CONFUCIUS taught that "propriety and righteousness" were the foundations of the state, and "power and profit" were its enemies. The history of modern China, culminating in the wealth-creating reforms of Deng Xiaoping, has been dedicated to proving him wrong.
In this superb book, Orville Schell and John Delury chart the intellectual struggles of the nation’s great modern thinkers. They conclude that a "common chord rings through all their work": how to make China strong and wealthy after its 19th-century collapse under foreign assault and internal putrefaction.
"Wealth and power" is a concept dating back 2,500 years, to before China was unified under the brutally pragmatic Qin emperor in 221BCE. A group known as the Legalists had emerged as critics of Confucius, rejecting the philosopher’s idea of a harmonious society and advocating what we might call realpolitik.
In China, the Legalist tradition had been overshadowed by Confucian concepts of piety and loyalty. The authors convincingly argue the rebirth of China has involved a rediscovery of its pragmatic Legalist roots. The book charts the process through the intellectuals who wrestled with the problems of how to overcome foreign domination and a dysfunctional domestic system. They trace those ideas through early 20th-century thinkers such as Liang Qichao through to Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and Deng himself.
Details
- TITLE: Wealth and power: China's long march to the twenty-first century
- AUTHOR: Orville Schell and John Delury
- PUBLISHER: Little, Brown
The earlier parts of the book are the most fascinating because they are the least familiar. Wei Yuan (1794-1857), a scholar who became increasingly preoccupied with China’s military inferiority, aired the ideas of the long-ignored Legalists — even a "sage king" needed to make his subjects wealthy and his nation strong.
After China’s humiliation by the British in the first opium war (1839-42), Wei arrived at the same conclusion as Japan’s Meiji leaders in the 19th century; China needed to look abroad to restore its greatness. He also advocated what would become a powerful motif: to spur change, the Chinese must nurture their humiliation; "To feel shame is to approach courage". That sense of humiliation burns in China’s youth today, in what the authors call a "hypersensitive patriotism".
The book is beautifully written and neatly structured around the lives of the actors in China’s philosophical and revolutionary drama. That allows us to draw threads together and start making sense of what can seem a chaotic, stop-start history, at least until Deng. All the protagonists are motivated by overcoming humiliation and securing national wealth and power. So when Deng was sent to Europe to study, he told his father: "China was weak and we wanted to make her strong, and China was poor and we wanted to make her richer." Today, President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream melds the twin goals of creating prosperity and securing the "rejuvenation of the Chinese nation".
The book even places the mad and brutal years of Mao in this tradition. In one of his first essays, in 1912, Mao celebrated what the authors call the Legalists’ emphasis on "strong leadership, rigid authoritarian controls, strict centralism and an uncompromising system of laws and punishments". His destruction of feudalism created a tabula rasa on which Deng could build, they write. The China Deng inherited was "far closer to escaping the drag of its four thousand years of tradition".
This, though, leaves modern China with a deep problem. If its rise is the triumph of a Legalist "whatever works approach", where is the moral core vacated by Confucianism? The book ends on Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has challenged the party’s centrality. In his view, regaining national pride is as much about just, humane government as wealth and power.
Many of the thinkers named in the book were out of step with their time. Chen Duxiu, founder of the Communist Party, died in obscurity. Still, their ideas ended up at the heart of the modern Chinese project. The unfashionable convictions now being advocated by Liu, the authors imply, could yet play a pivotal role.
About the authors
ORVILLE SCHELL He is an activist and writer working on China, and is the Arthur Ross director of the Centre on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He previously served as dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell attended Harvard University, leaving after his junior year to study Chinese, first at Stanford University and then at National Taiwan University.
While in Taiwan, Schell began writing columns for the Boston Globe as its “man in Asia”. He then returned to Harvard and studied Asian history, culture and politics. In 1992, Schell won an Emmy Award and an Alfred I duPont Award — Columbia University Silver Baton for producing 60 Minutes’ Made in China, a documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
JOHN DELURY He is assistant professor of East Asian studies at Yonsei University, in Seoul. Delury received his PhD in modern Chinese history at Yale University, where he wrote his dissertation on the Ming-Qing Confucian scholar Gu Yanwu. He has taught at Brown, Columbia and Peking University, and was associate director of the Asia Society’s Centre on US-China Relations.
© 2013 The Financial Times
