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

The Asia Society presents a book talk with Orville Schell on China's ascent from imperial doormat to global economic powerhouse.

Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, Orville Schell along with John Delury, 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 hyper-development 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. 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.

Orville Schell will be in conversation with Dr. Hans Stockton, University of St. Thomas.

About the Author

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former Professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of numerous books on China, and is a contributor to many magazines and edited volumes. Schell was educated at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.