Wealth and power China's long march to the twenty-first century

Orville Schell

Book - 2013

"Through a series of ... 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?"--Dust jacket flap.

Saved in:
This item has been withdrawn.

2nd Floor Show me where

951.05/Schell
All copies withdrawn
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 951.05/Schell Withdrawn
Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2013]
Language
English
Main Author
Orville Schell (author)
Other Authors
John Delury (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
478 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [411]-456) and index.
ISBN
9780679643470
  • Wealth and power
  • Humiliation : Wei Yuan
  • Self-strengthening : Feng Guifen
  • Western methods, Chinese core : Empress Dowager Cixi
  • New citizen : Liang Qichao
  • A sheet of loose sand : Sun Yat-sen
  • New youth : Chen Duxiu
  • Unification : Chiang Kai-shek
  • Not a dinner party : Mao Zedong, part I
  • Creative destruction : Mao Zedong, part II
  • Black cat, white cat : Deng Xiaoping, part I
  • Turmoil : Deng Xiaoping, part II
  • Entering the world : Zhu Rongji
  • No enemies, no hatred : Liu Xiaobo
  • Rejuvenation.
Review by New York Times Review

AS told in the magnum opus of ancient Chinese history, "Records of the Grand Historian," King Goujian knew how to nurse a grievance. At the start of his reign in the fifth century B.C., Goujian's archenemy attacked his kingdom, captured Goujian and made him a slave. The king was granted amnesty after three years and allowed to reclaim his throne. But Goujian swore off the trappings of monarchy, eating peasant food and living simply. He slept on a bed of brushwood and dangled a gallbladder from the ceiling, licking it to taste its bitterness every day. A Chinese aphorism, "sleeping on sticks and tasting gall," celebrates his determination to remember the shame and humiliation he suffered - and to draw strength from it. In "Wealth and Power," their engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China's modern rise, Orville Schell and John Delury note that the story of Goujian was a favorite of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who united China under his rule before being forced into exile in Taiwan. They might have called it the defining theme of contemporary China. From Wei Yuan in the early 19th century, the first major intellectual to insist that the mighty Chinese Empire had fundamental flaws, to Xi Jinping, who became China's top leader last year, the humiliations China has suffered at the hands of foreigners over the past century and a half are the glue that keeps the country together. Many nations revel in their victories. America has its War of Independence. The British still churn out documentaries about World War II. But even $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves has not healed the psychological trauma of 1842, the year of China's defeat at the hands of the British in the first Opium War. After that conflict, China was dismembered, first by the European powers, then, more devastatingly, by Japan. Chinese troops expelled the Japanese, and the country was reunified more than 60 years ago. But it is determined to keep the memory of the abuses it suffered from fading into history. Shame often acts as a depressant. But through the 11 biographical sketches that constitute their book, Schell and Delury argue that for generations of influential Chinese, shame has been a stimulant. In one sense, the evidence is not hard to find. The inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, splashily reopened in 2011, was called "The Road to Rejuvenation," which treated the Opium War as the founding event of modern China. And it then told a Disneyesque version of how the Communist Party restored the country's greatness. At the museum of the Temple of Tranquil Seas in Nanjing, the site of the signing of one of the most unequal of China's treaties with foreign powers, is inscribed this phrase: "To feel shame is to approach courage." Humiliation has been a staple of Communist Party propaganda. Schell, a prolific chronicler of China's reform-era politics and society, and Delury, an expert on Chinese and North Korean politics, acknowledge the cynicism behind the party's use of shame as a nationalist rallying cry. But their book makes the case that such feelings represent a deep strain in the Chinese psyche, which the country's current leaders have inherited as part of their cultural DNA. To love China means to share a passionate commitment to overcoming the loss of face suffered in the 19th century, to ensure that the defeats of the past will never be suffered again. This is not the first book to explore the legacy of the Opium Wars or the origins of Chinese nationalism. But what it offers readers is the idea that the most important Chinese intellectuals and political leaders, from the Empress Dowager Cixi to Deng Xiaoping, were united in the national quest to avenge humiliation. They all felt shame, and used it as the path to "wealth and power." MANY of the steps they took were disastrous. Over a century and a half China has stumbled through imperial rule, warlordism, republicanism and Communism. Its leaders have reigned through feudalism, fascism, totalitarianism and capitalism. But for Schell and Delury, none of those conflicting systems or ideologies in the end defined China, or even the leaders who imposed them. Instead, the constant through China's recent history is the persistent search for something - anything - that would bring restoration. The reformers of the early 19th century were the first to declare that China was "big and weak," and though the statement was true, at the time it bordered on heresy. The solution the early reformers proposed was "to self-strengthen," which would be achieved by adopting selective Western technologies and methods. By the turn of the 20th century, after a series of even more severe setbacks, prescriptions from scholars and advisers grew bolder. Liang Qichao, who founded the Sense of Shame Study Society, felt Chinese culture bred timidity. He wanted to destroy China's Confucian "core" and rebuild the country from scratch with imported Western ideas. That was the template China's Nationalist leaders, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kaishek, followed for years as they struggled to figure out which Western political, cultural and economic formulas could reinvigorate their country. Schell and Delury are more provocative in arguing that Liang's ideas of "creative destruction" also led, in a more or less straight line, to Mao Zedong. Much of Mao's brutally destructive legacy - the mass killings of class enemies, the famine-inducing Great Leap Forward, the catastrophic Cultural Revolution - should be viewed, they suggest, less through the prism of radical Marxism than as an attempt to exorcise Confucian passivity. Mao especially wanted to eliminate the traditional ideal of "harmony" and replace it with a mandate to pursue "permanent revolution," an inversion of Chinese cultural traditions he believed essential to unleashing the country's productive forces. Schell and Delury do not say that Mao intended to pave the way for Deng and his acolytes, including Zhu Rongji, whom they present as the most successful implementer of Deng's ideas. But they do seek to show that Deng's pursuit of marketoriented reforms might well have met far more resistance if Mao had not bequeathed him a blank slate - that is, a ruling party exhausted by bloody campaigns and a people purged of their ancient notions of order. Deng's tactics may have been the polar opposite of Mao's, but their goals, realized partly under Deng and rather spectacularly by his successors, were precisely the same. Despite the book's title, this is not a definitive guide to China's rise. Schell and Delury devote only a few pages to economics, the core of most other big works on China's emergence as a great power. But their examination of how an unusual trait in Chinese culture worked its way through politics and intellectual life is a fascinating attempt to reconcile China's current success with its past suffering. It also sets the stage for perhaps the biggest challenge facing a much wealthier and more powerful China today, since it cannot go on fighting its vanquished ghosts forever. Joseph Kahn is the foreign editor and a former Beijing bureau chief of The Times.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Many contemporary books examining China's recent gains in wealth and power (often with ominous overtones) have sought out and found answers in recent geopolitical trends. Schell and Delury suggest that we might best understand China's ascendancy by taking a longer view. Although we may not see China's Olympic success or Beijing's massive state-of-the-art Capital Airport as responses to ancient defeats, symbolic or otherwise, China's early formative interactions with the West were humiliating in a way that, over time, would become a source of motivation driving the construction of a new cultural identity. Like a set of genes that is firmly implanted on a genome and is then faithfully transmitted from generation to generation thereafter, they suggest, the urge to see China restored to greatness has been expressing itself over and over since Confucian scholars with legalist tendencies such as Wei Yuan first began fretting over the Qing Dynasty's early nineteenth-century decline. Examining in rich detail the actions of key thinkers and leaders from Wei Yuan and Liang Qichao to Mao and Deng Xiaoping, this selection compellingly reveals a different side of China's trajectory and suggests that it may take several more generations before China's success ultimately salves its insecurity.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Schell and Delury, both experts on China (the latter is the director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations; the former is a senior fellow there), track the intellectual and political pursuit of fuqiang, or wealth and power, by Chinese thinkers and leaders in response to the humiliations heaped upon their country by Western powers, beginning with the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. The work comprises chronologically ordered minibiographies, stretching from Ming "scholar-official" Wei Yuan to present-day Nobel Peace Prize laureate and outspoken dissident Liu Xiaobo, with long sections devoted to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The heart of the book follows the path from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 through the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, to the beginnings of economic prosperity under Deng. In the authors' view, Mao's "demolition of old structures and strictures" cleared the Chinese conceptual landscape, "making it 'shovel-ready' for Deng's own 'great enterprise' of reform and opening up." All along the road to fuqiang, the leading lights of China have been ideologically pragmatic, trading one concept for another as circumstances dictated. Considering China's quickening ascendancy, this is a timely and crucial volume. Photos. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (July 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In the 1970s, China was an economic and international backwater reeling from the Cultural Revolution. Today, China has the second largest economy in the world and is a major player in international affairs. Schell (director, Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Soc.; To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the 80s) and Delury (East Asian studies, Yonsei Univ., Seoul, Korea) explain that this dramatic transformation stretches back to the early 19th century. Their book is essentially 11 minibiographies of important Chinese thinkers and leaders from the early 19th century to the present. Through the stories of these individuals, readers learn about the broader picture of China's recent history, as well as how these figures contributed to the modernization of China. The authors deftly reveal how both Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms had their intellectual origins in the ideas of earlier thinkers. VERDICT This is essential reading for all students of modern Chinese history and those keeping up with international affairs. It is scholarly yet it will also be accessible to the interested general reader. Odd Arne Westad's Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, which covers China's foreign relations over roughly the same era, complements it well.-Joshua -Wallace, South Texas Coll. Lib., McAllen (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

From humiliation to glory: A vigorous scouring of the historical record by two crack Chinese scholars fleshes out the troughs and triumphs of Chinese greatness. It's helpful to remember that the rise of China didn't happen overnight, a fact that these elucidating essays demonstrate. Since China's humiliation in the mid-19th century at the hands of the imperialist powers, it has embarked on a path of self-criticism and self-strengthening, which Asia Society Center fellows Schell (Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, 2000, etc.) and Delury find strangely affirming. China's Year 1 was the Treaty of Nanjing on August 11, 1842, signed with Britain after the disastrous three-year Opium War; Wei Yuan, a middle-ranking Qing official, found in its sad aftermath a need for reform of China's defense and international relations, even if it meant learning from the "barbarian" enemy. He refashioned the Confucian motto for the country: "Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused." Feng Guifen, a scholarly administrator in the Qing dynasty based in Shanghai, similarly urged (in Dissenting Views from a Hut Near Bin) the need to "master the secrets of its new adversaries by admitting their superiority and adopting some of their ways, or perishing." Self-strengthening would remain the rallying cry, from Empress Dowager Cixi, aka Dragon Lady, to important reformist leaders Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Chen Duxiu, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Their theme: The Chinese past was rotten, the failures needed to be exposed, and the future demanded new thinking. Deng Xiaoping's bold economic retooling invited China's later opening up by Zhu Rongji yet also unleashed democratic activism by such notable figures as Nobel Prizewinning writer Liu Xiaobo. An astute, knowledgeable and nicely accessible history and assessment of China for all readers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 Introduction Wealth and Power (富国强兵) The Burden of Dreams As the Chinese empire was unraveling at the beginning of the twentieth century under the combined pressures of internal decay and foreign assault, political essayist and reformer Liang Qichao began writing an unlikely novel, The Future of New China. Published serially in a popular journal, it was a strange blend of patriotic reverie and science fiction conjuring up what a rejuvenated China might look like sixty years hence--after it had reemerged as a strong, prosperous, and respected country once again. Although Liang, the most influential public intellectual of his generation, completed only a few chapters, his fictional exercise allowed his many readers, distraught by the Qing Dynasty's inability to adapt to modern times, to dream a little about what their benighted country might be like in an idealized future, circa 1962. As he imagined it then, the world's leading scholars, statesmen, and merchants would all clamor to visit and pay tribute both to China's modern present and its Confucian past at an international exposition to be held in Shanghai--strangely like the World Expo the city actually did hold in 2010. "I truly believe that this type of book can be a great help to China's future," Liang wrote. The Future of New China was not exactly great literature, and Liang admitted as much, commenting self-deprecatingly that the work-in-progress made him "laugh at myself." But reading the novel's chapters today, when China is, in fact, ever more wealthy, powerful, and respected, imbues that long-ago moment with a triste sense of just how passionately Chinese then yearned to escape the bitter reality of their country's humiliating decline, even if only by projecting themselves for a moment into an imaginary future. Such fantasies were an all too understandable antidote to China's century-long decline, and Liang was not the last to indulge in dreaming of remote triumphs. Four decades later, another well-known writer, Lin Yutang, contemplating a China largely occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army and steeped in even deeper misery, experienced a similar wishful prefiguration of the future. In his 1942 book Between Tears and Laughter, Lin described being visited by an "intuition," almost "mystic" in nature, which "blew like a whiff of clean air through the tortuous maze in which my will and my mind were imprisoned and paralyzed." He wrote defiantly how, even with backwardness and despair everywhere around him, he nonetheless "saw China growing strong." "I know that this nation of 450,000,000 people, united and awakened and purged by the war-fire, is coming up," he insisted against all evidence. "The strength lies in her and nothing the western nations can do can stop her or keep her down." Such improbable dreams of a wealthy, strong, and proud China gave expression to widespread but frustrated yearnings for a revival of national greatness that arose in the nineteenth century, when for the first time in centuries Chinese could no longer think automatically and indisputably of their empire as Zhongguo (中国), the "Central Kingdom." Today, however, after three decades of dynamic economic growth on a scale and speed beyond anything the modern world has ever known, the fantasies of Liang Qichao and Lin Yutang seem prophetic. Such a starkly unexpected ending to modern China's torturous developmental story compels us to reexamine the narrative of endless modernization failure with which we have all grown up. How did China's modern history of relentless humiliation and backwardness, of failed reform and disastrous revolution--the curse of generation after generation of would-be activists trying to create a "new China"--suddenly morph into such a story of triumph? Was it really just a sudden post-Mao miracle conjured up by Deng Xiaoping, or were the seeds of the present planted long ago, only germinating so slowly that at the time it was difficult to see, or even imagine the shape of things to come . . . ​except in a few fictional dreamscapes? This is not another book heralding or bemoaning China's rise. Instead, we have chosen to engage in what is more of a historical reflection on the backstory to China's "economic miracle," an attempt to use history to find a new vantage point on its progress, emphasizing the perspectives of the Chinese themselves. In short, our goal has been to embark on a somewhat different kind of explanation for how, after over a century of decline, occupation, civil war, state repression, and socialist revolution, China finally did manage to catapult itself into an era of stunning dynamism and economic growth. To do this, we have chosen to primarily rely not on new archival material, but instead on preexisting scholarship--both the older classics in the field and some more recent research--works in which both of us have been immersed over our many collective decades of studying China's history. By standing on the shoulders of this collective body of work we hope to see a bit further toward the horizon of China's future, so bound up as it is with China's past. For it is these works that shaped, and continue to shape, our own thinking and understanding. And since both of us have also had long personal odysseys studying, living, and working in China, we have also drawn on some of these more immediate experiences that have also played an important role in helping us make sense out of how and why things have worked out as they have in this most singular of countries. In reading through historical accounts of the lives, writings, and speeches of the diverse group of iconic political and intellectual figures presented in this book, a common chord rings through all their work--the abiding quest for fuqiang (富强), "wealth and power." Our account of modern China is thus the story of how these national leaders marched their people down the long road to fuxing (复兴), rejuvenation, and, by doing so, made Chinese society finally more ready than ever before for the possibility of a more open and democratic future. The couplet of characters fuqiang has most commonly been translated as "wealth and power," and as a result the term--a shorthand version of the ancient adage fuguo qiangbing (富国强兵), "enrich the state and strengthen its military power"--has thus worked its way into historical literature in the English language. The expression was coined during the Warring States Period more than two millennia ago, as when the Legalist philosopher Han Feizi explained bluntly, "If a wise ruler masters wealth and power, he can have whatever he desires." For Chinese reformers since the early nineteenth century, these two characters have repeatedly stood in for the profound desire among China's cognoscenti to see their country restored to the kind of greatness their ancestors had once taken for granted. Above all, these patriotic Chinese yearned for their nation to be able to defend itself against foreign incursion. Although in classical times these two characters conveyed a certain sense of aggressiveness, when the phrase was revived in the nineteenth century in a context of an empire in decline and struggling to maintain its territorial integrity, the subtext of "wealth and power" was self-defense rather than foreign conquest. A more fitting translation might actually have been: "prosperity and strength." As China's humiliation deepened through each defeat by imperialist powers from the Opium War (1839-42) onward, the scramble to find the keys to China's lost "wealth and power" gained an almost unbearable urgency. The ardor with which successive generations of Chinese intellectual and political leaders pursued fuqiang--even though most of them ended up with very little to show for their efforts--ultimately proved a unique dynamo fueling the country's constant and fervent pursuit of self-reinvention and rejuvenation. The obverse of the elusive dream of "wealth and power" was, of course, China's chronic reality of poverty, weakness, and ignominy. As the West and Japan encroached ever more on its territorial sovereignty and as its people began to lose confidence in the superiority of their Confucian system itself, first uncertainty, and finally debilitating doubt and self-disparagement infected the entire society. When China was defeated by Japan--a presumably inferior Asian power--in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, the shock was staggering. By the end of World War I, the notion of their country as a global victim had become an organic part of how Chinese looked at themselves and their place in the world, with variations on the theme of "humiliation" infecting every aspect of China's cultural, psychological, and political being. Confronting this narrative of prey versus predators, in which they were inevitably bested, Chinese reformers and leaders wrestled with the complex task of blaming the predatory great powers, while at the same time somehow absolving their own countrymen of too crippling a sense of inferiority and hopelessness. Myriad new slogans arose, and many have endured to this day, all emanating from a crushing sense of China's having fallen from a previous state of grace: "Restore the nation and erase the stain of humiliation!" "Endure humiliation to carry out our important task!" By the 1940s, Chinese were speaking regularly of "a century of humiliation" and had even established a National Humiliation Day. To this day, children are still exhorted to "never forget national humiliation and strengthen our national defense." Modern Chinese intellectuals have continuously woven these grievances together into an ever more elaborate tapestry in which a weakened China is depicted as being unfairly pitted against a powerful, aggressive imperialist world. Within this frieze of history, our book examines how foreign exploitation and the ensuing humiliation that flowed from it became a deeply seductive, if painful, way of understanding their country's inescapable failures, how these failures also became organic parts of a new national identity (marked by what one scholar has described as the "sanctification of victimhood"), and finally how they paradoxically provided raw material for escaping the dilemma of perpetually being both stepped on and one step behind the great powers of the world. Foreign superiority may have been humiliating and shameful, but it also served as a sharp goad urging Chinese to sacrifice for all the various reform movements and revolutions that came to be launched as a way to remove the stigma of their shame. And nationalism, which reformers and revolutionaries alike turned to as a way to galvanize the populace against their ignominy, grew directly out of China's evolving consciousness of failure and weakness, its roots well irrigated by the aquifer of historical humiliation that had long been pooling beneath it. In the nineteenth century, the effort to efface national humiliation and restore China to wealth, strength, and respect had been largely focused on the question of how the West's military technology and economic yong (用), "techniques," might be harnessed to China's own national ziqiang (自强), "self-strengthening" effort. By the early twentieth century, however, the need for more far-reaching and radical approaches had become painfully apparent. It was in this period that Chinese thinkers first began seriously questioning the wisdom of maintaining the inner ti (体), or "core," of the country's traditional culture, fearing that China's backwardness and inability to adapt to the modern world was rooted in Confucian values themselves. Fin de siècle public intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu, for example, were ready to jettison the foundations of Chinese culture and import Western ideas in their place as part of a desperate effort to restore their country to greatness. "We have no time to ask whether this knowledge is Chinese or Western, whether it is old or new," Yan wrote imploringly. "If one course leads to ignorance and thus to poverty and weakness . . . ​we must cast it aside. If another course is effective in overcoming ignorance and thus leads to a cure of our poverty and weakness, we must imitate it, even if it proceeds from barbarians." Soon thereafter, even more radical skeptics had launched a cultural and intellectual uprising known as the New Culture Movement, calling for a wholesale repudiation of China's past and a new regimen of even more extensive foreign borrowing. For these activists, around whom much of twentieth-century Chinese history turned, the demolition of the country's ancient Confucian escutcheon became part of a sacred mission to "save the nation." Unlike democratic political reform in the West, which developed out of a belief in certain universal values and human rights as derived from a "natural," if not God-given, source, and so were to be espoused regardless of their efficacy, the dominant tradition of reform in China evolved from a far more utilitarian source. Its primary focus was to return China to a position of strength, and any way that might help achieve this goal was thus worth considering. What "liberté, egalité, fraternité" meant to the French Revolution and to the making of modernity in the West, "wealth, strength, and honor" have meant to the forging of modern China. As a result, Chinese reformers tended to inhabit what looks to Western eyes like a pragmatic kingdom of means, rather than an idealistic world of ends. Reformers have been interested in democratic governance at various stages in China's tortuous path, not so much because it might enshrine sacred, inalienable political liberties but because it might make their nation more dynamic and thus stronger. "We cannot decide whether an idea is good or not without seeing it in practice" was the way Sun Yat-sen, "Father of the Nation," who helped bring republican government to China, once pragmatically observed. "If the idea is of practical value to us and to the world, it is good. If the idea is impractical, it is no good." By this logic, since the liberal political philosophies and governmental systems of the West had been so effective in creating such extraordinary national strength, would it not be foolish of Chinese reformers not to also experiment with them? But the same held true for communism, fascism, and authoritarianism. If one kind of "borrowing" did not do the job, the inclination was to try another, and another . . . ​until China could find a formula that worked. So in their relentless quest for wealth, strength, and finally greatness, successive generations of reformers bent their energies toward giving their country the equivalent of serial economic, intellectual, cultural, and political organ transplants. Initially, conservative and sometimes xenophobic factions obstructed and inhibited this process, but over time, the scope of what might be acceptably imported from abroad kept growing. However, whatever means of borrowing were chosen, the goal was almost always the same: the "salvation" of the nation and its restoration to global preeminence. It was this pragmatic willingness to try anything that has given the drama of modern Chinese history its strangely disjointed quality, as if each succeeding act of borrowing had been imagined and written by a different playwright. Alas, learning from foreign models turned out to have its own set of problems, for to borrow from elsewhere in such a wholesale way meant to deny the most organic aspect of being Chinese, namely, its own unique cultural tradition extending back thousands of years. Indeed, for more than a century and a half, the country found itself oscillating between attraction to and then repulsion from a culture that had for millennia served it well, yet now seemed the very cause of its weakness and failure. Finally, under Mao Zedong the project of destroying the old core of Chinese identity was carried to a grim conclusion with a violent and totalistic resolve. But, like a forest fire that clears the way for new growth, it may have ironically also helped prepare the way to usher in a spectacular new kind of economic growth under his successor, Deng Xiaoping. Excerpted from Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-First Century by Orville Schell, John Delury All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.