Mandate Of Heaven: In China, A New Generation Of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Bohemians And Technocra

by Orville Schell, Jim Jorgensen

The China of the 1990s is a country of profound Maoist ideology coexists with an entrepreneurial spirit that has made China one of the world's economic powerhouses; a rebellious, irreverent popular culture thrives in the shadow of a totalitarian political system; a nihilistic subculture coexists alongside ancient traditions of obedience, conformity, and respect for tradition. In Mandate of Heaven Orville Schell, one of America's foremost China specialists, interprets these conflicting developments and brilliantly documents the new power structures, economic initiatives, and cultural changes that have transformed China since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. Schell takes readers on a series of journeys inside this latter-day People's Republic and introduces us to a broad spectrum of people, from students and workers to entrepreneurs, pop stars, and party officials, who, although they acted out the drama of the Square, are now playing the prominent roles in China's high-speed economic rush into the future. As China's role on the world stage grows, it becomes increasingly important that the West acquaint itself with the people who will be leading it into the twenty-first century. Mandate of Heaven is the authoritative and definitive account of this generation as it moves into a capitalist economic future while still clinging to the structures of its communist past.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, History, Asia

464 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 1994

About the author

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

Reviews

[Kaleb Wulf · Rating 3 out of 5]

First third of the book goes over the narrative of Tiananmen Square I've heard most commonly from Western authors, with the addition of Schell's personal experience as he was in Beijing at the time. When the book focuses on the personal stories of Tiananmen participants it excels, I liked the character of Wu'er Kaixi in particular, a Uyghur organizer and charismatic star of the protests. It's truly incredible how much China change directly after 1989. The protests are spurred by hyperinflation and poor job prospects for students at the time, but starting from 1990 the country bounces back immensely and begins the boom most people are familiar with now. There's a brief period of a despairing country after June 4 (including a strange phenomenon of ironic Mao worship, people buying Mao t-shirts, baubles, portraits, etc.), but once the economy recovers, people are willing to forget the tragedy. This weak memory leads to formulation of the CCP's current strategy, as long as we provide economic prosperity, we don't need to provide freedoms and we can crush dissent as soon as it arises. It's a risky gamble that pays off to this day, although with plenty of hiccups.

[Rick Harrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how I've missed reading this one for so long. Because Schell did such a careful job creating a durable long-view context for his reporting on current events, his take on China during the time leading up to and immediately following the 1989 "Beijing Spring" remains astonishingly relevant.

I'm glad to read it now that China and the rest of the globe are focused on the current wave of democratic uprising, this time in the Middle East and not among the former Soviet states.

Fact is I've blocked out China from my radar for a while. There's too much information, almost minute by minute, for even someone versed in Chinese tradition to make sense of.

The dimensions of what gets reported are too difficult to grasp. The pace and scale of economic growth for certain, but the exponentially growing disparity in wealth within the nation; the sheer scope of environmental degredation; the depths of misery from which China's dispossessed still cannot extricate themselves - from prison, from sweat shops, from massive relocations. The stark fact of single (Communist??!!) party rule, upheld among military-capitalistic and provincial power centers which pull against a China-center which cannot possibly hold.

And yet it does hold. It is the entire people now who hold tight to order in the face of a chaos made palpable by its lurking ever-presence. It's closeness in time and imagination. Rationalizations are as trivial as to compare the earnings in a sweatshop to those down on the paddy, and forget the comparisons out-of-country.

"Beijing Spring" is the euphemism for what really was an horrific sequence of events about which many Chinese swore "we will never forget." And yet so much tumult has continued in China that it's hard to believe that retrospection from the current vantage won't create an entirely new assessment compared to one made more near June 4, 1989.

But against that eventuality, Schell was utterly solid in his presentation, laying out the facts according to which every side has made its case. He wrote even to the point of documenting certain kinds of revisionism among the most political of the principals. It would be difficult to find any spin here.

The spin swirls all around the events now pinned in history by this book. Or at least, as a Western reader, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

When even someone like Wu'er Kaixi, albeit himself not Han Chinese, is willing to consider that he too might like a piece of China's wealth (and not considering his life subsequent to Schell's denouement interview from Calfornia where Wu'er Kaixi was then a successful roadhouse manager, having pulled on guanxi to get there . . . ) it really is hard to quell the virtigo.

And I think it remains historically impossible to determine whether the crackdown at Tiananmen has subsequently allowed the government that much more, and subtle, control. Would there now be more "democracy" had the Beijing Spring never happened? Would imaginations have run wild by now?

And how hard it does remain for freedom fighters everywhere to accept that verdict. China presents a funhouse mirror to our smug certainty in the West that we, at least, allow free speech and contending political parties. We allow workers rights and independent labor unions. We would never permit basic human rights to be so submerged beneath such corruption.

When, one has to wonder, will there be some point of view which doesn't suppose that we in the West still know better? Will it require us to dismantle our government completely? Destroy our workers' rights? Recognize that global warming knows no global bounds, even while we accelerate our export of both knowledge and its effluents.

So my sense of what it would mean to bring Schell's assessment up to date is that we will have to consider China's challenge to be our challenge also. We cannot make of her our adversary, our bogey, our other.

This is a book which deserves to be read again as a global recounting of events which are in fact still so recent. Indeed, we must never forget.

China's center holds also against its narratives of our web of discourse here in the West. There is one written language still. There is a unitary identity not based on some fictional narrative of the future. While we uphold our American Constitution as though it were received whole from God's mouth, the Chinese adjust. Horrors!

[Paul Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I immigrated to the United States from Mainland China in June of 1989, weeks after the events of Tiananmen Square. This book taught to so much about all the different forces impacting China during that time. It was an emotional book to read as it chronicled the sacrifices made by students across the country, especially, in Beijing with regards to advancing rights in China. Schell is a great writer and clearly is very passionate when it comes to understanding China to the best of his ability.