As many already know, Jonathan Spence, perhaps the best known historian of China in Europe and North America, will be giving a series of radio lectures for the BBC 4. The talks, on the subject of “Chinese Vistas,” will be made available online as podcasts after they air.
Say what you want about Professor Spence, and much has been said, I kind of admire the guy. Spence is to Chinese history what Stephen Ambrose was to Americanists or Simon Schama is to historians of Great Britain; they might not have the research or theoretical chops boasted by others in their fields, but their ability to write about history has given them a wide audience even as critics within the history establishment (and to be fair, there’s the whiff of sour grapes about all of this) complain about “selling out” and call attention to real or imagined theoretical, narrative, critical and (in the case of Ambrose) citational liberties.
Sure, Spence has his quirks. He’s written in the imperial first person (Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of Kangxi), used…err…speculation to recreate historical dialogue (The Question of Hu) and written about a 19th-century rebellion entirely in the present tense (God’s Chinese Son). But