Marching forward

Indeed, China celebrates defeat like other countries mark victories—and the humiliations of subsequent decades afford plenty of opportunities, with the once great empire carved up at the hands first of Europeans and then the Japanese. This grim past is central to the narrative of the ruling Communist Party. Without China’s legacy of humiliation, the party’s role in restoring fuqiang—wealth and power—would look less impressive.

Yet shame is woven into the national fabric. As early as the fifth century BC, King Goujian never allowed himself to forget a failed campaign that had cost him his kingdom and his liberty. He slept on a bed of sticks and hung above his head a gall bladder, which he licked daily; its bitter taste served to remind him of his grievance, and gave him the strength to later take his revenge. Chi ku—to eat bitterness—is a common phrase.

In “Wealth and Power” Orville Schell, a longtime observer of China, and John Delury, a rising Sinologist and Korea expert, set out to find the roots of China’s economic success. In the style of Jonathan Spence, the doyen of China historians, they do so through pen-portraits of 11 intellectuals and politicians who strove to change China after 1842. Running through this absorbing book is the sense that China’s leaders, from the much maligned Empress Dowager Cixi to the recent reformist prime minister, Zhu Rongji, all tried, in their own way, to avenge the country’s history of shame.

The work of restoring China’s lost wealth and power required overthrowing Confucian orthodoxy. The Confucian insistence on family over state, morality over materialism and ritual over reward had let the country down in the face of Western threats. Indeed the quest for wealth and power was first articulated by Confucius’s arch-rivals, the Legalists: “If a wise ruler masters wealth and power,” said the Legalist philosopher Han Feizi two millennia ago, “he can have whatever he desires.”

In search of rejuvenation, the figures profiled in this book were obsessed with starting anew. They were prepared to try anything, especially lessons and ideas from the West. China’s road to modernity is littered with “–isms”: constitutionalism (Kang Youwei), social Darwinism (Yan Fu), enlightened despotism (Liang Qichao) and republicanism (Sun Yat-sen). Even the Chinese leader who clung most to traditional Confucian notions, Chiang Kai-shek, drew from Leninism and the fascism of Mussolini. (Little good it did, he may have reflected later, as a diminished dictator in his island-exile of Taiwan.)

Most of China’s experiments with Western recipes ended in disaster. The ancient pull of Chinese history seemed to resist modernity. In this light, Messrs Schell and Delury provocatively try to rehabilitate Mao Zedong. They have no illusions about the catastrophes he unleashed, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Nor do they credit him with the power to predict the economic miracle that followed his death. But they suggest that Mao’s passion for permanent revolution—his eagerness to force-march China away from the country’s old habits—left a blank slate for Deng Xiaoping, the architect of Chinese prosperity. Mao had bequeathed a vast new “shovel-ready” construction site for Deng’s own “‘great enterprise’ of reform and opening up”.

It is a contentious claim. Other countries have got to where China is without passing through this gateway of trauma, bloodshed and suffering. And China’s growing wealth and military and diplomatic might is not the end of the story, as the authors acknowledge. The question now is what will China do with it?

Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel peace laureate in prison—one of several jail terms to which he has been sentenced during his lifetime—is perhaps the most inspiring character portrayed in this book. He is certainly the most astute critic of the motivations behind China’s pursuit of wealth and power, including the almost “pathological” need among China’s leaders to overtake the West. He poses some incisive questions: who is served by China’s nationalism? When national pride is used to justify despotic government, what is the eventual cost to ordinary people?

Lu Xun, one of China’s greatest writers at the time of the country’s debasement in the early 20th century, complained that the Chinese act like slaves before strong people, and like masters in front of the weak. Today China is authoritarian at home and increasingly flexing its muscles abroad. Many now wonder whether the abused child, nourished on bitterness, must necessarily become an abuser itself; or whether, now that it is rich and strong, China will learn to be at peace with itself and the world. It is one of the great open questions of the day. /economist