Western journalists in search of a shorthand for China’s dramatic economic turnaround will almost invariably trot this one out. But, oddly enough, it doesn’t show up much in Chinese publications, and nobody has managed to find the original source where Deng allegedly said it.

The phrase was popularized by the writer Orville Schell in his 1984 book “To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the ’80s.” But Schell never actually attributed the words to Deng, telling the L.A. Times’s Evelyn Iritani in 2004 that it merely “grew out of the zeitgeist” of China’s economic reforms.

That said, it’s almost impossible to verify or debunk any quotation attributed to a dead Chinese leader, as China’s Communist Party is extraordinarily adept at revising history so that it meets the political needs of the present.

From the cited L.A. Times article:

Although many scholars and journalists — including China expert Orville Schell and veteran CBS correspondent Mike Wallace — helped immortalize Deng’s phrase, he never actually said, sung or muttered it, many scholars and other experts say.

“As far as I can see, the use of the slogan … has been entirely in foreign reports,” says Bai Xueqiu, researcher at Beijing University’s Deng Xiaoping Theory Research Institute ….

Experts point to a confluence of issues — including the secrecy surrounding the Chinese government and its leaders, linguistic confusion and media hype — that helped put those words rightly or wrongly into Deng’s mouth.

Once the exhortation was picked up by the popular press and posted on the Internet, it created a history of its own.

“It’s sort of like a computer virus — once these things get out in the public consciousness, the associations are made and it’s very hard to disentangle them,” says Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing University, Deng Xiaoping, economic reforms, Orville Schell, Sarah Palin
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China has shown increasing intransigence towards the world in the defense of what it considers its core interest. This two-part series analyzes how China’s hard line policy may not have helped its best interest. Recent developments in the US-China relationship – both in politics, with the rocky start between presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao, and in business with Google’s partial retreat from the Chinese market are examples of this tough approach. In the first article, China historian Orville Schell notes that the Obama administration has taken heat from critics on the right and left for extending a series of friendly gestures to the nation with little to show in the way of tangible policy initiatives. If anything, some US observers noted that China became more aggressive with its demands. Some patience may be in order, as the US and China adjust to roles as collaborators rather than mere competitors and China rediscovers valuable lessons from its tradition. Schell explains that the notion of reciprocity, or “shu,” is a fundamental tenet of Confucian teachings. Rather than mark weakness, Schell contends that concessions and good intentions can serve as a catalyst to encourage reciprocity and move negotiations and relationships toward a higher level in resolving global problems, thus strengthening both nations.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Confucianism, Orville Schell, U.S. relations
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One key issue in the confrontation, Schell said, is that Google has become more like a nation than a company. By this he means that not only is Google closely connected to the Obama administration, but the company has a high resonance in the western world. Only a company like Google could take such a stance against China, he said in this video recorded at Davos.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: foreign IT companies, Googlecn, Orville Schell
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Atlantic correspondent James Fallows, scholar and journalist Orville Schell, and author and actress Rachel DeWoskin, who chronicled Chinese and American perceptions of each other in her acclaimed memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing, share their insightful, thought-provoking, and often humorous experiences in an informal conversation moderated by CBS News anchor Sam Litzinger.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: James Fallows, Orville Schell, rachel dewoskin, views of China
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Everything you see in Lu’s photographs—whether desolate mines, gritty plants spewing out toxic smoke, grimy miners, poisoned bodies of water or tundras of trash—grows out of China’s use of coal. In fact, 80 percent of China’s electricity comes from coal (in contrast to about 50 percent for the US). And electrical power has provided the Chinese economy with the energy it needs to maintain 10 percent growth rates for more than a decade.

In other words, coal has been China’s bounty and salvation, enabling tens of millions of people to rise up from grinding poverty, and allowing the government to build a whole new system of ports, highways, airports, railroads, bridges, buildings, and tunnels. It has also helped to create a prosperous middle class; and contributed to China’s emergence as a world power.

However, China’s reliance on coal has been polluting the country’s air and water, depleting its resource base and despoiling its landscape in ways that are difficult to imagine without actually visiting the Chinese countryside. Yet the photography of Lu Guang gives us a glimpse of this landscape, reminding us that these scenes of devastation are not isolated phenomena. They are ubiquitous. Above all, it also reminds us that there is a steep cost to such rapacious and high-speed development, something the Chinese government has started to understand and to try and remedy.

See more of Lu’s work and read translated comments from Chinese netizens via ChinaHush.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: air pollution, coal mines, Lu Guang, Orville Schell, photography
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As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized during her first trip overseas, the US has great expectations for China’s leadership and help on fixing the economy, and reducing climate change. Following the model of Richard Nixon in the 1970s, who sought to make common cause against the Soviet threat, Clinton emphasized common challenges for the two nations, playing down any differences over trade and human rights. Not so long ago, US and Chinese leaders insisted the other bears a greater share of responsibility for climate change and therefore should be the first to make sacrifice. Now, the Obama-Clinton team acknowledges that the US, as a developed country, contributed to high levels of emissions throughout history and seeks a partnership with China, currently the biggest emitter of green house gases. Orville Schell, director for US-China relations at the Asia Society, points out that, despite China’s tremendous success in overcoming poverty and pursuing development over the last two decades, the country still lags in self-confidence. “The truth is that old psychological mindsets and ways of relating to the world have changed far slower than the urban landscape might suggest, leaving China’s self-confidence lagging behind its actual achievements,” explains Schell, adding that some of China’s reluctance to take leadership may be part of a strategy aimed at not alarming neighboring countries. Solutions to major global problems require thoughtful ideas from all nations, as well as the ability to listen and collaborate on all levels. Compromise can be the first step on the leadership path. However, if China continues to shirk its global responsibility, the US will be left to act alone.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China's rise, financial crisis 2009, globalization, Orville Schell
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Dark Matter may appear to be simply another film about a mass shooting spree at an American campus, albeit one with a Chinese twist. When Liu Xing arrives at the University of Iowa from Beijing, he optimistically proclaims himself so lucky to come to America, Meiguo, the Beautiful Country. May we all find a dream here!… I’m going to solve the Dark Matter problem, win the Nobel Prize, and marry a blue-eyed American girl!

But he gradually becomes persuaded that his professors are conspiring to delay his degree and deny him his rightful recognition as a scholar. His growing paranoia is only heightened when his Ph.D. orals committee refuses to sign off on his thesis until he redoes some of his computations, making it impossible for him to win the top dissertation prize he feels he deserves. By the end of the film, his acute sense of humiliation has led to a psychotic state, and in a fit of murderous rage he kills the professors he once idealized.

But what gives Dark Matter wider significance is the filmmakers’ use of the Iowa incident to explore—indirectly—some important psychological dynamics between China and the West: China’s deeply felt sense of historic injury by foreign nations, and the ways its often thwarted efforts to gain acceptance among leading world powers have exacerbated such sentiments. In the past, feelings of injury have arisen from such events as the Opium Wars and the Japanese occupation; and most recently after the Tibetan demonstrations this spring and during the run-up to this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games.

By retelling the tragic story of a Chinese graduate student attempting to complete a Ph.D. at a prestigious American university, the film suggests, obliquely, a larger parable about China’s ambivalence toward the developed world, especially the United States.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dark Matter, Orville Schell
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followed by a group discussion with Cheng Li, Orville Schell, and Perry Link:

(...)
Read the rest of Charlie Rose Show on China (0 words)

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 17th Party Congress, kissinger, Orville Schell, perry link, videos
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The whole world, it seems, views China as the next great global power. A trip to Beijing does little to dispel that impression. Out of the welter of dust, noise, welders’ sparks, flotillas of cement mixers and construction cranes, the setting for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games is taking shape. A visitor feels inconsequential in the chaotic vastness of this epic undertaking.

But looking down on the scene from the half-finished Morgan Centre, the luxury apartment complex (where annual rents are $800,000) and seven-star hotel that is arising beside the Olympic site, one is awestruck not only by the project’s grandeur, but by its design daring. Below, like some latticed popover, is the Herzog & de Meuron-designed “birds nest” Olympic Stadium. Beside it is the stunning “water cube,” or Aquatics Center, of Chinese/Australian design. [Full Text]

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China's future, China's rise, Orville Schell
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In today’s China, nature is on the run, and at the heart of this environmental crisis sits coal, from which the country derives 69 percent of its primary energy and 52 percent of its electricity. China uses well over 2.2 billion metric tons of the stuff per year — more than the United States, India and Russia combined — and produces more conventional harmful emissions than the United States.

Sometime next year, China could surpass the United States in greenhouse gas emissions, but the average person in China still consumes less than one-fifth the energy the average American does. For China to achieve the same living standard as the United States, it would have to triple its use of coal, creating an enormous increase in both conventional pollutants and greenhouse gases. And make no mistake about it, China is angling to catch up. In fact, to keep up with this voracious demand for energy, a new conventional coal-fired power plant comes on-line in China every week. [Full text]

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coal, environmental cooperation, global warming, Orville Schell, U.S. environment
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