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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 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.
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