Wealth and power : China's long march to the twenty-first century / Orville Schell and John Delury.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 411-427) and index.

Wealth and Power follows Chinese history from the Opium Wars to today. Modern Chinese history is generally considered to have begun with the Treaty of Nanjing at the close of the first Opium War. Schell and Delury see special significance is using that first great humiliation of China at the hands of the modern world as the starting point, central to a thesis they use to explore Chinese history through its intellectual history. Roughly, that thesis is that modern Chinese history is best understood as a reaction to its modern humiliation, the desire to strengthen itself and overcome that humiliation by achieving "wealth and power," and the tension that created with traditional Confucianism. The underlying intellectual tension in modern Chinese history then, is between conservative family-centric thinking and conservative state-centric thinking. It's thinking that dates back to the old conflict between Confucians and the Legalists, philosophical adversaries to the Confucians whose mantra was Wealth and Power. It's a conflict that predates and leaves precious little room for classical liberalism or even Marxism.