Hi Kaiser, did Pete Hessler date your sister?

Jonathan Spence enjoys a poor reputation among his peers in the field because he was a poor scholar (i.e., not because he and Fred Wakeman were rivals - that's just stupid). That is to say, while Spence produced a number of very readable books for non-specialists, he produced virtually nothing for other scholars. Aside from inspiring a handful of Yale undergraduates to go on to graduate school, he did very little to advance the academic field of modern Chinese history. He was widely derided as a frustrated novelist. Indeed, one of his most famous books, "The Death of Woman Wang," is an imposter - a novel posing as a work of history. Spence played loose and fast with the documents, and his peers knew it. It is perfectly reasonable to enjoy certain of Spence's books (I, for one, am also a fan of "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" and "The Search for Modern China"), it is quite another to imagine that he was somehow the equal of Frederic Wakeman (Berkeley) and Philip Kuhn (Harvard), the two best historians of modern China of their generation.

Forget about Spence's "God's Chinese Son" - if you want to learn about the Taiping Rebellion, read Philip Kuhn's treatment of the subject in the Cambridge History of China. Spence's book is not good. Seriously.

Best survey of P.R.C. history, bar none - Maurice Meisner's "Mao's China and After"

Nice to hear someone mention Joseph Levenson. "Confucian China and Its Modern Fate" is a foundational text in the field - it sometimes seems as if half of everything that was written during the last 50 years was written in response to it.

Agree completely with agan_28 about Spence. I began my study of China by reading Spence, but I have long since moved on to bigger and better things. Wakeman and Kuhn (among many, many others!) were far more substantial scholars than Spence. As a scholar, Spence seemed more like an entertaining and highly learned high school history teacher than a productive member of the faculty of one of the world's best research institutions. There was no rivalry between Wakeman and Spence. I can assure you that students at Berkeley would never have treated Kuhn with the same aggressive disdain with which they went after Spence. It was all about the quality of Spence's scholarship, not his Yale pedigree.

I agree with your guest's recommendation of Kuhn's "Soulstealers." However, the book is really not "about" an eighteenth century soulstealing scare; rather, it makes use of the occasion of the soulstealing scare to speak of other, far more important matters - namely, the relationship between the various administrative layers of power of the Qing bureaucracy, their very near failure to reckon with the social upheaval that took place in Fujian in 1768 (ostensibly the high point of Qing wealth and power), and what all that said about the declining efficacy and future of the Qing. Kuhn is interested in questions having to do with the decline of the Qing and the collapse of the dynastic institution. He's also interested in determining whether an insipient "Chinese" modernity existed prior to the arrival of the West in force (a subject that Levenson also wrote about in "Confucian China and Its Modern Fate" -- a great, great, great book!). "Soulstealers" is one of the best books ever written on the subject of Chinese history. As with a couple of Kuhn's other books ("The Making of the Modern Chinese State" and "Rebellion and Its Enemies"), it appears on graduate seminar syllabi everywhere - and for good reason.

Great picks! Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence is a fantastic and fascinating book. I also think The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu and books by Ma Jian are great. I would add a couple of more academic works for those interested in contemporary politics and economics: Kellee Tsai's Capitalism without Democracy, Guobin Yang's The Power of the Internet in China, and Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law.

Thanks for a great podcast. It would have been great to hear your views on Mao: The Unknown Story

just wanted to add my thanks for the informative podcasts too.