The Search for Modern China (Second Edition)

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


The best one volume history of modern China   November 22, 2005
Koreen (United States)
24 out of 24 found this review helpful

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.


A feast of history and difficult issues   April 4, 2001
Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France)
29 out of 32 found this review helpful

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.


Spence takes you there   November 13, 1998
Bryan Walker
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

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.)


Excellent work.   August 18, 2006
Zhang Kai (Wuhan, China)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

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.