The Search for Modern China

The Search for Modern China tells the history of China from the late Ming dynasty to the 1990, when the book was published. It covers all the significant events in China post 1500. It covers the late Ming to the expansion of China under the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors to the First Opium War to the Taiping rebellion[^2] to the end of the Qing in only 269 pages. The remainder is devoted to the highly tumultuous 20th century: the new Republic of China, its decent to warlordism, the rise of the Nationalists and Communists, the Nanjing Decade, World War II, the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, the creation of the PRC, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the reformist 1980s. Throughout, Spencer focuses on intellectual history, often bringing up authors, playwrights, poets, and painters whose works were influential or captured the zeitgeist. This choice makes sense when we consider that the dominant class in most of Chinese history have been Confucian bureaucrat. Spencer also uses tables to illustrate the economic conditions of a time.

It tells a good, if temporally uneven story of modern China up to 1976. The later chapters suffer from myopia. In 1990, the Tianmen Square massacre was less than a year old. Hong Kong was still a British colony. Search for Modern China does not focus enough on the economic reforms of the 1980s, which birthed a superpower. It does not focus enough on the One Child Policy, which has created a looming demographic crisis. These are minor weaknesses; Search for Modern China is a historical work not a geopolitical prediction. But the 30 years of perspective is important. From 2021, we know that the search for modern China is over. Now begins the search for a what world with a modern China will look like.