Wang Qishan is reading about history’s decisive moments, and so should we

Niall Ferguson says the book recommendation by China’s powerful anti-corruption chief to his Politburo Standing Committee colleagues will resonate as the hour of reckoning approaches on the Korean missile crisis

Reading Time:3 minutes

Visitors look through binoculars towards North Korea from a South Korean observation post in Paju, near the demilitarised zone dividing the two Koreas, on August 11. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:14pm, 14 Aug 2017Updated: 7:01pm, 14 Aug 2017

If you are stuck for a book to read this August, I recommend Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History. Published in 1927, Zweig’s book is now largely forgotten. My interest was piqued when a friend in Beijing told me it was the latest Western book to be recommended by Wang Qishan (王岐山) to his colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee. (A few years ago it was Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Regime and the Revolution; more recently John Hirst’s The Shortest History of Europe.)

It pays to know what Wang is reading. As the head of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption commission, he is seen as the second most powerful man in China after President Xi Jinping (習近平). As we approach what may be the next decisive moment in history, we too should probably know what to look out for.

Usually, wrote Zweig, history does nothing but “add link to link in that enormous chain that stretches through the millennia”. Very occasionally, however, “a critical moment occurs in the world” that is “decisive for decades and centuries ... a single moment that determines and decides everything: a single yes, a single no, a too early or a too late makes that hour irrevocable for a hundred generations”. Zweig, a Viennese, called such moments sternstunden, best translated as “stellar moments”.

A notebook from Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition was found after a century trapped in the ice of the frozen continent. The race between Scott and Roald Amundsen to reach the South Pole led to a decisive moment in history, in Stefan Zweig’s telling. Photo: AFP / Antarctic Heritage Trust (New Zealand)

Part of the charm of Decisive Moments in History is the idiosyncrasy of Zweig’s selection. Three are famous events in political history: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, and Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917. Others are less obvious but still significant in the history of exploration and economics: Balboa’s first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, John Sutter’s discovery of gold in California and the fatal race between Scott and Amundsen to reach the South Pole.

You do not have to be a nice guy to change history

Yet it is to the first three turning points that the reader returns. The fall of Constantinople, in Zweig’s telling, is mainly the triumph of ruthless calculation by the young Ottoman sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror – but the fatal breach in the city’s defences is the result of a humble gate, the Kerkoporta, inadvertently left ajar.