of cultural sacred cows before ‘construction’ of a new and stronger state could begin.
Each chapter focuses on one man, a leading intellectual or politician, taking us gradually through the decades from the end of the Opium wars to the present day. The emphasis is not on the events of any given period, although of course they are referenced and highlighted. Rather, the authors concentrate on the writings and speeches of each man, showing how each generation of political thought adopted, rejected or built on the ideas of the one before. Many of the people who are discussed were entirely unknown to me, especially those prior to WW2, but the authors create a continuous chain of intellectual development, clearly showing how and why ideas were influenced by, and adjusted in reaction to, events at home or abroad.
The authors take a sympathetic approach to their subject – in the afterword they tell us that the book is part of a project undertaken by the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York to examine China’s reform movement and transition to modernity. They attempt, successfully in my view, to explain to a Western audience the cultural differences that have enabled China to follow a path that seems, to our eyes, doomed to fail – to build a society that values the acquisition of ‘wealth and power’ above things that we see as essential for progress: intellectual freedom, human rights, democracy. While in no way condoning the horrors of the era of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, they suggest that this period of destructiveness may in fact have cleared the way, culturally, for the creation under Deng Xiaoping of the ‘Leninist capitalist’ system that has enabled China to become the powerhouse it is today. An unequal society, yes, and with repression still at its core, but a country governed largely with the consent of its people nonetheless.
They end with some informed speculation about where next for China - having gained ‘wealth and power’ will they use that power to bully other nations as they were bullied in their nineteenth century weakness? Or will they, from a position of strength, continue to open up their society and perhaps gradually move towards an intellectual position and political system more closely aligned with the West?
I found this a lengthier read than its size would necessarily suggest, since after every few pages I would discover that I was staring at a wall and thinking. It has challenged and changed my pre-existing assumptions, certainly about China’s culture and system of government but perhaps also about our own. It has gone a long way towards answering the question why China, alone of all the major states that adopted authoritarian non-democratic systems during the twentieth century, seems eventually to have made a relative success of it while retaining the support of the majority of its citizens.
Apologies for the length of this review, but I still feel I’ve given the merest glimpse into this highly illuminating and thought-provoking read. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who is interested in understanding the national psyche of a nation that seems destined soon to be the wealthiest and most powerful of all.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
a_bookreader's review against another edition
5.0
I'm glad I read this book. Highly recommend. I read it last spring 2020.
senid's review against another edition
5.0
This book is a series of 1 or 2 chapter long biographies of key Chinese political leaders and thinkers. The period covered is from The Opium Wars to current day. As far as history books go, I love this format. I am very interested in the people living the history and their stories. Perhaps it is a problem reading books written in English by Western authors, but it seemed that there was a lot of focus on the West and it's influence.
skitch41's review
4.0
(Full Disclosure: I had the honor of meeting one of the co-authors of this book and getting my copy signed by him. Having said that, the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect that of the author or publisher.)
In recent years China has seen explosively economic growth. Even though China's growth is expected to slow down this year, it is still predicted to grow at an estimated 6-7%, a rate that most other countries envy. It has also allowed China to stretch its legs in international politics by joining the WTO and laying claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea. While China's economic and political rise may seem like a relatively recent event, especially when considered in the context of China's long history stretching back several millennia, its rise has been a long-sought-after goal stretching all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century. This wonderful book charts modern China's fall and rise through a series of biographical sketches of key Chinese scholars and political leaders such as Wei Yuan, the Empress Dowager Cixi, Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping. Each of these figures wrestled with the question of how to restore China to wealth and power in their own time and in their own way. Through their struggles we see how China's humiliation at the hands of the Western powers in the 19th century still haunts the country today. But what is also interesting is how, like a leit motif throughout a beautiful symphony, the question of where democracy and human rights fits into China's desires comes up repeatedly. Needless to say, many of these leaders had a complicated relationship with democracy ranging from hesitancy to outright hostility. The exception would be the last biographical sketch on Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese democracy activist who won China's first Nobel Peace Prize, but is still in jail for his activities. The point the authors seem to be making with his inclusion at the end is that, now that China has attained wealth and power, public figures like Liu Xiaobo may become more prominent in the future. The question that the authors leave us with is whether democracy is something Westerners desire for China or Chinese desire for themselves. Not all of the biographies in this book are great. The one covering Sun Yat-Sen was particularly forgettable, in spite of his influence on the thoughts of China's leaders in the 20th century. Still, this is a great history/multiple biography of modern China that I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about this increasingly wealthy and powerful country.
In recent years China has seen explosively economic growth. Even though China's growth is expected to slow down this year, it is still predicted to grow at an estimated 6-7%, a rate that most other countries envy. It has also allowed China to stretch its legs in international politics by joining the WTO and laying claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea. While China's economic and political rise may seem like a relatively recent event, especially when considered in the context of China's long history stretching back several millennia, its rise has been a long-sought-after goal stretching all the way back to the beginning of the 19th century. This wonderful book charts modern China's fall and rise through a series of biographical sketches of key Chinese scholars and political leaders such as Wei Yuan, the Empress Dowager Cixi, Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping. Each of these figures wrestled with the question of how to restore China to wealth and power in their own time and in their own way. Through their struggles we see how China's humiliation at the hands of the Western powers in the 19th century still haunts the country today. But what is also interesting is how, like a leit motif throughout a beautiful symphony, the question of where democracy and human rights fits into China's desires comes up repeatedly. Needless to say, many of these leaders had a complicated relationship with democracy ranging from hesitancy to outright hostility. The exception would be the last biographical sketch on Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese democracy activist who won China's first Nobel Peace Prize, but is still in jail for his activities. The point the authors seem to be making with his inclusion at the end is that, now that China has attained wealth and power, public figures like Liu Xiaobo may become more prominent in the future. The question that the authors leave us with is whether democracy is something Westerners desire for China or Chinese desire for themselves. Not all of the biographies in this book are great. The one covering Sun Yat-Sen was particularly forgettable, in spite of his influence on the thoughts of China's leaders in the 20th century. Still, this is a great history/multiple biography of modern China that I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about this increasingly wealthy and powerful country.
gannent's review
5.0
A really fascinating look at modern Chinese history through important leaders and political figures, all fighting to gain wealth and power for China in their own way. The author did a really great job of weaving the themes throughout the book. This becomes especially obvious in later chapters when current strategies for attaining wealth and power are related to opinions of the figures earlier in the book. The chapters were also enjoyable to read, not too academic and not too pop fiction, just serious enough without being boring.
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