Summaries

Here will appear your summaries for your assigned chapters from Spence’s book. When you post (or edit) your assignment, you can add the password to limit readers to our class only (optional). Click on the title link to go to the post.

• Chapter 27 Summary
  Deng Xiaoping’s suppression of the Democracy movement in 1989, and his controversial political maneuverings in doing so was proving that China was still showing signs of its rocky past. Many compared his actions during the time period to those of the Emperor Dowager Cixi’s suppression of Emperor Guangxu’s ambitious reform program of 1898. Deng’s rash ...
• Summary chapter 24
  The Four Modernizations After the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping saw an opportunity to make his political comeback. Deng left Peking for Canton in 1976 and sought protection from the military governor of the province, General Xu Shiyou. In July 1977, Deng was reappointed to his previous positions of power including his vice-premiership, the Politburo ...
• Chapter 21 Summary
  The Great Leap Forward Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward came in the wake of The Hundred Flowers campaign, and would prove disastrous to an already struggling people. After Mao had “rightists”(people who would put their own financial security over that of China) imprisoned and executed, the cadres were intimidated into over exaggerating their harvest numbers, lest ...
• Summary on Chapter 26 – Testing the Limits
  Key Points from Textbook Spence Pg. 639 – 665: Democracy’s Chorus Excitement over new entrepreneurial arrangements had people forgetting about the huge amount of young people who were sent to communes to work by reasons such as the Cultural Revolution. These individuals were not permitted to go home. Finally, these people had enough and on April 1985 ...
• Chapter 25 Summary – Levels of Power
  One Billion People (pg 615-623) With government arguing over the changes that needed to be made economically, the PRC needed to look at the ever-growing population of China.  The last census to be done in China had occured in 1964. The census of 1982 proved what the PRC fears: the population of China had passed ...
• Chapter 19 Summary
  Countryside and Town, 1949-1950:  ‘The rest of the people would enjoy the full range of freedoms, while China developed its potential through the twin politics of socialization of agricultural and a powerful industry having state enterprise as its backbone.’ After the establishment of the People’s Republic, Mao ran lots of campaigns between countryside and town. His first ...
• Chapter 18 Summary
  The Japanese Surrender and the Marshall Mission: After the Japanese surrendered in WWll, the United States occupied many ports and transported many GMD troops to Japanese and Communist-controlled areas. The United States was highly anti-Communist and wanted to keep China’s government in the hands of the Nationalists. In Manchuria, the Soviet Union assisted the Communists in ...
• Chapter 17: World War II
  The Beginning of WWII In the spring of 1937 there was a calm period while the Guomindang and the CCP worked on propaganda initiatives. In May 1937 the American ambassador in Nanjing expressed his concern that anti-Japanese agendas/beliefs had now become, “a part of the Chinese racial consciousness” (397). The divide was growing. When Japan’s commanding ...
• Link to summary chapter 11
  The summary for chapter 11 is password protected; if you are not logged in yet, the post will not appear in the list of summaries. You can follow this link: Summary chapter 11; the password is the usual one.
• Chapter 16 – Communist Survival
  The Chinese Poor: Due to the fact that the Chinese population was upwards of 479 million (Spence, 356) and various external forces, it was extremely difficult for the Guomindang to take control of many concerns facing their government. Despite this, conditions in China were at least sufficient enough to a portion of the population due to ...
• Chapter 15 Summary – The Guomindang in Power
  Guomindang Goverment The Guomindang had its own unsolved problems and as national unification remained an elusive goal, and commander Chiang Kai-shek who was a member of the nine-man Guomindang Central Executive Committee was desperately in need of money that Soong – Chiang’s new brother in law had to get him what he needed to resume the ...
• Chapter 14 Summary- The Fractured Alliance
  The Initial Agreement: Sun Yat-Sen was not seen as a good communist ally because he structured the Guomindang to be personally loyal to him. This meant that the party would be highly secretive. Sun Yat-Sen also planned to conduct the revolution in three stages. First, a military revolution, then a “tutelage” for the Chinese people, and lastly a ...
• Chapter 11 Summary
  From 1860 to 1905, some Chinese provincial officials and the Qing court had tried to adapt a wide range of Western techniques and ideas to China’s proven needs. (ships, factories, new schools etc.) After the debacle of Boxer Uprising, the Qing tried to obtain elements of the constitutional structures which lie at the heart of ...
• Chapter 13 Summary- A Road Is Made
  The Warning Voice of Social Darwinism The dawn of the 20th century saw many new, western ideas become popular in China, most notably Social Darwinism, which argued that Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest also governed social evolution, not just biological evolution.  This growth in popularity was thanks to the translation efforts of Yan Fu, ...
• Chapter 12 Summary—-The New Republic
  Experiment in Democracy At the late of Qing, China has been in a period of chaos. A lot of natural disasters happened during 1911 which destroyed the countryside and made a lot of people homeless. Moreover, because of the continuous invasion of foreign countries and the sign of the unequal treaty, the burden of people became ...
• Chapter 10 Summary – New Tensions in the Late Qing
  Self-Strengthening and the Japanese War Confucian statesmen called for the “self-strengthening” of China, which proved to be “an apparently viable road to a more secure future.” (Spence 208) The Chinese began cherry-picking Western technology and ideals and adapting them to China’s needs. It seemed the Qing on a path to regain some of their former power. However, ...
• Chapter 9: Restoration through Reform
  Confucian reform The Qing dynasty managed to survive for the whole 19thcentury till 1912, without strong imperial leadership. Officials made the Qing’s economy better, developed new institutions and military agricultural bases. They called this restoration (zhongxing). There was one central task: the Tongzhi restoration statesman wanted to re-establishment of the basic values of Confucian government, like ...
• Summary of Chapter 3
  Kangxi’s Consolidation The War of the Three Feudatories, 1673-1681 At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Qing emperors had to grow up fast. Kangxi, one of the most admired rulers in China’s history, arrested Oboi when he was fifteen. The most significant problems that Kangxi was facing was to make China under Manchu’s control. However, Southwest part ...
• Chapter 8 the Crisis Within
  Social Dislocation in the North and South (pg 164 – 168) During the early nineteenth century, China faced increasing domestic instability. This instability was caused by governmental corruption and failure to regulate parts of the bureaucracy such as the salt trade and the Yellow River and Grand Canal. In addition, the emperors during this period were ...
• Chapter 7
  The scholars of China in during this time knew that the present and future was tumultuous. Some scholars wanted more attention to be given to the country’s administrative problems, other scholars attempted to guess what the future held for their nation, and some were saying that the kaozheng school was turning into something that was ...
• Chapter 6: China and Eighteenth-century World
  In ancient China, the Chinese emperors believed that they were in the center of world. In Tribute of Yu, there are five zones. The emperor lived in the center. The more distant people lived away from the emperor, the more barbarian they were. Thousands of years later, even if many northern tribes, such as Jurchens ...
• Chapter 5
  The Reign of Qianlong – 1736 to 1799 Qianlong was the longest ruling emperor of China, ruling from 1736 until 1799. When combined with his father and grandfather, these three emperors ruled for almost 14 decades, and this explains why other countries thought of China as such a stable country. Qianlong made many changes in both ...
• Summary Chapter 4: link
  Chapter 4 summary is a password protected post. If you are not yet logged into the post, it will not appear in the list on the page with summaries. Follow this link.
• Summary Chapter 2: Manchu Conquest
  Summary Chapter 2: The Manchu Conquest The Ming fell at the hands of the rebel Li Zicheng, but it was the Manchu who became the rulers of the next dynasty. The Manchu lived northeast of the Ming territory, in present-day Jilin and Liaoning provinces. They were in many ways very different from the ethnic Han people who were ...
• Chapter 4
  Summary based on the textbook, Spence The Search for Modern China P72-79: Economic (compare with the provinces) During the Yongzheng period, China had been divided to several different macro-regions. The first macroregion was located in Shaanxi and Shanxi. This included Xi’an. The second macro-region was located around Hebei, Shandong and Henan. It included Beijing. The third macro-region was located ...
• Summary of Chapter three
  Kangxi’s Consolidation The War of the Three Feudatories, 1673-1681 At the beginning of Qing Dynasty, Qing emperors had to grow up fast. Kangxi, one of the most admired rulers in China’s history, arrested Oboi, his regent, when he was fifteen. The next significant problem that Kangxi faced was how to keep China under the Manchu’s control. Southwest ...
• Summary Chapter 1
  Chapter 1: The Late Ming Spence has to do a difficult job getting us up to speed with the basics of Chinese history, and simultaneously setting the scene for a four-hundred year survey of the most recent Chinese history. There is debate among historians of China when exactly we should begin with “modern” China, or indeed, ...