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considers the scale of the task that he set himself. The Search for Modern China is a landmark in China scholarship. Spence's talent as a raconteur and his immensely readable style enable him to succeed in making history interesting to the nonspecialist.
On the present succession crisis in China, Spence points out the eerie parallel between Deng Xiaoping's behavior today and that of Mao Zedong in his last years, with each man anointing, then purging, one hand-picked successor after another. Even greater perspective is provided by his relating the present situation to that of the early Qing dynasty, when the emperor Kangxi was brought, as Spence put it, "to the edge of despair" by the succession question (p. 245), not being able to decide which of his many sons to name as his heir.
The author provides a rare perspective on China's centuries-old struggle to come to terms with the rest of the world,
He recalls that the reformers of 1898 had sought to resolve this tension by developing the concept of ti, or "essence," and yong, or "practical use." This formulation, Spence says, "affirmed that there was indeed a fundamental structure of Chinese moral and philosophical values that gave continuity and meaning to the civilization. Holding on to that belief, China could then afford to adopt quickly and dramatically all sorts of Western practices, and to hire Western advisers" (p. 225).
Spence sees Deng and the other Chinese leaders today falling victim to the nineteenth-century fallacy that China could join the modern world entirely on its own terms, sacrificing nothing of its prevailing ideological purity" (p. 746).
He feels this effort is doomed to failure. "The task was even more hopeless in the late 1980s than it had been in the 1880s”, Spence concludes. "What was left of Chinese Communist doctrine after the rejection of many of Mao's ideas and the emergence of the enterprise system was a thinner gruel even than the overformalized Confucianism that had guided the reformers of the late Qing. The party elders flailing out at Zhao Ziyang and his noisy supporters were reacting in an oddly similar way to the Empress Dowager Cixi as she struck back at Emperor Guangxu for attempting his Hundred Days' Reforms" (p. 746).