The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence

For the entire lifetime of my generation and the one before, China has appeared to outsiders to have been a relatively stable political entity, run by a communist regime in Beijing with a massive army, enormous homogeneous population, and great hostility toward the West. Certainly there has been internal turmoil from time to time, but nothing that would seem to betray that this is a country that for most of its history has been torn asunder by civil war or blanketed by foreign conquest, with constantly shifting borders, devastating natural disasters, and weak central governance.

The complexity of China's history, as well as its expanse, prove formidable to anyone seeking even a basic comprehension. I had to listen twice to the entire 18-hour Teaching Company lecture series on Chinese history, titled "From Yao to Mao," before I even felt like I understood the rudiments.

The last dynasty to rule China, termed the Qing Dynasty, was actually led by the Manchu people, who invaded and conquered the preceding Ming Dynasty in 1644. Like India, China spent much of its recent history under foreign rule. The Qing, which would last until overthrown by the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, oversaw a tumultuous period in Chinese history as the Manchu consolidated power, fought off the remnants of Ming loyalists, and in the 19th-century, tried to cope with with the pressures of foreign interests. The forces which led to the collapse of the dynasty ensured several decades of chaos in the aftermath, until the Communists, in the wake of Japan's defeat in World War II, were able to drive the Nationalist forces out to Taiwan in 1949 and establish the People's Republic of China which is with us to this day. In The Search for Modern China, Yale professor Jonathan Spence covers this entire period from the late Ming until the book's publication in 1990, engaging in "an ongoing search" for a China that he does not think yet exists:

I understand a "modern" nation to be one that is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies, new ideas. If it is used in this poen sense, we should have no difficulty in seeing "modern" as a concept that shifts with the times as human life unfolds, instead of simply relegating the sense of "modern" to our own contemporary world while consigning the past to the "traditional" and the future to the "postmodern." I like to think that there were modern countries--in the above sense--in A.D. 1600 or earlier, as at any moment in the centuries thereafter. Yet at no time in that span, nor at the end of the twentieth century, has China been convincingly one of them.

Spence takes a straight chronological approach to the narrative, providing a thorough look at the political and economic life of the last four hundred years of Chinese history, with occasional asides devoted to religious or cultural issues. Spence moves relatively briskly through the 17th and 18th centuries, as the Qing take power and then consolidate their gains. The pace slows as external forces introduce new pressures to the country, with ramifications that echo into contemporary times:

China's Confucian-trained scholars were aware of the moral and economic pressures on their society in the early nineteenth century. Drawing on the intellectual tradition in which they had been raised, they proposed administrative and educational reforms, warned about the rapidly rising population, and urged greater fairness in the distribution of wealth. Some also pointed to the social inequities separating men and women, and pleaded for greater sensitivity toward the status of women in daily life.

The spread of opium addiction posed a particularly complex social dilemma. Scholars, officials, and the emperor himself were torn over whether to legalize the drug or ban it absolutely. At the same time, massive British investments in the drug's manufacture and distribution, and the critical part that opium revenues played in Britain's international balance-of-payments strategy, made the opium trade a central facet of that nation's foreign policy. The Qing, believing the problem to be a domestic one, decided to ban the drug. The British responded with force of arms. Defeating the Qing, they imposed a treaty in 1842 that fundamentally altered the structure of Qing relations with foreign powers, and ended the long cycle of history in which China's rulers had imposed effective controls over all foreigners resident on their soil.

Indeed, the relationship between China and the Western powers took on a very unique shape. It was not carved up or colonized like Africa, the Middle East, or the Indian subcontinent. And yet its sovereignty was utterly ignored in the treaties and treatment that followed the Opium Wars. The consequences for the Qing government were catastrophic, and indeed it is some wonder that the dynasty held on as long as it did. Not only did the foreign intervention cast doubt on the strength and solidity of the ruling dynasty, it raised questions about the direction of Chinese society and its ability to keep up with the social and technological advances of the outside world:

This new foreign presence in China coincided with--and doubtless contributed to--new waves of domestic turbulence. Uprisings against the Qing had been growing in frequency during the later eighteenth century. The widening social dislocations of the nineteenth century brought even greater unrest, until in mid-century four major rebellions erupted, at least two of which--the Taiping and Nian--had the potential to overthrow the dynasty... Only an extraordinary series of military campaigns led by Confucian-trained scholars who put their loyalty to traditional Chinese values above all else, and were determined to perpetuate the prevailing social, educational, and family systems, enabled the Qing dynasty to survive.

And survive it did, at least through the first decade of the 20th-century, which still only takes us a third of the way through Spence's book. Almost five hundred pages are devoted to the period between 1911 and 1990, and it is remarkable the political transformations China experienced in that time frame. The aftermath of the Qing's fall is sometimes depicted as the rise of the Republic of China under Sun Yat-Sen, but it would be more apt to describe the first decade as a chaotic reversion to warlord rule:

The national finances were in disarray, with a depleted treasury in Peking and little money coming in from the provinces. Groups of scholars and bureaucrats had expressed a wide range of dissatisfactions with the defunct regime, and this discontent now had to be addressed. The army troops occupying Peking were numerous but hard to control, of doubtful loyalty, and liable to mutiny or desertion if their pay fell too long in arrears. Natural disasters had devastated the countryside, causing ruined harvests and starvation, and creating masses of refugees just when financial shortages made it difficult for local governments to offer famine relief. Many supporters of the defeated ruling house remained loyal and could be the focus for future trouble. Foreign pressure was intense, the possibility of invasion imminent. In the macroregions of central, western, and southern China, there was a strong chance that independent separatist regimes would emerge, further weakening central authority.

What follows from there is relatively familiar to students of history. Though ostensibly an Allied Power during World War I, the Chinese were ignored and mistreated by the Big Four at Versailles, watching formerly-German holdings handed over to the Japanese rather than back to the Chinese themselves. Over the next several decades the nationalist Kuomintang and the Communists violently compete for power, sometimes uniting in opposition to foreign aggressors (mainly Japan), but largely at each other's throats until the Communists win out in 1949, driving Chiang Kai-Shek and his followers to the island of Taiwan. The subsequent decades of Communist rule demonstrated that many of the problems besetting the Qing dynasty and its predecessors were not to go away quickly, and China's relations with the world remained extraordinarily complicated in the Cold War era.

Spence keeps a critical eye on the regime, highlighting the extremes of suffering that some of Mao's ideas produced and tracking the rise and fall (and sometimes resurrection) of Mao's colleagues and proteges. His narrative never gets stuck in muddy details, yet nor does it shy away from relying on charts and statistics when needed. He also ably roots the events of the last 50 years in the preceding centuries, lending a much-needed coherence to Chinese history that shorter, narrower works cannot provide.

The Search for Modern China ends with the notorious crackdown on the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests, an event that embodied all the ambiguities of China's pseudo-embrace of modernity. Amidst a wave of economic reforms pushed by Deng Xiaoping came a desire for similar progress on the political and cultural fronts. Like so many times before, the Chinese leadership first showed encouragement or at least ambivalence, only to respond with crushing force once they came to fear the direction the blossoming movement was taking. Unlike the Soviet leadership, which (eventually) accepted its own demise rather than send troops against its own people, China has shown no such hesitation. And in the two decades since the crackdown, the disparities between economic freedom and political and cultural oppression have continued apace, despite lingering hopes in the West that economic exchange will force open the doors to liberal democracy. As defined by Spence in his opening pages, the search for "modern China" continues.