Many questions are asked by different people as to what is behind the achievements that China has made on its road to becoming an economic superpower that some think it already is and others think it will eventually be.

Two American professors try to explain how and why China became what it is today through historical lenses that focus on some of China’s thinkers over the past 200 years or so.

In their book Wealth and Power: China’s Long March into the 21st Century, professors Orville Schell and John Delury dig into China’s history and form a thought leadership perspective.

They bring into the book and the endeavour to explain China, some familiarity not only with their subject but also experience in academia.

Schell is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at University of South Carolina and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has travelled widely in China for almost four decades. It is no surprise then that 10 of the 15 books that Prof Schell has written are on China.

Professor Schell’s co-author, John Delury is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the Yongsei University Graduate School of International Studies in South Korea. His areas of expertise include China and North Korea. Prof Delury previously worked as Associate Director at the Center on US-China Relations, Asia Society in New York while also serving as director to the China Boom Project and the North Korea Inside Out Task Force.

The authors try to examine the lives of 11 influential persons who occupied several positions within China either as officials, writers, bureaucrats or activists whose ideas and contributions moulded the ingredients on which China is today founded.

In short, the book shows how after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war and revolution, China has somehow emerged on the world stage with hyper-development and wealth creation.

At the core of the book is the thesis that throughout its ancient history, China was a formidable power but had unfortunately embarked on a steady decline in its influence and significance on the world affairs and more specifically within its immediate neighbourhood in comparison to Japan, for instance.

In the words of the authors:

“Our account of modern China is thus the story of how these national leaders marched their people down the long road to ..., rejuvenation and by doing so, made Chinese society finally more ready than ever before for the possibility of a more open and democratic future.”

Following Western countries’ forages into the larger Asian continent, whether through exploration or ultimately colonialism, the Chinese thinkers came to the realisation that the Empire was lagging behind other world powers within Asia such as Japan and generally in relation to the West.

This consciousness arises from the fact that China as a whole and the Chinese nationals took great pride in the history of ancient China as a kingdom of wealth, intellectual influence and even military power. The concern then was that from this state of influence, something needed to be done to ensure that China retained its pride of place within the world.

At the core of this was the fact of continuous humiliation of China whether through peace treaties subsequent to the Opium Wars of the 19th Century or colonialism and annexation of Chinese territory by European powers.

This humiliation was exacted on China by powers the Chinese believed to be culturally inferior although in reality they were materially and militarily mightier.

This state of confusion among the Chinese set the grounds for introspection as to why supposedly inferior cultures would nevertheless overwhelm the Chinese in other visible aspects such as material wealth or in war.

The book sets this state of wonder as having provoked a realisation that China as an empire was in decline and that urgent and positive acts of restoration were necessary.

The scholar-official Wei Yuan ignited this debate within China and sought to have the elite within the country to reflect on means of restoration of the country’s greatness. In so doing, Wei Yuan revived a two millennia old phrase summed up as “wealth and power,” which has remained the guiding principle for China’s political and intellectual elite ever since.

The “wealth and power” initiative that Wei Yuan sought to awaken amongst his compatriots stood in contrast to the more established and hallowed principles of Confucius and his disciples on which China had been governed from the family unit to the state for almost 2,000 years.

The options that Wei Yuan offered were premised on the idea that the key to national strength lay in making investments in a technologically advanced military, encouragement of a mixture of private enterprise and state monopolies and efficient enforcement of the rule of law.

Wei Yuan noted that his compatriots general disdain for all things foreign was one of the innate weaknesses that needed serious and urgent redress and suggested that China needed a compliment of competent officers knowledgeable in international relations and diplomacy to effectively navigate its international pathway towards its desired goal of international significance.

Following upon the foundation laid out by Wei Yuan, Feng Guifen noted that the West’s advantages over China lay in four critical areas of education, economic development, political legitimacy of the rulers (democracy) and intellectual inquiry.

He proposed that the Chinese would have to abandon their traditional ways and emulate the West if they are to recover their previous stature. He summed this up as the “self-strengthening ethic” for China.

This quest and consciousness to change continued even during the mid-19th century in the tenure of Empress Dowager with the mantra “Western methods, but a Chinese core.”

In other words, the struggle continued as to whether the future lay in completely abandoning the old Chinese methods or merely picking and choosing only such of the Western methods and strategies as could be moulded into Chinese way of management of national affairs. Within this thought was the argument that the Confucius principles were too important to be abandoned for anything.

The second thinker, Liang Qichao, is considered by the authors for his proposition that China’s primary need was to rebuild itself by changing the mindset of its populace under the collective thought “New Citizen.”

By this, Qichao argued that the first place for reconstruction was in the average thought processes of the Chinese citizens. He argued that the country needed to change how its citizens thought of themselves and related to each other — another challenge to the long-lived principles of Confucius.

Thus, China would ebb and flow with the ideas of mostly public officials and intellectuals who identified the problem as essentially a backwardness on the part of China in relation to the Western powers and noted an important ingredient in the empowerment that democracy would bring to a people.

However, most, including Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek were extremely reluctant to recommend wholesale democracy and often were in favour of public order rather than liberty.

Until the first third of the 20th century, it was clear that there were concerns from China’s officials, citizens and academics that the country was non-achiever relative to its aspirations.

The ideas for its reforms were varied but hard at their core the need for an important shift. The problem would appear to have been that none of the thinkers and scholars had the political and social power to make the paradigm shift that was required.

But it was Mao Zedong who appears to be the first to try and make the shift using the social and political power that he wielded following the war of 1949 after which China became a Communists republic designed along the precedent of the Soviet Union with some modifications.

Mao Zedong’s main ability, the authors assert, derived not only from his possession of political and military power in China but even more from his ability to project a commanding sense of fearlessness and strength.

Mao’s appeal to the psyche of his compatriots lay in his argument that strength even for the individual as much as for the nation, had to precede knowledge.

He thought and convinced his countrymen that only when the body (both physical and politic) was strong, could an individual or nation as the case may be, advance speedily in knowledge and morality so as to reap advantages.

Man of action

In truth, therefore Mao Zedong projected himself successfully as being a man of action rather than of mere thought. He said, to move the world, one needed to first move the world’s hearts and minds.

Even while embracing Marxism, Mao Zedong’s belief in the efficacy of a strong individual will put him at odds with economic determinism of Marxism.

Thus, Mao Zedong came up with the thinking of creative destruction by which he argued that China’s road to reconstruction had to go through with uprooting of its current social structures. He said: “There is no construction without destruction, no flowing without damning and no motion without rest.”

Through these words of action and reform, Mao Zedong was able to challenge Confucius thought of harmony and thereby rally his country into a Communist insurrection. To Mao, this was the creative destruction phase that China needed to launch itself into the desired progress towards wealth and power that it had sought for almost two centuries.

It was this idea of action and power which led Mao Zedong to lead China into the eras of the Great Leap Forward (1958) as an economic rethink and redesign of the country’s economic foundations and the cultural revolution (1966) for reordering of the citizens’ mindset.

Though it cannot be said that either of those wish-lists were particularly successful, Mao Zedong is without argument the single Chinese on whose shoulders whatever economic take-off China would experience after his death can be said to have been launched.

Mao’s followers in office, Deng Xiaoping in particular, built upon his predecessor’s foundations to begin the economic strengthening of China — but by reversing the ideology of the cultural revolution.

Taking as his blue-print the “Four Modernisations Agenda” focused on agriculture, industry, science and technology and national defence, Deng led the Communist party of China to appreciate and view “Fazhan” or “development” as the centre-piece of reform for China.

Deng Xiaoping begun to reverse China’s centuries-old resistance to anything foreign and encouraged officials and citizens to visit abroad as a means of emancipating their minds. This lead to renunciation of class struggle and the adoption of economic empowerment as the central theme of China’s endeavours.

Wary of democracy

Despite this, however, China’s Communist party remained cautious about full throttle democracy, claiming it was disruptive for the economic development and not good for China. Instead, Deng Xiaoping urged that the priorities ought to have been in “economic democracy.”

The protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 shook China’s trajectory and the economic development story line.

The resort to martial law and the June 4, 1989 Massacre of peaceful protestors in answer to the protests showed that the old ways of law and order first were far from gone from China’s leadership manual.

Although Deng Xiaoping and China suffered reputational dent in the sense for China’s search for relevance and respect as a peaceful and democratic nation, the quest for prosperity that he unleashed sent China into a burst of economic growth that brought it to its long desire of the Chinese to the “wealth and power” dreams.

Xiaoping’s cultivated protégés who as his successors largely followed this path of economic reforms first, brought China to where it is today.

Thus, China embarked on the road that led it to grow into the second largest economy in the world by the year 2011.

The historical strokes painted by the authors indicate that even as it is today, China retains the internal tension between breaking out if it’s past while trying to retain a core of its traditions.

The final Chinese thinker is Liu Xiaobo, who is a reminder that perhaps China’s rejuvenation is incomplete as long as it remains a country in which democratic space remains shrunken.

The authors perhaps ask this question in rhetoric when they state in the final chapter that China’s break would be complete only when the rule of law, transparency and accountability of the rulers find their way into the thinking of the governance framework in China.

The authors have succeeded in confirming that a nation’s improvement towards wealth and power is made from a constant state of introspection that will come with trials and even errors. Time will tell whether China has finally cracked its endeavour for unassailable wealth and power in the 21st century.