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

Wealth and Power takes a new and interesting approach to give a history of China over the last century and a half. It is divided into chapters on key scholars and policy makers in China in which each chapter discusses the context and subsequent history of those individuals. Through the book the reader is given a history of China as well as an account of the progression of thought and how and why it evolved. It contextualizes issues of today and shows where they originated. The book has a great flow that takes the reader from the great humiliation of the Opium Wars to where China is today in the world, the issues it has overcome and the issues it still struggles with. Much material is embedded in Wealth and Power and it is extremely readable and interesting. I will try to give a quick overview of the people and history covered.The book is split into 15 chapters, for the most part each chapter covers 1 individual though Mao and Deng Xiaoping both take two chapters to cover. It starts with the Opium Wars where China's first "humiliation" at the hands of foreign powers began. The authors first discuss Wei Yuan who was a scholar in the early 1800s. It first introduces the concept of Wealth and Power and introduces Wei Yuan who they see as introducing ideas from the Legalist period of China to be more pragmatic about goals of governance for china compared to Confucian ideals. Through the Opium Wars the prioritizing of becoming more wealthy and powerful relative to following outdated bureaucratic process became an aspect of Wei Yuan's thinking and sets the stage for the subsequent chapters and returning to the concept of Wealth and Power. The author's move to Feng Guifen, a contemporary of Wei who spent more time among Europeans. The authors weave the characters together and relates the questions of each scholar together. Feng advocated learning from the barbarians. The authors move on to Empress Dowager Cixi an infamous character based off fanciful accounts of her behavior. The authors describe the power politics of the day but also discuss the philosophy of the decisions of the empress given the circumstances. Not so much a reformist the authors describe some aspects of her forward thinking about China's needs but she is used as a critical character in China's early modern history. The authors discuss Liang Qichao and the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The authors describe how criticisms of the Chinese system were growing and a recognition of the lack of progress of China becoming more abundant in science and technology. The authors note the growing sense of nationalism and desire to re-steer china back to its former glories. The author's move on to Sun Yat-Sen and the father of non-imperial China. It gives his history and that of the country 100 years ago. The chapter focuses on Sun Yat-Sen's global travels and pursuit of sympathetic Chinese to the failure of the nation and it discusses his 3 principles the country needed to follow namely - Nationalism, the rights of the People and the livelihood of the people. The authors move on to Chen Duxiu who was one of the founders of the Communist party. The authors document the turbulent times between the first and the second world war as Russia moved from Lenin to Stalin. It discusses the philosophical choices politicians had to consider given the conditions. The authors discuss the publishing's of Chen Duxiu in New Youth where he called for individuality, forward thinking, self defending, global and pragmatic. He saw the need to have a final stage of scientific thought and democratic rule, but a leninist means of achieving that end with a firm party. They then discuss Chian Kai-Shek, a key historic character. They discuss him as a military leader and politician and detail the cooperation and aggression of the nationalists and communists as a function of whether China's occupation. The authors move on to the two most influential political actors of the last century, Mao and Deng Xiaoping. They discuss early Mao and post political consolidation Mao, the Great Leapforward as well as the Cultural revolution. The turbulence of the times leads in to a discussion of Deng and his history of ascent followed by descent followed by ascent. The history gives a sense of why Deng focused on results rather than philosophy and how the years preceding his heading the party gave rise to his political and economic philosophy. The most important reforms for the recent growth of China were from Deng's vision of what was needed to prosper. We move on to the modern era first with Zhu Rongji who continued in Deng's footsteps and we end the book with Liu Xiaobo who is included to note that despite the economic success the democratic deficit within China remains.The authors tying together all of these characters does a remarkable job of making sense of China's history and national concerns. It shows how the nationalism that tied together so many of the political scholars in China for the last 150 years has helped get China to where it is by adopting economic ideas and foreign technology. The authors discuss how Mao's era might have been the reason why China was able to shed its Confucian ideological past and embrace a blank slate to try new experiments from. No doubt this was a painful way to achieve that blank slate and one always has to wonder if there were other less savage ways to have gotten it, but the issue is well posed. The author's discuss the future issues China will have to face and use Liu Xiaobo as an example of someone who might be looked on in history as setting the stage for the next intellectual shift- to a more democratic norm. The authors are careful to note that a nimble party might defy historical political evolution but the lack of democracy in China is resurfacing as a concern in a substantial way and civil unrest is increasing reminding us of Tienanmen Square. There is a lot of material in this and one gets a history of modern China as well as the politics that got us here.

I loved this book. Coming from a perspective of someone wishing to learn more about a country with limited base knowledge, I found this book like reading a fiction story. It held my attention while teaching me by breaking periods of time down into individual leaders of China. They author did a great job of jolting one's memory when the names began to pile up. It was packed full of information without being dry. I look forward to reading it again to solidify my understanding.

As a Chinese native who lived through part of the most controversial Chinese history on which I could not find an authoritative or “official” version in China, I bought this book as a timely history reference while writing Green Apple Red Book. Wealth and Power is a narrative history of China over the last 150 years or so, through biographic sketches of eleven "iconic intellectuals and leaders, reformers and revolutionaries": Wei Yuan, Feng Guifen, the Empress Dowager Cixi, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-Sen, Chen Duxiu, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Zhu Rongji, and Liu Xiaobo. Mao and Deng deservingly get double chapters. In this historical reflection on the backstory to China’s “economic miracles” and study of the Chinese ethos from the end of the Opium wars to the present day (as published in 2013), the authors shed light on China’s astral rising in wealth and power in the last three decades.Emphasizing the perspectives of the Chinese themselves, the authors attempt to explain the cultural differences that have enabled China to follow a path that values the acquisition of wealth and power above the western ideology of intellectual freedom, human rights and democracy. The main controversy, viewed by the westerners with pre-existing assumptions about China, is the authors’ nuanced portrayal and recognition of Mao, and to a lessor degree, Deng, whose image in the westerners’ view was tarnished for his role in Tiananmen Square student protest crackdown. Instead of labeling Mao as a simplistic “dictator,” “tyrant” or “mass murderer” in narratives familiar to the western readership, the authors' viewpoint on Mao reflects the complex “gratitude-grief-grievance” and “worship-fear-indifference” transition among the populace who had lived through the Mao era. A focal point is that Mao's "creative destruction" paved way for China's economic development led by Deng Xiaoping, whose pragmatism and ingenuity of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” has enabled China to become the powerhouse it is today.A lengthy read, the book has gone a long way towards answering the question why China has made a relative success of an authoritarian system while retaining the support of the majority of its citizens, on the surface at least, as the world’s largest population seems to have made an implicit bargain with the ruling Party, as long as its citizens are allowed to partake in growing wealth and the Motherland’s increasing power in the world.The long history of China is fraught with rulers who exercised their power to have the history book “commissioned” or rewritten. For Chinese natives who are consumers of the history its rulers and leaders make for them, this book is refreshingly informative and unapologetically objective, especially on the “post liberation” history since the Chinese Communist Party came to absolute power. More than six decades later, the Party seems determined to maintain its hard-fought “governing power from gun barrels” (quotation from Mao’s Little Red Book) by “enriching the state and strengthening its military power 富国强兵.” 富强 Wealth and Power is just a suiting shorthand of the ancient Chinese adage to describe China in the twenty-first century.

Excellent summary and overview for gaining a broad and comprehensive insight of the historical development of Chinese politics, culture, economy, research and development and zeitgeist in the last 200-400 years.

Last 150 years through different characters, their mindsets and ordeal to shape China from a feudal to a communist country

This is a very useful essay to better understand the roots of the Chinese diplomacy, easy to read and very interesting

This book lacks the freshness and feeling of immediacy present in most of Schell's books of the past three decades, but perhaps that is not what he intended with an essentially historical work. My problem with this book is the portrayal of Mao's butchery as "creative destruction." Would any Western author dare apply such a term to the mass murder of Hitler or Stalin? Chris Patten once remarked how shocked he was that some Westerners would display their Mao souvenirs in a way that they would not have done with Hitler artifacts. When the late Prof. Fairbank appeared to be apologizing for Mao, someone pointed out that Fairbank would not want his own grandchildren to live under Mao's system. Maybe there is a lesson here regarding the "creative destruction" that cost at least 30 million Chinese people their lives.

Excellent overview of China from the start of the 19th Century until now. I actually wish it was a little longer as the author just touches on some topics I find very interesting and left me wanting to read up more about on my own.