Orville Schell > Quotes

“In an ancient Confucian classical text, Wei found the perfect motto for the Qing’s nineteenth-century predicament—indeed, for modern China’s struggle as a whole—which he used prominently in the preface to Records of Conquest: “Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.”40 This idea would be expressed again and again by others for the next century and a half. In fact, it remains the inspiration for the phrase inscribed today in the museum at the Temple of the Tranquil Seas: “To feel shame is to approach courage.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“When someone can fill such words with the depth of meaning that they are intended to have, it's like hearing them for the first time.”
― Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood

“faithfully kept a Confucian-style diary of daily self-criticism.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“him took place all over the country. And—for better or worse—his conviction that Chinese needed a protracted period of firm, authoritarian political tutelage before democracy could be risked has become the template for reform ever since. As”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“The explanatory panel adds that because the Temple of the Tranquil Seas was “the former site of negotiating the Treaty of Nanjing, the first unequal treaty of modern China, [it] has become a symbol of the commencement of China’s modern history.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“Finally, under Mao Zedong the project of destroying the old core of Chinese identity was carried to a grim conclusion with a violent and totalistic resolve. But, like a forest fire that clears the way for new growth, it may have ironically also helped prepare the way to usher in a spectacular new kind of economic growth under his successor, Deng Xiaoping.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“For much of the Communist era, scholars tended to look back on Sun as one more unsuccessful, reform-minded leader, and his Three People’s Principles as just another of modern China’s many dead-end political experiments. As one biographer wrote: “If Sun Yat-sen had one consistent talent, it was for failure.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“Deng’s vision was not just rapid growth but continuous reform.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

“I think the greatest difference between China and the West, which can never be made up, is that the Chinese are fond of antiquity, but neglect the present [whereas] Westerners are struggling in the present in order to supersede the past.”
― Orville Schell, Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century