The Search for Modern China

...Spence has had to blur his Susan Rue4 a former resident of Shanghai, is an assistant professor at Hofstra University's Institute of Applied Social Science...

...Having attained such a degree of interest, he not only gets away with, but triumphs in, his rendering of her strangulation as a poetic dream sequence...

...For Spence to have carried out the herculean labor of summarizing four centuries of Chinese history is analogous to such a painter's attempting to illustrate a broad mountain vista or a gigantic big-character poster: the disparity between method and subject could not be more vast...

...Overall, The Search for Modern China is more expository than analytical, more episodic than interpretive...

...As it is, this 876-page book is so hefty that hoisting it up to read may yield aerobic benefits...

...In his earlier work, Spence has shown considerable literary talent and an affinity for evocative minutiae, particularly in The Death of Woman Wang (1978), the story of the murder of an unfaithful wife by her husband in an accident-prone corner of Shandong province in the seventeenth century...

...Spence is unusually well attuned to the lessons Chinese writers hold about the spirit of their eras, from Cao Xuegin's Dream of the Red Chamber and Shen Fu's Six Records from a Floating Life to modern-day artists such as Lao She, Ding Ling, Mao Dun, and especially Lu Xun...

...29.95 Susan Ruel J onathan Spence's new book brings to mind those Chinese calligraphers who use mouse whiskers to paint, on bits of ivory, poems and images so infinitesimal that they must be viewed through a magnifying glass...

...At that moment, the author soars to a level of inspiration seldom reached in non-fiction...

...Unfortunately, Spence has no time in this new book to dwell on any one scene long enough to give it the kind of in-depth treatment at which he excels...

...While writing a text away from one's sources may make it more readable, it leads to a tendency to paraphrase instead of quoting directly...

...While he once again uses details colorfully and powerfully, they seldom add up to more than a diverting mnemonic for remembering the main events between the late Ming dynasty and the present...

...Q pence includes much on women, 1.3 who, according to the Chinese saying, "hold up half the sky...

...For example, Peking's prosecution of a foreign businessman who fell asleep while smoking in bed and set fire to a Shenyang hotel in the early 1980s is compared to the harsh treatment of foreign sailors implicated in the deaths of Chinese nationals during the nineteenth century, before the Treaty of Nanking...

...The problem is that cataclysmic events, such as the Cultural Revolution, in which by some estimates twenty million Chinese perished, lose their gravity and magnitude when covered, as every event in a book this length must be, in passing...

...In fact, the book comes most alive in those passages when the author enters the sensibilities of individuals: for example, the Ming emperor Kangxi despairing as he casts about in vain for a suitable successor, or the emperor Qianlong and the reasons the I Ching hexagram of the "sun at midday" epitomizes his strengths and weaknesses...

...Spence's scroll just keeps unfurling, as inexorably as time itself, with a climactic final frame: the Peking massacre of 1989...

...An anecdote about a Christian missionary who abandoned his Chinese mistress and three children when his European wife arrived speaks volumes about the mixed blessings Western missionaries bestowed on the Far East...

...111 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 53...

...By culling quotations from the best of their work, Spence contributes much to an understanding of the times in which they wrote, including the bounds of censorship under which some had to operate...

...The plethora of sometimes gory but always vivid word paintings in this long scroll of a book is guaranteed to leave an impression on the student's mind and memory...

...Some of Spence's other books, such as The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980, also take a broad sweep of Chinese history as their purview, but he is at his best when he zooms in on individuals and their circumstances—as in The Measure Palace of Matteo Ricci and The Question of Hu...

...The author told the New York Times that he has refrained from traveling to China recently to register his displeasure with the bloodshed in Peking last year...

...Spence revealed at a book-warming lecture at New York's Asia Society last spring that he wrote much of this book at the Naples pizza parlor in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is George Burton Adams professor of history at Yale University...

...In an anecdote of a man exonerated of burying his son alive because the boy had violated filial piety by cursing him, Spence tells us more about the Qing legal system than any treatise or translation of by-laws could do...

...By the time woman Wang, abandoned by her lover, returns to her village to suffer a grisly fate, Spence has his readers attuned to every detail, from her bound feet to the chill of the winter of 1672...

...Nearly every recent history of modern China has traced current conditions back to the Ming dynasty, so there is little originality in Spence's approach...

...focus considerably in order to cover a mammoth amount of information...

...By connecting the current leadership of the Chinese Communist party with the nation's imperial past, Spence stops short of indicting the uniquely "modern" evil of totalitarian Communism...

...Beyond simply recounting the story of China's crippling dependence on opium provided by Western powers, he addresses the deeper issue of why so many nineteenth-century Chinese were susceptible to drug addiction in the first place, even citing an example of what sounds remarkably like an early support group for imperial scholars suffering from opium addiction...

...From that tragedy, Spence draws one of his few sweeping conclusions, quoting journalist Liu Binyan: "There will be no modern China until people are given back their voices...

...The latter account notes that the Hakka women who participated in the Taiping rebellion were considered bizarre by China's Han majority mainly because they did not bind their feet...

...The book teems with heretofore untranslated or unavailable historical sources, but I would like to have found even more...

...Others may feel the author shuns controversial or idiosyncratic interpretations...

...While some have argued that history itself is composed of episodes, scholars who yearn for a fresh and coherent new mode of looking at China's past may be bored by the conventionality of the overview presented here...

...He covers everything from female infanticide rates so high they affected sex ratios in some areas (as they still do) to the brave life and early death of female revolutionary Qiu Jin, executed for attempting to overthrow the Qing dynasty...

...However, it is not entirely clear that 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 the Chinese people have ever made their voices heard...

...Furthermore, the author's command of both the spirit and letter of Chinese history allows him to draw comparisons between past and present that most would miss...

...I only wish this book had registered a more emphatic protest, by differentiating the criminality of the CCP from the despotism of Ming and Qing emperors...

...In his introduction, Spence promises to treat the "intellectual, economic, and emotional problems" that have hindered China in its quest for modernity...

...the scene lingers indelibly in the mind of anyone who has read it...