China’s Economic Surge Has Roots Before Deng, Book Finds

The official position of the Chinese Communist Party is that the answer is easy: Mao Zedong. But as evidence has accumulated in recent years about the extent of the killings, torture and chronic economic mismanagement through much of Mao’s rule, academic assessments outside China and sometimes even inside have been increasingly damning about Mao’s legacy.

That has produced a search for who should be given the credit for China’s re-emergence as an economic juggernaut with growing military and political heft. Jung Chang, the author of one of the most scathing biographies of Mao, as well as the best-seller “Wild Swans,” has suggested an alternative in a new book: Cixi, the empress dowager who for practical purposes was the ruler of China for most of the years from 1861 until her death in 1908.

Using extensive access to imperial court archives in Beijing that have not been available to biographers outside China, Ms. Chang presents her subject as neither the cruel despot nor the easily manipulated ruler whom the Communist Party and other critics have long portrayed. Her book, “Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China,” presents Cixi (pronounced tsuh-shee) as a powerful, strong-willed woman responsible for most of the modernizing programs undertaken during her rule, only to be thwarted on many occasions by men who were sometimes in the pay of foreign powers.

Ms. Chang gives Cixi credit for building China’s first rail artery from Beijing to Wuhan, although she initially opposed it, as well as for strenuously resisting Japan and other foreign powers, protecting freedom of the press and even seeking in her last days to give millions of Chinese men the right to vote.

Some historians have criticized the book as painting too rosy a picture of its subject.

John Delury, an assistant professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, who specializes in the Qing dynasty, said that, with most of the chapters ending with strong praise of Cixi, he was concerned about whether the archival material had been objectively assessed. “As a reader, you don’t know what to trust, because everything is the best possible” interpretation of her actions, he said. “Really what we need is a post-revisionist biography that is very scholarly and very careful.”

Speaking in Hong Kong last week, Ms. Chang defended her work as fair while acknowledging that she “did develop sympathy” for Cixi.

“I documented every single one of Cixi’s killings, some of which have not even been put out by the official propaganda,” she said. “What I did was to provide the context and why Cixi did it.”

Ms. Chang said: “It is a biographer’s job to enter the head of your subject. I mean that is my job — I felt I entered Mao’s head, and I felt I entered Cixi’s head.”

A few other authors have also begun offering somewhat favorable interpretations of Cixi, notably Sterling Seagrave in his 1992 book, “Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China.” Chinese historians, too, have offered more sympathetic interpretations of Cixi and other Qing court figures who resisted more radical calls for change in the late 19th century. But Ms. Chang said the Beijing archival material to which she unexpectedly gained access after the international success of her biography of Mao showed that Cixi had played an even more central role and been even more important to modernization than previously believed.

Although Ms. Chang’s books are banned in mainland China, Ms. Chang said the government had continued to let her travel to China each year to visit her aged mother, but with restrictions.

“I’ve made a commitment not to speak at public gatherings, not to talk to the press and not even to see my friends — I just restrict my visits to my mother and very close, old friends who have nothing to do with politics,” as well as a few Chinese scholars, she said. “I just hope that I can still go back to China and see my mother.”

PPR Will Change Name to Kering to Show Breton Roots

Kering is pronounced “caring,” according to François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and chief executive of the family-controlled company. “Ker” is a Breton word meaning “home,” making the new name also “a proud reminder of our origins in the Brittany region of France,” Mr. Pinault said in a statement.

The rebranding comes as the house is completing its transformation into a “pure” apparel and accessories group, shedding some of the broader collection of businesses on which it once depended. Mr. Pinault said in February that PPR planned a public stock offering this year of its Fnac entertainment retailing chain, which, like Virgin Megastores and HMV, has struggled as much of its core business has moved online.

The company also plans to divest itself of the Redcats online clothing and furniture business. That will allow it to focus exclusively on its luxury and sports-lifestyle brands, which also include Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta.

The new name “expresses the group’s new identity and our corporate culture,” said Mr. Pinault, 50, the son of PPR’s founder, François Pinault, 76. A marketing campaign, to be carried out largely though print advertisements and social media, is planned to help get the word out before the name change takes effect in June.

PPR reported revenue of 9.7 billion euros, or $12.5 billion, for last year.

Manfredi Ricca, the managing director at Interbrand in Milan, said the name change reflected an awareness that companies needed “a strong angle on what they stand for,” both for consumers and for employees, to demonstrate their “overarching vision” and values.

“I think it’s a case where the name needs to tell the story of the business,” Mr. Ricca said of PPR. “The former name contained things that are no longer relevant to the group.”

Kering will actually be the company’s fifth name.

It began in 1963 as a timber-trading business run by François Pinault, who called it simply Pinault. After expanding into distribution, the company took control of the venerable Printemps department store in 1992 and changed its name to Pinault-Printemps. With the acquisition of La Redoute, a mail-order shopping business, it changed its name to Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, before eventually opting for the simpler PPR.

The company achieved global prominence in 2001, when the elder Mr. Pinault won a highly public and drawn-out battle with Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, for control of the Gucci Group.