Ebook: Wealth and power: China's long march to the twenty-first century

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 the nation's ascent from imperial doormat to global economic powerhouse that is at once analytical and personal.

By now everyone knows the basic facts of China's rise to preeminence over the past three decades. But how did this erstwhile sleeping giant finally manage to arrive at its current phase of dynamic growth? How, after such a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval and revolution, foreign occupation and civil war, did a country once derided as the "sick man of Asia" manage to break out of its old pattern of repeatedly failed reform efforts to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation? How did the century-long succession of failures to change somehow culminate in the extraordinary dynamism of China...