MCLC: Wealth and Power review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Wealth and Power review
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/18/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/books/review/wealth-and-power-by-orville-
schell-and-john-delury.html

Losing Face, Leaping Forward
‘Wealth and Power,’ by Orville Schell and John Delury
By JOSEPH KAHN

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
Kai-shek, 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 market-oriented 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.