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
02.03.94Where the East Begins
from New York Review of Books
Between 1965 and 1977, Donald Lach published the first two volumes of his Asia in the Making of Europe, an illuminating and erudite survey of the various ways that Asia has affected scholarship, literature, and the visual arts in the West. Beginning...
The NYRB China Archive
09.23.93The Chinese Miracle?
from New York Review of Books
Over the last few months the news and reportage about China have become almost incomprehensibly divided between two points of view. According to one set of reports, China is now confirmed as an economic “colossus,” shaking off all the trammels of...
The NYRB China Archive
06.24.93Unjust Desserts
from New York Review of Books
Can there be any justice in today’s China? It is the deepest question that the film director Zhang Yimou has asked so far. His best-known earlier films, sexually supercharged, suffused with violence or the threat of it, always found some politically...
The NYRB China Archive
10.22.92The Other China
from New York Review of Books
On the same late fall day in 1991, two stories about China appeared in the Western press. One announced that thirty-five drug dealers had just been executed in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, probably by a single police bullet fired into...
The NYRB China Archive
07.18.91China on the Verge
from New York Review of Books
During the play-off matches for the intercollegiate East China soccer title in the early 1920s, passions ran high. The president of Shanghai’s prestigious Communications University was no less a soccer fan than anyone else, but he was also a...
The NYRB China Archive
10.12.89China Witness, 1989
from New York Review of Books
In response to: China’s Spring from the June 29, 1989 issueTo the Editors:The absolute cynicism displayed by the current Chinese leadership as they present their version of this spring’s events in Beijing and other cities offers a special challenge...
The NYRB China Archive
02.18.88China on My Mind
from New York Review of Books
Almost forty years have passed since John King Fairbank’s first book, The United States and China, was published in 1948. A careful blending of Chinese institutional history with diplomatic history, the book proved immediately popular among...
The NYRB China Archive
01.16.86Turbulent Empire
from New York Review of Books
Among the great and enduring questions in the study of Chinese history are these: In an agricultural country of such extraordinary size how was the land farmed and what were the patterns of ownership and tenancy? How was the rural revenue extracted...
The NYRB China Archive
09.27.84
Our Mission in China
from New York Review of Books
This is the bicentennial year for contacts between the United States and China, since it was in 1784 that the merchant ship Empress of China sailed to Canton from New York. It was an auspicious beginning, at least for the American backers of the...
The NYRB China Archive
04.01.82China: Mulberries and Famine
from New York Review of Books
Near the beginning of the Chinese “Classic of Historical Documents” (the Shujing), where the doings of early mythic rulers are being described, there is a brief passage that stands out among the others for its precision and clarity. The focus of...
The NYRB China Archive
08.13.81
China: How Much Dissent?
from New York Review of Books
In the year 278 BC an aristocrat and poet named Qu Yuan took his own life by throwing himself into the waters of the Milo River. Qu Yuan had once been the powerful adviser to the ruler of the Chu kingdom, specializing in legal affairs and diplomacy...
The NYRB China Archive
04.30.81Take Back Your Ming
from New York Review of Books
Until very recently the great expanse of the Ming dynasty, which ruled in China from 1368 to 1644, was largely uncharted in Western historiography. The dynasty was seen either as having come at the end of a great tradition that had been dominated by...