The Search for Modern China
A single-volume narrative history of China from the late Ming dynasty (around 1600) through the modern era, grown out of Spence's famous Yale lecture course. It has been the standard survey text for modern Chinese history since 1990, now in a fourth edition revised by Janet Chen.
Seven hundred sixty-eight pages. Even the people pressing it on you issue a warning: "it's a brick, so ask about luggage capacity." It began as a Yale lecture course and never stopped sounding like one. "The depth is somewhat spoiled by the turgid academic prose," one reader writes, and the opening Ming and Qing chapters are the worst stretch, "jammed with names and dates" that blur before the narrative gets going. The ending is a different problem: Spence wrote it in 1990, and a reader finishing the book in 2024 found "some finger wagging prognostications" that China would be "trapped in a new cycle of impoverished helplessness."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
