中国回归强大

　　Marching forward

　　艰难前行

　　The great power is still licking old wounds

　　这个强国仍在舔舐旧伤口

　　Aug 3rd 2013 |From the print edition

　　Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. By Orville Schell and John Delury. Random House; 478 pages

　　《富强：中国21世纪的长征》

　　MODERN China’s founding trauma came in 1842, when British troops pushed opium down the throats of a prostrate nation at the Treaty of Nanjing. Today this brutal military and diplomatic defeat is hailed in China for the way its darkness forced a new dawn.

　　现代中国的灾难始于1842年，英国军队在南京条约下强制向中国输送鸦片。今天残暴的军队和失败的外交在中国都不复存在了，黑暗之后迎来了黎明。

　　Indeed, China celebrates defeat like other countries mark victories—and the humiliations of subsequent decades afford plenty of opportunities, with the once great empire carved up at the hands first of Europeans and then the Japanese. This grim past is central to the narrative of the ruling Communist Party. Without China’s legacy of humiliation, the party’s role in restoring fuqiang—wealth and power—would look less impressive.

　　确实， 中国像其他国家一样庆祝胜利，这个曾经的强大帝国先后被欧洲列强和日本瓜分，给后代留下了深深的耻辱。这些残忍的过去经常被共产党说起。没有中华民族所经历的耻辱，共产党在重塑富强中起到的作用就不会这么令人印象深刻。

　　Yet shame is woven into the national fabric. As early as the fifth century BC, King Goujian never allowed himself to forget a failed campaign that had cost him his kingdom and his liberty. He slept on a bed of sticks and hung above his head a gall bladder, which he licked daily; its bitter taste served to remind him of his grievance, and gave him the strength to later take his revenge. Chi ku—to eat bitterness—is a common phrase.

　　在中国悠久的历史中，耻辱早就有所存在。公元前15世纪的时候，越王勾践永记亡国之痛，囚禁之苦。他睡在柴草上，头顶挂了个苦胆，每天都舔一舔，苦味让他紧记其委屈，让他有力量在以后复仇。吃苦是一个很常见的词语。

　　In “Wealth and Power” Orville Schell, a longtime observer of China, and John Delury, a rising Sinologist and Korea expert, set out to find the roots of China’s economic success. In the style of Jonathan Spence, the doyen of China historians, they do so through pen-portraits of 11 intellectuals and politicians who strove to change China after 1842. Running through this absorbing book is the sense that China’s leaders, from the much maligned Empress Dowager Cixi to the recent reformist prime minister, Zhu Rongji, all tried, in their own way, to avenge the country’s history of shame.

　　Orville Schell是一个对中国很了解的资深专家，John Delury是一个新晋的中国研究专家和韩国专家，他们合著《富强》一书，试图找到中国经济成功的根源。模仿中国历史学家Jonathan Spence前辈的风格，他们通过讲述1842年以后试图改变中国的11位知识分子和政治家论证中国的成功。读这本引人入胜的书，让人们感觉从恶毒的皇太后慈禧到近代的改革派总理朱镕基都想用自己的方式一雪前耻。

　　The work of restoring China’s lost wealth and power required overthrowing Confucian orthodoxy. The Confucian insistence on family over state, morality over materialism and ritual over reward had let the country down in the face of Western threats. Indeed the quest for wealth and power was first articulated by Confucius’s arch-rivals, the Legalists: “If a wise ruler masters wealth and power,” said the Legalist philosopher Han Feizi two millennia ago, “he can have whatever he desires.”

　　重塑富强的中国需要颠覆儒家正统思想。儒家思想讲究家大于国，道德大于物质，先礼后兵，这让中国陷入了外国的威胁之中。真正对富强的追求首先被儒家的对手法家阐述。法家的代表人物韩非子2000年前说：“如果一个聪明的统治者掌握了富强，那么就什么都在掌控之中了。”

　　In search of rejuvenation, the figures profiled in this book were obsessed with starting anew. They were prepared to try anything, especially lessons and ideas from the West. China’s road to modernity is littered with “–isms”: constitutionalism (Kang Youwei), social Darwinism (Yan Fu), enlightened despotism (Liang Qichao) and republicanism (Sun Yat-sen). Even the Chinese leader who clung most to traditional Confucian notions, Chiang Kai-shek, drew from Leninism and the fascism of Mussolini. (Little good it did, he may have reflected later, as a diminished dictator in his island-exile of Taiwan.)

　　寻求复兴的过程中，本书中的人物都着迷于重新开始。他们准备尝试任何事物，尤其是来自西方的思想和教训。中国的现代化之路上充满了各种主义，有康有为的立宪主义，有严复的社会达尔文主义，有梁启超的开明专制主义，还有孙中山的共和主义。甚至是最讲究传统儒家信条的蒋介石都吸收列宁主义和墨索里尼的法西斯主义思想。（这在其后来独裁统治台湾期间没有带来什么好处。）

　　Most of China’s experiments with Western recipes ended in disaster. The ancient pull of Chinese history seemed to resist modernity. In this light, Messrs Schell and Delury provocatively try to rehabilitate Mao Zedong. They have no illusions about the catastrophes he unleashed, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Nor do they credit him with the power to predict the economic miracle that followed his death. But they suggest that Mao’s passion for permanent revolution—his eagerness to force-march China away from the country’s old habits—left a blank slate for Deng Xiaoping, the architect of Chinese prosperity. Mao had bequeathed a vast new “shovel-ready” construction site for Deng’s own “‘great enterprise’ of reform and opening up”.

　　中国大部分西为中用的实验都宣告失败。中国历史古代的力量似乎阻碍着现代化进程。基于这个认识，Messrs Schell和Delury试图重现毛泽东的成功之路。他们没有描述毛泽东亲手发动的灾难，比如说大跃进和文化大革命。他们也没有颂扬他预测死后的经济奇迹。但是他们论证毛泽东对革命的热情，铲除旧风俗的欲望，为中国经济建设的总工程师邓小平扫清了道路。毛泽东把一大笔建设遗产留给了邓小平，使得邓小平能开展改革开放。

　　It is a contentious claim. Other countries have got to where China is without passing through this gateway of trauma, bloodshed and suffering. And China’s growing wealth and military and diplomatic might is not the end of the story, as the authors acknowledge. The question now is what will China do with it?

　　这个说法很有争议。其他国家在没有经历中国所经历的灾难，血泪和屈辱的情况下也达到了中国的地位。中国增长的财富，军事和外交实力不是故事的结束。问题是中国会用这些做什么？

　　Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel peace laureate in prison—one of several jail terms to which he has been sentenced during his lifetime—is perhaps the most inspiring character portrayed in this book. He is certainly the most astute critic of the motivations behind China’s pursuit of wealth and power, including the almost “pathological” need among China’s leaders to overtake the West. He poses some incisive questions: who is served by China’s nationalism? When national pride is used to justify despotic government, what is the eventual cost to ordinary people?

　　刘晓波，一位待在监狱的诺贝尔和平奖获得者，或许是本书中最令人感悟的角色。他正在服刑，已经入狱数次。他是中国崛起动机最机敏的批评者。他甚至给出中国领导人赶超西方的近乎病态的原因。他提了很多尖锐的问题：中国民族主义的受益者是谁？当国家荣誉为暴政服务，公民的代价是什么？

　　Lu Xun, one of China’s greatest writers at the time of the country’s debasement in the early 20th century, complained that the Chinese act like slaves before strong people, and like masters in front of the weak. Today China is authoritarian at home and increasingly flexing its muscles abroad. Many now wonder whether the abused child, nourished on bitterness, must necessarily become an abuser itself; or whether, now that it is rich and strong, China will learn to be at peace with itself and the world. It is one of the great open questions of the day.

　　鲁迅，20世纪初期中国最著名的作家，抱怨中国人在强者面前跟奴隶一样，在弱者面前跟主人一样。如今，中国在国内一党专政，在国外也展现自己的实力。很多人担心被欺负的小孩，受尽了苦头，会不会变成一个施虐者，或者，当中国富强了，中国会学会与世界和平相处。这是现在很重要的一个公开问题。