Wealth and Power, by Orville Schell & John Delury

Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century (2013)

Moves through some of China's most important figures after the Opium Wars, and what they considered to be the path for China to return to wealth and power. It supplies the long arc behind the Meiji and Qing comparison that recurs throughout my book.

Read it asking: every figure in this book is answering the same question — what do we borrow from the people who humiliated us, and what do we refuse? Notice that Europe is now asking a version of it.