Mandate of heaven

by Orville Schell

This astonishing new book by Orville Schell, for thirty years America's foremost chronicler of contemporary China, offers a unique look at the China of the mid-'90s and the generation that stands poised to inherit the "mandate of heaven," the right to govern the world's largest nation. China's current leaders - already in their eighties and nineties - will soon be leaving the country's political scene. Their departure raises the ultimate question: Who will assume power? The generation that was the natural heir was decimated in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and '70s. Thus, with the end of the Deng era, it is left to a new generation, with a drastically different set of experiences and priorities, to take over. The crackdown that followed the democracy protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 seemed to foretell doom to international investment and any possibility of political freedom, but Deng Xiaoping, who had already begun instituting bold capitalist-style economic r