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China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century
Random House
July 2013
On Sale: July 19, 2013
496 pages
ISBN: 0679643478
EAN: 9780679643470
Kindle: B00BH0VU4W
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of todayβs foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this countryβs 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 creationβculminating 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, βwealth and power.β This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a βcentury of humiliationβ at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. Itβs 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 Chinaβs actions today.
By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of todayβs resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the countryβs 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.
 Media BuzzMorning Edition - July 18, 2013
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - July 18, 2013
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