Jonathan D. Spence, a British-born historian who became a longtime Yale University professor and scholar of Chinese studies, and attracted a wide following with his 1990 best-seller “The Search for Modern China,” has died at age 85.
“We can see how often the Chinese people, operating in difficult or even desperate circumstances, seized their own fate and threw themselves against the power of the state,” he wrote. “We can see how in 1644, again in 1911, and then again in 1949, disillusion with the present and a certain nostalgia for the past could combine with a passionate hope for the future to bring the old order crashing down, opening the way for an uncertain passage to the new.
“He narrates history that is always lively, always concrete, always comprehensible, no matter how complex the issue,” wrote the Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who added that the book “will undoubtedly become a standard text on the subject.” Born in Surrey, England, Spence grew up in a family of book lovers: his father was an editor, his mother a reader of French literature. He was an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, where he edited the student newspaper and co-edited the student magazine Granta, now one of the world’s most prestigious literary journals.
“I was able to hold in my hand the original writings of the emperor of China,” he said in a 2010 interview with Humanities magazine, the in-house publication of the National Endowment of the Humanities. “It was something that is still very emotional for me, and it was a major moment for my thinking about the past.”