Volume 37, Number 9 · May 31, 1990
From the Ming to Deng Xiaoping
By John K. Fairbank
The Search for Modern China
by Jonathan D. Spence
Norton, 876 pp., $29.95
When I began teaching Chinese history at Harvard in 1936 my first students turned out to be the brightest I would ever have—Theodore White as an undergraduate and Mary Clabaugh as a Ph.D. candidate. Mary Clabaugh was a Vassar graduate from Tuscaloosa who came to study international history but turned to China when she heard about it. She married another Harvard graduate student in Chinese history, Arthur F. Wright. Twenty years later, when both Wrights were invited from Stanford to come to Yale as professors of history, Mary Wright found her brightest student in the person of Jonathan Spence, a young Englishman from Winchester College and Cambridge University, who had just come to Yale. Hearing Mary Wright's lectures he chose Chinese studies, and she arranged for his unusual talent to be specially trained under the master of Ch'ing (Manchu) dynasty biography, Fang Chao-ying. Fang was then in Australia, where Jonathan Spence was sent to work with him.
Review, 3950 words
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