Taiwan Today

The Search for Modern China.
By Jonathan D. Spence. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1990. 876 pp.

In the twenty-five years since the publication of his first book, Jona­than Spence has earned a well­ deserved reputation as perhaps the most literarily accomplished of contemporary Western historians of China. So it is no surprise that The Search for Modern China has many merits.

The book is a narrative that takes the reader from roughly the year 1600, in the late Ming dynasty, right up to the Tienanmen massacre. It falls into three sections of approximately equal length: the first treating imperial China, the third describing the People's Republic, and the second the period in between. Sources are drawn almost entirely from academic monographs and ─ Spence's trademark ─ Chinese creative literature. From an academic point of view, the book is a tour de force of synthesis. Check where you will, and you will find that the latest scholarship has left its mark. Yet the exposition is almost seamless. The book is a pleasure to read.

Spence writes with lucidity and grace, and his narrative is buttressed by care­ fully chosen illustrations, crisp charts and tables that sum up complex demo­ graphic and economic information, a useful glossary, and most important, good clear maps. The only major produc­tion fault is the virtual absence of Chi­nese characters.

Spence's volume will inevitably join the small but distinguished company of synthetic histories that treat imperial and modern China together, and it will be compared with them. In material cov­ered, it is probably closest to East Asia: The Great Transformation (960), by John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, and The Rise of Modern China (970), by Immanuel C. Y. Hsu. As might be expected, given the more numerous sources and longer perspective upon which he could draw, Spence improves on these predecessors in certain respects, and not only in his treatment of the Ching dynasty and the People's Repub­lic, where most research has been focused. His account of the Republican period (beginning in 1911) has some real strengths. He deals seriously with Yuan Shih-kai, for example, and restores. World War II to its pivotal role.

Generalization about works such as those of Fairbank and Hsu is necessarily a risky business, but they do have certain traits in common. John Fairbank was born in 1907 and first went to Peking in 1932, so his sense of China was formed in the crucible of World War II and the Chinese civil war. Much the same is true of Immanuel Hsu, born sixteen years later. Such writers of this older genera­tion vividly remember how China was contested in the 1930s and 1940s, and bear the associated emotional scars. They also have a certain intellectual char­acter in common. They personally wit­nessed the catastrophes that overtook China following the Japanese invasion and shared the sense of impotence and futility that gradually overtook most thoughtful Chinese.

Because these writers have longed so desperately to see an end to China's agony, they have sometimes seemed willing, even eager, to see the establishment of communism as in some sense the end of the "search for modern China," and to take 1949 and the estab­lishment of the People's Republic on the Mainland as perhaps the decisive and defining event of the twentieth century. Previous attempts at change had been in­ conclusive. With the communist trans­formation, China was on the road at last.

To read Spence, however, is to hear the voice of a new genera­tion, one that came of intellectu­al age in the era of the People's Republic. Spence was born in 1936 and received his Ph.D. in 1965. Unlike their predecessors, this younger generation had no direct experience of China in their formative years. In the work of the older generation, the passionate con­cerns of people who knew China before 1949 are always smoldering under the surface. One can almost feel a Fairbank or a Hsu fighting back powerful emotions while turning out disinterested narratives and judicious conclusions.

For Spence's generation the problem has always been just the opposite. They have known China primarily through their imaginations and have had to supply the emotions themselves. The older generation had a firsthand and con­crete sense of China's many perils and possibilities; the younger generation has had to imagine them from afar. Spence, who comes from a literary family, has met the challenge by making resourceful use of everything from statistics to short stories, while at the same time keeping his analytical distance.

This perhaps accounts for a certain coolness or detachment in Spence's ac­count. Fairbank's title makes it clear that he believes China has been transformed in the twentieth century, while Hsu's title suggests a core belief that, in one way or another, modern China is in the process of rising. Spence, however, is ambiguous. He presents no such clear picture of progress. His story is rather of a search for modern China. Indeed, the first third of the book is devoted not to change at all, but to a cycle: the fall of the Ming, and the rise, glory, and decline of the Ching.

Nor does the early twentieth cen­tury, according to Spence, bring clear-cut change. True, there are possibilities and ideas of change. Roads are opened, but they are not necessarily followed. The history of the Chinese Republic, whether in Peking or Nanking, is not of govern­ments but of "experiments in govern­ment." Even his treatment of the Peo­ple's Republic is full of words connoting imagination and flux, illustrated by the chapters entitled "Planning the New Society" and "Redefining Revolution."

And Spence's concluding sentence, about Tienanmen, brings the search back almost to where it began, in impe­rial times when emperor and people in­habited two different worlds. The twentieth century had created what seemed to be a radically new and popular authority, although housed in the same former imperial precincts. After the massacre, however, as Spence writes: "The gleam­ing yellow roofs and spacious marble courts of the Forbidden City still stood in place, but they now reverberated to a new kind of challenge from the great open space that stretched in front of them. There would be no truly modern China until the people were given back their voices" (emphasis added).

Spence, one feels, has read correctly the watershed significance of the Tienan­ men massacre, not dissimilar, in its own way, to that of the communist victory in 1949. It was common after the commu­nists had come to power to describe how the Nationalist government had gradual­ly lost the confidence of many Chinese people, and thus, in the traditional Chi­nese phrase, forfeited "the Mandate of Heaven." The term even found its way into book titles, John Melby's classic The Mandate of Heaven (1971), for example. Nevertheless, scarcely anyone suspected, even a few days before Tien­anmen that the same fate was about to overtake the People's Republic.

But how else to interpret, for exam­ple, an electric moment during the demonstration outside the PRC consu­late in New York the day after the massacre? The thousands of students had been chanting slogans about individual people: "Down with Li Peng!" "Down with Deng Xiaoping!" What else should they shout? During a pause, a single voice was heard: "Tatao kungchan­ tang!" This was something new, and for a moment the young Chinese hesitated. Most had been born after 1949 and never in their lives dreamed of uttering such forbidden words. But after a moment came the full-throated roar, and with it a sense of spiritual and intel­lectual liberation: 'Tatao kungchantang! Down with the Communist Party!"

The moral and imaginative sway ─ if not the institutional control ─ exercised by the Communist Party for almost half of the twentieth century was at an end. The idea, ubiquitous before Tienanmen, that 1949 had been a conclusive turning point, was finished. China was again up for grabs. The form of Spence's book demonstrates his understanding that the twentieth century has seen not the build­ing of, but rather the search for modern China. After Tienanmen that search was renewed with a vengeance, not in the public forums of the People's Republic, of course, still occupied by troops, but in the minds, hearts, and imaginations of millions of Chinese.

Thus we come to the paradox of The Search for Modern China. One of the supreme tests of his­torical writing is the degree to which it escapes presentism, the tenden­cy to treat the past not on its own terms, but rather as a field for the backward ex­tension of current wisdom and current concerns. As long as the present is stable, presentist history is secure. But when the present changes and demands a new past, then much historical writing is suddenly forgotten. Only the very best can survive such transitions. They are able to do so because they capture the full range of the past's potentials ─ and above all, those potentials that, even though hidden for a time by the blinders of a particular moment, subsequently reemerge.

The transition marked by the Tien­anmen massacre represents such a test­ing time for historical writing about modern China, Spence's book included. It is almost certain that if The Search for Modern China had been published, let us say in 1983, then it would quickly have become standard, not only for its scholarly and literary strengths, but also be­ cause of the degree to which it reflected mainstream thinking then about China's modern past. Today such status is per­ haps in doubt. With Tienanmen the task of imagining China's future, and thus its past, has become far more complex than even Spence imagined.

The ability of Spence and his genera­tion to envision genuinely alternative Chinas, it turns out, has been impover­ished by the fact that they grew up with the People's Republic, and thus could believe that they knew in advance the answers to the questions their histories posed. For them the defining China­ the "real" China, if you will-was always the PRC, and quite reasonably so: Spence was a schoolboy of thirteen when it was founded. Fairbank, by con­trast, spent nearly twenty years studying China before he found out that the com­munists were going to win.

It therefore seemed natural to Spence's generation to take relevance to the People's Republic as the touchstone of importance for events in modern Chi­nese history, and 1949 as the year on which events were (rather obviously in retrospect) converging. This belief, in effect the presentism of the generation to which Spence belongs, can perhaps be called the post-1949 but pre-Tienanmen sense of Chinese history. That sense was secure precisely for the forty years be­tween those two events.

But today, Chinese and Western scholars face a new and unexpected chal­lenge: to write post-Tienanmen-and soon probably post-communist-histo­ries of modern China. Unlike pre-Tien­anmen scholarship, which is distin­guished by a guiding sense that the PRC and its origins are central, post-Tienan­men scholarship (and there is not much of it yet) tends to reject the PRC and in­ stead searches the Chinese past for alternatives. It is thus presentist, it should be noted, in its own way.

What will post -Tienanmen histories contain? When we clean house, we often discard the very things that later turn out to have been valuable. History is similar, and like parallel volumes now being written in Russia and Eastern Europe, the new books about China will almost certainly stress precisely the ele­ments to which members of Spence's generation have accorded secondary importance.

As much as any scholar of his gener­ation, Spence has understood just how important imagining the new has been in Chinese history. Yet it is striking that even he scarcely begins to prepare his readers for the new vision of the Chinese past that has been taking shape since 1989. The stamp of pre-1989 presentism is unmistakable in his treatment of the period from 1912 to 1949. This is not to suggest that it is somehow biased or un­professional. Quite the contrary, Spence is careful with his facts, and his narration is in certain respects superior to that of his predecessors. It is in his judgment of what is important that the problem shows. In China the Republican period was one of unmatched inventiveness and creativity. Spence, however, devotes disproportionate attention to Marxism and the Chinese Communist Party, even at times when both were politically marginal, and correspondingly reduces the space available for the exam­ination of alternatives.

Spence's account of the rise of the communist movement is hard to beat. As in his earlier book, The Gate of Heav­enly Peace (1981), he weaves together political and cultural narratives, political manifestos and poems, the story of the hard Leninist party and the soft and romantic cultural left. But the post- Tien­ anmen generation is already writing a revised version. New and dark studies of Mao, Deng, and others are in progress. They are less literary than Spence's account, and far more bloody.

But post-Tienanmen writers are doing more than simply revising the story of their own times. They are look­ing for a "usable past," for a historical validation of their own sense of China's potential not as an imperial or commu­nist dynasty, but rather as a genuinely pluralistic, prosperous, and democratic society. They do not believe that the riddle of Chinese history was resolved in 1949. So they are more interested in the paths not taken than in the one onto which history, as they see it, tragically stumbled. Pursuing such an intellectual agenda means exhuming the ideas of those who did not win, or have not yet won, in the great twentieth century strug­gle for modern China: philosophers, poli­ticians, civil servants, entrepreneurs.

Once one becomes aware of this ap­proach to the past, it is staggering to real­ize how much Chinese history between 1912 to 1949 is left out of The Search for Modern China and other books that share its approach. Spence's forte is exploring the history of the left. But that is of little (perhaps too little) interest to post-Tienanmen thinkers. They are ask­ing different questions, and about topics where Spence's information is less com­plete and his instincts are less sure.

Post-Tienanmen thinkers want to know whether democracy ever had a chance in pre-1949 China, yet Spence pays relatively little attention to the vari­ous post-1911 constitutions, or the mechanisms and patterns of electoral politics. Instead he focuses on the histories of the Nationalist and Communist parties. Post-Tienanmen thinkers won­der whether governmental centralism can be relaxed, and a new form found for China in which provinces can have more autonomy, and to which Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other such places will willingly join. But the word "federal­ism" (about which there was much dis­cussion before 1949) seems never to appear in Spence.

Moreover, post-Tienanmen thinkers want to know whether and how the army and security apparatus may affect China's development now that commu­nist ideology is dead, but Spence gives only a brief account of the militarists and their wars. They want to know whether China can become prosperous under a noncommunist system, yet Spence devotes relatively little space to the rise of modern banking and the development of an indigenous Chinese entrepreneur­ial class. They want to know what sort of place a modern China can take in the world, but Spence's treatment of inter­ national relations and foreign policy stresses the radical tradition, and largely ignores the equally important profession­ al tradition exemplified by Alfred Shih (mentioned once) or Wellington Koo (who never appears) ─ both brilliant dip­lomatic innovators who laid the founda­tions of most subsequent Chinese di­plomacy, whether practiced by Peking or Taipei.

Spence cannot really be blamed for these gaps. He set out to write a synoptic view of several hundred years of history, and any such enterprise depends upon the sources and secondary literature that exist and are accessible. Spence's omis­sions are by and large omissions in the literature, which he cannot be expected to remedy single-handedly. As for the question of judgment, again it is not his alone that has turned out to be imperfect. Spence's whole generation used post­ 1949 China to understand what came before. The faults of his book are the faults of a field and a generation, and no generation is free of faults.

Nevertheless, the suddenly changed intellectual environment into which The Search for Modern China has been launched gives the book an ironic status. Mostly written before Tienanmen, but published after, this fateful accident of timing has made the book a transitional form. It is a narration largely informed by pre-Tienanmen assumptions about China, to which post-Tienanmen conclu­sions and illustrations have been append­ed. It is probably the best, and also almost certainly the last, pre-Tienanmen style synopsis of modern Chinese history.

Post-Tienanmen literature is grow­ing. It already includes many polemical and journal articles, and soon some sub­stantial books will emerge. As this litera­ture grows, it will pose a challenge for historians, Spence included, and one that his book can help to define. It is a challenge at once both simple and for­midably difficult: to write a book that will capture the new sense of China and its past now coming into being-and to do so with as much success as The Search for Modern China captures the sense that is now exhausted. ─ Arthur Waldron teaches Chinese history at Princeton. His book, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, was published in 1990 by Cambridge University Press.