Highly recommended. Takes the interesting approach of covering China’s rise over the last 200 years by profiling a selection of leaders (intellectual and political) from each period. It’s missing a map of China, so you may want to read with Google Maps handy so you can get a sense of where things in the book are happening. Also seems slanted toward the position that China’s path to wealth and power has been a successful one, instead of a crooked road paved with the bodies of the dead (see Tombstone).
Three things I learned:
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Sun Yat-Sen was not the “father of democracy” I thought he was. Rather, he was one more reformer vying for power in the period at the end of the Qing dynasty, and not a very successful one, either.
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The feeling of humiliation for Chinese goes back to the nineteenth century. It’s not an invention of the communist party; the Chinese intellectuals of the time saw their treatment at the hands of the Western powers as humiliation, not simple defeat.
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The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 was done at the orders of Deng Xiaoping, the same leader that started China on the path to a more market-based economic system.
