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Wealth and Power

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349139647

Price: £12.99

ON SALE: 1st September 2016

Genre: Humanities / History

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By now everyone knows the basic facts of China’s rise to pre-eminence over the past three decades. But how did this erstwhile sleeping giant finally manage to arrive at its current phase of dynamic growth? How did a century-long succession of failures to change somehow culminate in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?

By examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China, Wealth and Power addresses these questions. This fascinating survey moves from the lead-up to the first Opium War through to contemporary opposition to single-party rule. Along the way, we meet titans of Chinese history, intellectuals and political figures.

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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Reviews

Wealth and Power offers everything readers might expect from its two eminent authors. It is both sweeping and specific, authoritative and lively, sympathetic and critical, offering the perspective of both the hedgehog and the fox. The hardest challenge in writing about China, or finding things to read about it, is perceiving significant patterns while remaining aware of the chaos and contradictions. Orville Schell and John Delury meet that challenge in exemplary form. I only wish that they'd written the book years ago, so that (along with other readers) I could have been taking advantage of its insights all along
James Fallows, The Atlantic
A brilliantly original and essential book: the road map to China's quest for national salvation. This is a story of ideas and the vibrant figures who shaped them: rebels, thinkers, and rivals, united by the quest for reinvention. It is required reading for anyone seeking to understand China's motives and the future of global competition, and is, quite simply, a pleasure to read. Vivid, literate, and brimming with insights, Wealth and Power deserves to become a classic
Evan Osnos, New Yorker
In Wealth and Power, their crisp and comprehensive introduction to the history of modern China, historians Orville Schell and John Delury present us with the historical background we need to understand the driving mechanism that lies at the center of China today. By no longer presenting China's past two centuries as a record of recurrent failures and humiliations, they give us a portrait of a nation in the making, and of leaders with the skills and determination to redirect China's energies on a global scale. The change of perspective is valuable and challenging
Jonathan D. Spence, author of The Search for Modern China