Title: fluff and b.s.
Review: hate to breakup the love fest in these pages, all from former students and other young, naive college undergrads, but this book is a joke. Only the uninformed read Spence, and certainly not any Chinese. His histories of pre and eraly modern China lack detail, substance, and any evidence he has kept up with recent scholarship of, say, the last 20 years. And, worse yet, he has little to say about modern/Communist China, except for the same crap you can read in any newspaper/wire service.A much,much better book on China (modern), and one better respected within the profession/education establishment, is/are Maurice Meisner's books and the Mao and Deng eras. He writes lucidly too, and unlike Spence, is capable of sustaining an argument and not lt\etting his own self/ego get in the way.
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