The Search for Modern China

"This book is by Jonathan Spence , who was a great historian of China out of Yale. He wrote many, many books, but his Search for Modern China was one of the first things that I read when I arrived in China. It gives you a really great understanding of how political and social developments in the Qing Dynasty and the Republican period to 1949 shaped the way China works. The book covers the reform efforts in the late Qing, the contending schools of thought during the Republic, through to the Communist period up to 1989. It gives you a sense of the way China thinks, and also the way there have been so many hopes raised and dashed within China, by people who believe that they can partake in opening and new opportunity, and then everything closes down again. So that’s a really good one to read. Yes. The Search for Modern China also shows the internal logic of the system, which is one thing that the international world has really missed about China. Because with a lot of economists and political scientists, internationally, you get this narrative, of ‘Why doesn’t China just allow more consumption?’ ‘Why doesn’t China open up in this way or that way?’ And ‘Why don’t the local governments just make their own budgets and become independent?’ Well, you have to understand the fundamental logic of Chinese society and the government. Those things are impossible under the governance system. And I feel that people need some historical context in order to understand that. China has intentionally weak institutions. The country is structurally adapted to a winner-take-all system of governance that changes only under the influence of earth-shaking, millenarist movements that permit one autocratic ruler to be toppled and another to take its place. Balance of power and incremental change are simply not in the Chinese DNA. China’s verticality is both its strength and its weakness: rulers capture and deploy all the wealth of the nation and so can create great leaps forward – as in the reform and opening – and great tragedies, like the Great Famine."