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
America's foremost chronicler of contemporary China brilliantly illuminates the new power structure, economic initiatives, and cultural changes that have transformed China since the Tianamen Square massacre of 1989. "A rich portrait, capturing a fascinating and perhaps fateful moment in China's long, turbulent history".--Arnold R. Isaacs, San Francisco Chronicle.
A uniquely experienced observer of China gives us a sweeping historical novel that takes us on a journey from the rise of Mao Zedong in 1949 to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, as a father and his son are swept away by a relentless series of devastating events. It's 1950, and pianist Li Tongshu is one of the few Chinese to have graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Engaged to a Chinese-American violinist who is the daughter of a missionary father and a Shanghai-born mother, Li Tongshu is drawn not just by Mao's grand promise to "build a new China" but also by the enthusiasm of many other Chinese artists and scientists living abroad, who take hope in Mao's promise of a rejuvenated China. And so when the recently established Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing offers Li Tongshu a teaching position, he leaves San Francisco and returns home with his new wife. But instead of being allowed to teach, Li Tongshu is plunged into Mao's manic revolution, which becomes deeply distrustful of his Western education and his American wife. It's not long before his son, Little Li, also gets caught up in the maelstrom of political and ideological upheaval that ends up not only savaging the Li family but, ultimately, destroying the essential fabric of Chinese society.
A lively tour through experimental Chinese photography from the early 1990s to today The past thirty years were dynamic, transformative decades in Chinese photography. Artists exposed to recent work from around the globe experimented with photography in newly conceptual and expressive ways, and their art from this period offers a portrait of a country at a moment of rapid urbanization, globalization, and cultural foment. A Window Suddenly Opens reveals the key role that photography has played in questioning and refashioning the aesthetic and social status quo of modern Chinese society for the past three decades. Alongside prescient works by Cao Fei, Lin Tianmiao, Rong Rong, Song Dong, Wang Qingsong, Zhang Huan, Zhang Peili, and many other artists, essays and interviews by scholars and curators explore the history of experimental photography in China and the artistic transformations of the digital age. The book also features texts written between 1994 and 2014 by Chinese artists, some published for the first time here in English, which offer essential insights into their ideas and experiences as they forged new creative paths. To explore further, readers can instantly access artist videos inside this book with Hirshhorn Eye, the Hirshhorn Museum's award-winning image-recognition technology. Published in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Exhibition Schedule: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (November 4, 2022-January 7, 2024)
On the night of June 3-4, 1989, Chinese troops violently crushed the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in the history of the communist regime. In this extraordinary collection of hundreds of internal government and Communist Party documents, secretly smuggled out of China, we learn how these events came to pass from behind the scenes. The material reveals how the most important decisions were made; and how the turmoil split the ruling elite into radically opposed factions. The book includes the minutes of the crucial meetings at which the Elders decided to cashier the pro-reform Party secretary Zhao Ziyang and to replace him with Jiang Zemin, to declare martial law, and finally to send the troops to drive the students from the Square. Just as the Pentagon Papers laid bare the secret American decision making behind the Vietnam War and changed forever our view of the nation's political leaders, so too has The Tiananmen Papers altered our perception of how and why the events of June 4 took the shape they did. Its publication has proven to be a landmark event in Chinese and world history.
An insightful and recondite chronicle of a journey through Chinese Turkestan retracing the ancient routes that were once essential to world trade offers a rich and revealing portrait of one of the world's most unfamiliar and fascinating areas. Reprint.
A portrait of China. From the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and the brutal crackdown that followed, to the country's rebirth as an economic powerhouse where almost anything can be bought but little of political significance can be said, Schell takes the reader inside China.
Published between 1951 and 1978, these posters chart the progress of Zedong's political development--from his school days through the formation of the Chinese Communist Party to the end of the Cultural Revolution and his death in 1976. Created in a uniquely Chinese-socialist style, they are a record of the evolution of modern China and the man who controlled it. 210 illustrations.
What has made remote, mountainous Tibet and its only real celebrity, the Dalai Lama, so abidingly fascinating to the West? In Virtual Tibet, Orville Schell, one of the preeminent experts on modern China and Tibet, undertakes a strange and wondrous odyssey into our Tibetan fantasies. He recounts the spellbinding adventures of the Western explorers and spiritualists who for centuries were bent on reaching forbidden Tibet and the holy city of Lhasa. Simultaneously, Schell embarks on a parallel present-day journey from Beastie Boys' "Free Tibet" concerts to a re-creation of Lhasa in the high Argentine Andes -- the extravagant set of Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt. At once comic and insightful, Virtual Tibet takes us beyond the fantasies to the reality of an isolated country that has repeatedly won the West's adoration, and paid the price for believing that our allegiance is profound.
Current Affairs/Asian Studies Perhaps no nation in recent history has undergone as total a transformation as China has in the past twenty-five years. For Chinese leaders, the death of Mao Zedong, the rise of Deng Xiaoping, and unprecedented economic growth have spawned new complexities. For the country's 1.3 billion citizens, changes have been equally dramatic, from skyrocketing sales in automobiles and satellite dishes to an explosion in violent crime and drug trafficking. The China Reader: The Reform Era is a fascinating compilation by two astute China watchers of the most important documents, articles, and statements on China from 1972 to the present. Here are the voices of the experts, from Chinese analyses of the fall of Soviet Communism to Western exposés of an ecological crisis that threatens global weather patterns into the next millennium. Here, too, are the artifacts of an era, from regulations to control Chinese cyberspace to a Party member's Orwellian justification of the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Authoritative and comprehensive, The China Reader is a timely guide to understanding a nation in the throes of change--a historic moment with profound implications for policy makers and markets from the Pacific Rim to Wall Street.
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