jonathan spence the search for modern china

Economy opens her latest book, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, by asking the reader to consider the nature of contemporary China. And while their focus and approaches vary considerably, they all seek to explain the nature of the modern Chinese state.Įlizabeth C. Ranging in topic from Xi Jinping’s effect on Chinese society, to an examination of the Belt and Road Initiative, to an analysis of changes in Chinese grand strategy over the past hundred years, to the psychological effects of living under an increasingly authoritarian regime, these books were written by leading thinkers with deep knowledge of and experience in dealing with China. Seeking to answer these questions, three recent works of non-fiction and, surprisingly, one novel stand out in their ability to interpret modern China. Sitting at the heart of that debate are the same fundamental issues about China’s nature and direction that Spence raised three decades ago. Thirty years later, the United States finds itself in the midst of a generational debate on China. Opening his comprehensive work, The Search for Modern China, Spence observed that “for a long time China was a completely unknown quantity to those living in the West.” That had changed, he suggested, but there were still enough questions to “keep us in a state of bewilderment as to China’s real nature.”

“There is no easy way to understand China,” the preeminent China historian Jonathan Spence wrote in 1990. Haunted by Chaos: Chinese Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017, 208 pp., $34.95 Oxford University Press, 2018, 360 pp., $27.95Ĭhina’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State

Jonathan spence the search for modern china