Customer Reviews

The Search for Modern China, 2nd Edition

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This book, now in its second edition, has been quite successful and has in one sense managed to fill a perceived need among literate westerners, particulaarly Americans, to know something about modern Chinese history.

However, few people appreciate what a ground-breaking book this was, at least in its first edition. That it was a popular history of China ("popular" in the sense that it was not primarily designed to be a college text) was not unique; reasonably well-researched surveys of Chinese history have been around since the nineteenth century. But for those of us who sat through an undergraduate course on Chinese history prior to 1980, Spence's approach was refreshingly un-Eurocentered.

Once upon a time, Chinese history was presented in two neat halves: the first half was "traditional" China from prehistoric times to the Opium Wars (1840's). The second half was everything else going forward. The overall impression was that everything changed when the white man appeared - which is, of course, a misperception, to put it mildly. Spence conceives of "modern" Chinese history as beginning with the Ming Dynasty, and treated the Western intervention as just one theme among many.

Thus, Spence was able to present a new view of China to a new generation, and it was a viewpoint that explains a great deal more than previous ones did. That he does it in such a compelling way, opening new vistas up to us in the process, is what makes this a great book. A great deal of thought and sensitivity has gone into this work, and it deserves to be appreciated for that.

I enjoyed this book for several reasons. The writing is excellent. It does not read like dry history. The author starts with the fall of the Ming dynasty. This is an excellent choice. By starting here, the reader better understands why China views the west it does. This places current events more in historical perspective. I also liked the author making value judgments about various historical figures and events. I am sure these value judgments will provoke controversy by the academic community. Spence does a good job of showing that the Communist revolution was more than a cult of Mao. Others were involved and Mao had his limits of power. This book is an excellent choice for someone who knows little about Chinese history but wants a quick survey of recent history.

As for weaknesses, I thought the coverage of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was weak. The horror of these two events is discussed too dispassionately. If readers have no previous knowledge of these two events, it is hard from this text to understand the nature of the true tragedy.

As a disclaimer, I am not a scholar of Chinese history. I had only read a few books and have had no academic courses in Chinese history

I have read Jonathan Spence's history course on modern China is one of the most popular courses at Yale University. "The Search for Modern China" is a great introduction to modern Chinese history. Spence's prose is very readable and the book is obviously exceedingly well researched.

Unlike the tendency of most Americans to falsely claim the United States and the West in general are at the center of the historical unverse, this book presents modern Chinese history primarily in a Chinese context. I especially enjoyed the chapters about the fall of the Ming dynasty and the Kangxi emperor, who was probably the wisest and most capable of the Qing emperors.

Americans and other people should be better able to understand after reading Jonathan Spence's book, the resentment many Chinese still have about recent, as well as current Western interference and continued popular hostility toward Japan. For nearly a century, as Spence ably writes, China endured a system of western imposed unequal treaties, a semi-colonial western and Japanese presence in many large Chinese cities and Japanese invasion. The western intrusion in China had the inadvertent consequences of weakening the Qing dynasty. The Japanese invasion prevented Jiang Jieshi or Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist armies from completely defeating Mao's Communist forces. Had there been no Japanese invasion of China, it is likely the communists would have never prevailed over the Nationalists. The century of western and Japanese imperialism in China helps explain why many Chinese still harbor strong suspicions and resentment about recent and current United States policies toward China.

While the book is fairly long, I think Spence could improve his book even more if he made it longer, with more extensive coverage of Chinese history since 1960. My only specific criticism of this book is that Spence should have more thoroughly covered the immense human disaster of the so-called Great Leap Forward, where 20 to 30 million human beings, primarily peasants died of starvation because of the extremely misguided economic policies of Mao.

Also, the Cultural Revolution was far more terrible than portrayed in this book. I highly recommend Jung Chang's "Wild Swans" for an excellent first hand description of the cruelty common by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

In general though, Jonathan Spence's book is an excellent introduction to modern Chinese history and can be reread for further understanding.

For anyone interested in contemporary China, this books provides the necessary historical backdrop in great and well reasoned detail. In my reading, Spence explains better than anyone why the Chinese currently prefer stability over democracy and why the country has made a slow and halting entry into the modern world. While making no excuses for the excesses of the Party's leadership, Spence chronicles the immense change that Mao and his successors initiated, not from the standpoint of solely the 20th Century, but over the last 300 years. If you are looking for a single book that provides a 360° view of the evolution of this ancient and complex civilisation, this is the book for you. Spence is also a master of eloquent and concise prose, refreshingly un-academic in tone and yet a brilliant synthesis of contemporary research.

Older readers may recall those Walter Kronkite-narrated documentaries where Kronkite kept saying "And you were there!", even though the documentaries themselves were stripped-down butcherings. This book does take you there. Spence accomplishes what so few historians do--he approaches his subject on its own terms, and within the narrative seeks to immerse the reader in the temporal and geographic subject matter. This is one of the few--perhaps the only--narrative surveys where readers might root for protagonists and feel anger toward villains. In reading this book, you feel as if you _are_ China; the turmoils of the late 1800s and 1900s strike you physically, at the gut. Each chapter conveys not only the happenings, but also the mood of the period--you feel tranquil and arrogant as you read about the Qing Dynasty at the height of its power, you begin to feel anxious as the Western world arrives, and you feel helpless as internal strife and Western demands eat away at the Empire. If you have near-zero interest in history books and will read only ten in your lifetime, this should be one of them. (PS--If you are ever in New Haven during school terms, make sure to sit in on a Spence lecture.)

I teach history in an International Baccalaureate public high school in San Diego California. After trying several other texts I have always come back to Spence for my class and my students. Every year some students come away from the unit lost and dumbfounded but more come away excited and intrigued. The chapters that we use from 1911 - 1980 are awesome for our studies which focus on the Cold War. The thoroughness of the research and preciseness of the narrative are awesome examples of historical methodology in them selves. Spence's compelling analysis on top is simply icing on the cake.

This textbook is the perfect introduction for students interested in an overview of modern Chinese history and a valuable reference for scholars already immersed in the subject. Drawing on his many years of teaching the survey course at Yale on Chinese history, Spence covers the major events and themes of the past four hundred years with scholarly thoroughness and a light literary hand. Although the amount of material is daunting - even Spence doesn't use it all in his course- Search for Modern China is written to be accessible to the layperson as well as the academic. Highly recommended for anyone interested in China today.

I'm a Chinese and I was fancinated by it when I was working as a visiting scholar at a Canadian University. I couldn't help buying it for myself when I came back to mainland China later. It's a little expensive to buy it from here, but it's worth it. For me, this book is the most comprehensive and objective history work about modern China that I have seen.

Finally,a text that does not read like one!Spence should be given a congratulatory note by all students of Chinese history. His work, physically voluminous and heavy, is anything but when the front cover is opened. I was immediately hooked from the retelling of Manchu invasion in 1644 to the Taiping Rebellion led by "God's Chinese Son" to Mao's Communist takeover in October of 1949. Remember, however, that this is a text and explores only historical events and not the cultural context of Chinese history. He does not go in to much detail regarding the cultural context of Chinese history(but that is not his purpose). For that you need to read some of his other works. If you are looking for an understanding of modern Chinese history/culture you might want to look at James Hersey's "A Single Pebble" or Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth", "Donald Duk" and "China Wakes." All are great works that compliment Spence's factually rich text.

Just examining the China/Far East section at your local bookstore will reveal just what an authority Spence is. In the US he dominates the field and this book is his most comprehensive offering. He does indeed support a very modest bias, as another reviewer has pointed out, but this is far less apparent than in the many many other books that deal with the subject. None of Spence's contemporaries really compare, and none of his other works do either. As an history this is a phenomenal guide, providing rich detail and a cohesive overview. As I have said though - there is a slight bias in his thesis, but in the field of recent Chinese history an unbiased opinion is as rare as a comprehensive view. That is to say, of any book you're likely to find on the subject 'Search' is the most comprehensive and the least slanted.