Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform

Orville Schell

Anchor

Through a series of lively and absorbing 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?   Wealth and Power answers this question by examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists, and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China. This fascinating survey begins in the lead-up to the first Opium War with Wei Yuan, the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer who was one of the first to urge China to borrow ideas from the West. It concludes in our time with human-rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, an outspoken opponent of single-party rule. Along the way, we meet such titans of Chinese history as the Empress Dowager Cixi, public intellectuals Feng Guifen, Liang Qichao, and Chen Duxiu, Nationalist stalwarts Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu Rongji.   The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, “wealth and power.” This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a “century of humiliation” at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. It’s what drove both Mao and Deng to embark on root-and-branch transformations of Chinese society, first by means of Marxism-Leninism, then by authoritarian capitalism. And this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of China’s actions today.   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.  NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH  “Superb . . . beautifully written and neatly structured.”—Financial Times    “[An] engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China’s modern rise.”—The New York Times Book Review   “Informative and insightful . . . a must-read for anyone with an interest in the world’s fastest-rising superpower.”—Slate   “It does a better job than most other books of answering a basic question the rest of the world naturally asks about China’s recent rise: What does China want?”—The Atlantic   “The portraits are beautifully written and bring to life not only their subjects but also the mood and intellectual debates of the times in which they lived.”—Foreign Affairs   “Excellent and erudite . . . [The authors] combine scholarly learning with a reportorial appreciation of colorful, revealing details.”—The National InterestFrom the Hardcover edition.

Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

History

John Delury

Asia

ABACUS +

Imperial China: The Decline of the Last Dynasty and the Origins of Modern China, the 18th and 19th Centuries (The China Reader, Vol. 1)

Franz Schurmann

Vintage

Republican China: Nationalism, War, and the Rise of Communism 1911-1949 (China Reader, Vol 2)

Random House Trade Paperbacks

In the People's Republic: An American's first-hand view of living and working in China

Travel

Vintage Books

The Town That Fought to Save Itself

Pantheon Books

In 1984 Sebastião Salgado began what would be a fifteen-month project of photographing the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa in the countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and Sudan, where approximately one million people died from extreme malnutrition and related causes. Working with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented the enormous suffering and the great dignity of the refugees. This early work became a template for his future photographic projects about other afflicted people around the world. Since then, Salgado has again and again sought to give visual voice to those millions of human beings who, because of military conflict, poverty, famine, overpopulation, pestilence, environmental degradation, and other forms of catastrophe, teeter on the edge of survival. Beautifully produced, with thoughtful supporting narratives by Orville Schell, Fred Ritchin, and Eduardo Galeano, this first U.S. edition brings some of Salgado's earliest and most important work to an American audience for the first time. Twenty years after the photographs were taken, Sahel: The End of the Road is still painfully relevant. Born in Brazil in 1944, Sebastião Salgado studied economics in São Paulo and Paris and worked in Brazil and England. While traveling as an economist to Africa, he began photographing the people he encountered. Working entirely in a black-and-white format, Salgado highlights the larger meaning of what is happening to his subjects with an imagery that testifies to the fundamental dignity of all humanity while simultaneously protesting its violation by war, poverty, and other injustices. "The planet remains divided," Salgado explains. "The first world in a crisis of excess, the third world in a crisis of need." This disparity between the haves and the have-nots is the subtext of almost all of Salgado's work.

Sahel: The End of the Road (Volume 3) (Series in Contemporary Photography)

Arts & Photography

EDUARDO GALEANO

Sebastião Salgado

Fred Ritchin

Lélia Wanick Salgado

Photography & Video

University of California Press

Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-First Century

Random House, NY

The American Years : A Chronology of United States History

Americas

Mandate of Heaven

Pictorial

Time Warner Paperbacks*

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Books by Orville Schell