To understand China today, you must understand its past!
From the fall of the late Ming Dynasty to modern China's desire to dominate the world situation,
Using politics as the main thread and economics as the secondary thread, Jingyuan Shih has woven a new generation of Chinese history that is both grand and objective!
From the fall of the late Ming Dynasty to modern China's desire to dominate the world situation,
Using politics as the main thread and economics as the secondary thread, Jingyuan Shih has woven a new generation of Chinese history that is both grand and objective!
Let’s step out of the historical perspectives we are familiar with and re-examine from the perspective of others – how China became China!
After Kangxi and Cao Yin, Changing China, Kangxi, and Tiananmen, the master of Ming and Qing history, Stephen Spence wrote In Search of Modern China to help Western students understand the complex modern Chinese history in a more systematic way. With its vivid descriptions and beautiful writing, it has not only successfully become an introductory book for Westerners to understand Chinese history, but has also become a classic masterpiece for Chinese people to understand contemporary China.
The first volume looks at how the land tax system of the Ming Dynasty affected people's livelihood from the fall of the dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. The evolution of mainstream doctrines, from Neo-Confucianism and textual criticism to "Chinese learning as the basis and Western learning as the application", can influence the selection of talents by the court and even lead to the rise and fall of the country. After experiencing border troubles and civil unrest, the international powers landed in force, the situation became more dangerous and complicated, and internal and external troubles continued, which eventually led to the collapse of the Qing Empire and the establishment of the Republic. Personal ambitions and national interests, and the balance of power between local and central governments have been bothering China in various forms since the late Ming Dynasty, and have not been resolved to this day.
The middle volume starts with the decline of the Qing Empire, goes through the turbulent Republic of China, and ends with the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. In Spence's writing, Chinese intellectuals finally woke up from their dream of a Celestial Empire and began to think about how to connect with the Western world, learn from Western theories, and rebuild the ideal map of great unification. From Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, the transition and struggle of power never stopped; the Kuomintang and the Communist Party struggled on the lines of capitalism and socialism; however, the international powers were also eyeing them, trying to influence the development of power in order to gain greater benefits. At this time, China was like a huge dead beast, with only the corpse still trembling. The awakening and resistance of the grassroots people reflects the weakness and corruption of the ruling political system in terms of economy and class. Faced with the various chronic diseases of the country, the casualties and chaos of the transfer of power, and the loss of ideological support, who will gather the anger of the land and the people? Where will China go?
The second volume begins with the KMT-CCP split and the Korean War in 1949, and ends with the revival of Neo-Confucianism in Chinese politics, showing the evolution of Chinese politics, economy, and diplomacy over the past seventy years. In this volume, Jonathan Spence writes that from the late Ming Dynasty to the present, there has always been a lack of peaceful transfer of power in China. This happened to scholars in the late Ming Dynasty, the late Qing Dynasty reform, and the early Republic of China. It has continued to happen in China after 1949. When Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang confronted each other for power, behind the scenes, generations of scholars and common people were trying to fight for democracy from the cracks of totalitarianism in a confined and conservative atmosphere and shed blood and sacrificed their lives. Tiananmen Square in front of the Imperial City has witnessed the revolutionary spirit of several generations, the endless open and covert struggles over the past century, and the people's desire for national prosperity.
When Jonathan Spence wrote The Search for Modern China at the end of the last century, it was just before the June 4th Tiananmen Square Incident, and his focus was on a closed China. At that time, China was no different from the late Ming Dynasty, in urgent need of internal reform and in turmoil. Leaders all consolidated their power in the name of truth and restricted the people's lofty ambitions in various fields. Although economic reforms brought hope for enlightenment, every reform also triggered bloody repression to consolidate power, and this cycle repeated again and again. For Jonathan Spence, if China wants to create its own path and if the West wants to understand China, especially why the East and the West have taken different paths in modernization after the Great Divergence, they cannot avoid how China was formed from the late Ming Dynasty to the modern era. This is the origin of the first edition of The Search for Modern China.
The third edition in 2013 not only expanded the timeline to the "Hu-Wen system" of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, but also significantly increased the amount of money and economic details based on the economic orientation in recent years; and the use of "liberalism" and "democracy" by various regimes to consolidate power has never disappeared in the third edition. Looking back at "In Search of Modern China", readers will find that this book is not only an entry-level classic for the West to understand China's modern and contemporary history, but also makes up for the lack of neutrality of cross-strait history books with clear positions and unequal information.