*Starred Review*  

Many contemporary books examining China’s recent gains in wealth and power (often with ominous overtones) have sought out and found answers in recent geopolitical trends…

Schell and Delury suggest that we might best understand China’s ascendancy by taking a longer view. Although we may not see China’s Olympic success or Beijing’s massive state-of-the-art Capital Airport as responses to ancient defeats, symbolic or otherwise, China’s early formative interactions with the West were humiliating in a way that, over time, would become a source of motivation driving the construction of a new cultural identity. “Like a set of genes that is firmly implanted on a genome and is then faithfully transmitted from generation to generation thereafter,” they suggest, “the urge to see China restored to greatness has been reexpressing itself over and over since Confucian scholars with legalist tendencies such as Wei Yuan first began fretting over the Qing Dynasty’s early nineteenth-century decline.” Examining in rich detail the actions of key thinkers and leaders from Wei Yuan and Liang Qichao to Mao and Deng Xiaoping, this selection compellingly reveals a different side of China’s trajectory and suggests that it may take several more generations before China’s success ultimately salves its insecurity.