John Delury, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies in the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) and Chair of International Studies at Underwood International College (UIC), has been receiving widespread international recognition for his book Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. Co-authored by Orville Schell, Wealth and Power presents a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, providing a panoramic narrative of the country’s rise to preeminence. The authors attempt to answer how the nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, managed to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyper-development and wealth creation.

Portraits of Iconic Modern Chinese Leaders and Thinkers

Wealth and Power examines 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.
According to Professor Delury and Schell, the common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, or “wealth and power.” They further argue that the quest for wealth and power 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 is 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, they conclude, this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of China’s actions today.

Widespread Media Attention

Professor Delury and Schell continue to receive international acclaim, with Wealth and Power being praised by such respected publications as the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Economist, and Financial Times. Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and others have cited the book in recent articles dealing with China. Fareed Zakaria, host of the CNN program Fareed Zakaria GPS, has also recommended Wealth and Power on his show. In China, netizens have been able to read about the book on the Chinese-language version of WSJ.com, the Wall Street Journal’s website, while Caixin - China Economics and Finance published a special article on the book.
Since the publication of Wealth and Power by Random House last July, more than 10,000 copies have been sold (with Little Brown publishing the book in England). Within the next year, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean translations of Wealth and Power will be published. The Korean translation is being undertaken by Munhakdongne Publishing Group.