The Search for Modern China

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.

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.

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.)