Jonathan D. Spence held the position of Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University, and is well-known throughout the world for his insightful views on modern China. His books include The Death of Woman Wang (Penguin, 1979), To Change China: Western Advisers in China (Revised edition, Penguin, 1980), Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (Viking, 2007), and The Search for Modern China (Third edition, Norton, 2012). A graduate of the University of Cambridge and Yale University, Spence holds a number of honorary degrees, has served as president of the American Historical Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has held both a MacArthur and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received the Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George from Queen Elizabeth II.
Last Updated: March 2, 2022
The NYRB China Archive
06.28.07The Dream of Catholic China
from New York Review of Books
From the later sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth, the Jesuit educational system was the most rigorous and effective in Europe. As one senior Jesuit wrote proudly in 1647, each Jesuit college was a “Trojan horse filled with soldiers...
The NYRB China Archive
09.21.06
China’s Great Terror
from New York Review of Books
Long before August 1966, when immense chanting crowds of young Chinese Red Guards began to mass before Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square, alerting those in the wider world to the onset of the Cultural Revolution, senior figures in the Chinese...
The NYRB China Archive
11.03.05Portrait of a Monster
from New York Review of Books
1.It is close to seventy years since Edgar Snow, an ambitious, radical, and eager young American journalist, received word from contacts in the Chinese Communist Party that he would be welcome in the Communists’ northwest base area of Bao-an...
The NYRB China Archive
03.25.04Chiang’s Monster
from New York Review of Books
1.During the late 1930s and World War II, it was common to call Dai Li “China’s Himmler,” as if Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police and intelligence chief during that period performed functions similar to the head of the Gestapo and the SS under Hitler...
The NYRB China Archive
03.18.99Talking with Mao: An Exchange
from New York Review of Books
In response to:Kissinger & the Emperor from the March 4, 1999 issueTo the Editors:No China scholar has influenced my own thinking more than Jonathan Spence. My comments on his review of The Kissinger Transcripts edited by William Burr [NYR,...
The NYRB China Archive
03.04.99Kissinger & the Emperor
from New York Review of Books
From the moment when they first began to keep historical records, the Chinese showed a fascination with the complexities of diplomacy, with the give-and-take of interstate negotiation, the balancing of force and bluff, the variable powers of human...
The NYRB China Archive
05.28.98Goodfellas in Shanghai
from New York Review of Books
Just over two thousand years ago, China’s first great historian, Sima Qian, decided to include a chapter on assassins in his long history of his newly united homeland. He chose five men as representative examples of those who had tried to kill...
The NYRB China Archive
04.10.97What Confucius Said
from New York Review of Books
1.The first Western-language version of Confucius’ sayings—later known as the Analects—was published in Paris in 1687, in Latin, under the title Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, with a brief dedication to King Louis XIV, thanking him for supporting...
The NYRB China Archive
12.19.96The Risks of Witness
from New York Review of Books
With this, the third book that Harry Wu has published about China’s forced-labor prison camp system, we can see that he has been moving on a discernible trajectory, one that has taken him from the world of reality to the world of appearance. In this...
The NYRB China Archive
08.10.95
In China’s Gulag
from New York Review of Books
Near the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn includes a chapter he calls “The Muses in Gulag.” Most of the chapter describes the absurdity and uselessness of the Communist Party’s Cultural and Educational Section, but he also briefly reflects...
The NYRB China Archive
04.20.95The Underground War for Shanghai
from New York Review of Books
During the night of November 21–22, 1928 a steamer moored at the docks in the Chinese section of Shanghai, and a group of harbor coolies, flanked by a squad of thirty armed guards, began to unload chests onto the dock. Alerted by a tip some weeks...
The NYRB China Archive
06.23.94Remembrance of Ming’s Past
from New York Review of Books
To many readers in the past, The Plum in the Golden Vase has seemed an inchoate mass of a story. Even if it was clearly “about” a wealthy urban merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing, his six consorts, and numerous other sexual companions, it was also full of...