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History

History

The Search for Modern China

Jonathan D. Spence

A narrative history of China from the late Ming dynasty to the early twenty-first century, developed from the author's long-running introductory course. Spence traces the political, social and intellectual search for a modern Chinese state through the Qing conquest, the collapse of the imperial order, revolution, and the reform era.

Prerequisites: No prior knowledge of Chinese history is required, though a general world-history background helps with the nineteenth-century chapters.

Difficulty Level
Intermediate
Academic Level
Undergraduate
modern chinachinese historyqing dynastyeast asian historyTextbook

01 / Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Citation

Spence, J. D. (2013). The Search for Modern China (3rd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Chapter Summary

The third edition runs to about 700 pages of text, with a further section of notes, bibliography and index at the back, and is divided into five parts and 28 chapters. Each chapter is subdivided into four or five sections whose headings, listed in the library catalogue contents note, show how the narrative is organised.

Part I, Conquest and Consolidation: Chapters 1–6

The book starts around 1600. Chapter 1, The Late Ming, moves from the glory of the Ming through town and farm life and corruption and hardship to the Ming collapse. Chapter 2, The Manchu Conquest, follows the rise of the Qing, the conquest of the Ming, adaptation to China, and class and resistance. Chapters 3 to 5 (Kangxi's Consolidation; Yongzheng's Authority; Chinese Society and the Reign of Qianlong) cover the war of the Three Feudatories, Taiwan and maritime China, the courting of intellectuals and the definition of the borders, then economic structures, taxes and the channels of central power, then eighteenth-century Confucianism, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber and Qianlong's later years. Chapter 6, China and the Eighteenth-Century World, deals with the management of foreigners, foreigners under Chinese law, opium and Western images of China.

Part II, Fragmentation and Reform: Chapters 7–11

Chapter 7, The First Clash with the West, treats the responses of China's scholars and of the government, Britain's military response and the new treaty system. Chapter 8, The Crisis Within, covers social dislocation, the Taiping, foreign pressures, the Nian rebellion and the Muslim revolts. Chapter 9, Restoration through Reform, takes up Confucian reform, foreign policy, the missionary presence and overseas Chinese. Chapter 10, New Tensions in the Late Qing, includes self-strengthening and the war with Japan, the reform movement of 1898, nationalism and emerging social forces. Chapter 11, The End of the Dynasty, ends the part with the Qing constitution, railways and the new army, nationalists and socialists, and the fall of the Qing.

Part III, Envisioning State and Society: Chapters 12–16

Chapter 12, The New Republic, covers the experiment in democracy, Yuan Shikai's rule, and militarists in China and Chinese in France. Chapter 13, "A Road Is Made", turns to social Darwinism, Marxist stirrings, the May Fourth movement, and the Comintern and the birth of the Chinese Communist Party. Chapter 14, The Fractured Alliance, follows the Northern Expedition and the break between Nationalists and Communists. Chapter 15, The Guomindang in Power, looks at Guomindang government, culture and ideology, and China's relations with the United States and with Japan. Chapter 16, Communist Survival, covers the rural poor, Mao Zedong and the rural soviets, the Long March and the crisis at Xi'an.

Part IV, War and Revolution: Chapters 17–22

Chapter 17, World War II, deals with the loss of east China, a divided country, and the Nationalist capital Chongqing and the Communist base Yan'an. Chapter 18, The Fall of the Guomindang State, covers the Japanese surrender and the Marshall mission, land reform, inflation and the defeat of the Guomindang armies. Chapters 19 to 22 (The Birth of the People's Republic; Planning the New Society; Deepening the Revolution; Cultural Revolution) follow the early People's Republic, the first five-year plan and the Hundred Flowers campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Sino-Soviet rift, and the Cultural Revolution through the death of Lin Biao.

Part V, Re-entering the World: Chapters 23–28

Chapter 23, Reopening the Doors, begins with the Nixon visit and ends with the deaths of the old guard in 1976. Chapters 24 to 27 (Redefining Revolution; Levels of Power; Testing the Limits; Century's End) cover the four modernizations, the special economic zones, governing China in the 1980s, the democracy movement and its breaking point, and the growth and openings of the 1990s up to Deng Xiaoping's death. Chapter 28, Breakthrough?, covers the range of options, the Hu and Wen years, economic challenges, global preoccupations and cultural parameters. The 2013 edition is the one that extends the narrative into this period.

Key Concepts

  • The Manchu conquest and Qing consolidation: the transition from Ming to Qing rule and the work of Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong in securing borders, taxes and moral authority.
  • The treaty system: the framework that followed the first clash with Britain and shaped foreign relations through the nineteenth century.
  • Internal crisis: the Taiping, Nian and Muslim rebellions, which the book places alongside foreign pressure in explaining the Qing decline.
  • Self-strengthening and reform: Confucian reform, the 1898 reform movement and the late Qing constitution as attempts to renew the state.
  • May Fourth and the founding of the Communist Party: the intellectual currents, including social Darwinism and Marxism, that preceded the party's birth.
  • The Guomindang state and the Communist base: the competing governments in Chongqing and Yan'an, and the road to 1949.
  • Mao-era campaigns: the Hundred Flowers campaign, Great Leap Forward, "socialist education" and the Cultural Revolution.
  • Reform era: the four modernizations, special economic zones and the problems of prosperity.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

  • A long chronological sweep in one narrative. The five-part structure runs from the late Ming to the Hu and Wen years, so one author's framing links the Qing, the Republic and the People's Republic. Norton's description says the book grew out of Spence's introductory course at Yale and traces the beginnings of modern China to internal developments from the early seventeenth century.
  • Early-modern depth. Six chapters, a fifth of the book, are given to the Ming and Qing before the first clash with the West, including social and cultural material such as eighteenth-century Confucianism and The Dream of the Red Chamber. This makes it suitable for a course that wants the origins of modern China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
  • Social and cultural history alongside politics. Norton's description credits the text with strength in social and political history and in the intersections of culture and politics, and the chapter sections bear this out through headings on town and farm, class and resistance, social strains and cultural parameters.
  • Navigable structure. Each chapter is divided into short, titled sections, which makes it easier to locate one episode, and the back matter provides bibliographical references and an index.
  • A companion source book. A separate volume, The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection, is listed in Google Books as a companion.

Limitations

  • Length. At more than 700 pages the book is demanding for a single survey course; instructors normally need to select. Norton's page for the later fourth edition says that edition's narrative is about 10 percent shorter, which suggests length was seen as a problem to address.
  • Political core. The same page says the fourth edition's new co-author revised the text to balance its "strong political core" with social and cultural history. A reader of the third edition should expect a narrative organised mainly around rulers, regimes and campaigns, and may want supplementary reading on economy and everyday life.
  • Recent period. The final chapter ends with the Hu and Wen years, and as a 2013 publication the book cannot cover later developments.
  • Edition-specific wording. Chapter titles differ in later editions (for example the 1945–1949 chapter appears as The Civil War in the fourth edition), so page and chapter references from other editions will not always match.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the East Asian History course, Spence is the full-length narrative of China from about 1600 to the present. Holcombe's A History of East Asia and Ebrey and Walthall's East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History are one-volume regional surveys that place China beside Korea, Japan and in Holcombe's case Vietnam; they are the choice for a course on the whole region, with Spence as the deeper treatment of China alone. Mote's Imperial China 900–1800 is a detailed history of the earlier dynasties and the non-Chinese states that ruled, and overlaps with Spence only in the Ming and Qing chapters of Part I. Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan plays a similar role for Japan, so Spence and Jansen can be read side by side for the modern period.

Mitter's Modern China: A Very Short Introduction is a short orientation; it suits a reader who wants a quick overview before, or instead of, the longer narrative.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no prior knowledge of Chinese history, and general world-history background helps with the nineteenth-century chapters. It suits undergraduates in a modern China survey, students of politics or international relations who need historical depth, and general readers who want one sustained account.

A practical plan: read Parts II to IV (Chapters 7–22) as the core of a one-semester course on modern China, since these chapters cover the nineteenth-century crisis, the fall of the dynasty, the Republic, the war and the Mao years. Use Part I (Chapters 1–6) as background, or as the core of a course that starts in the early modern period; Part V (Chapters 23–28) supplies the reform era. Keep a timeline of regimes beside the text, since the chapters are organised around reigns and leaders. Use the documentary collection for primary sources and the bibliography at the back to choose monographs for each period. Readers who need the years after 2013 should add a more recent title.