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Of that of China. But it does include Hong Kong and Macao, the British and Portuguese possessions on the south China coast, as their history is bound up with that of South East Asia rather than with that of China. With so many different countries being covered, the history of any one country is necessarily fragmented.

CHINA: THE HARD ROAD TO NOW

Date: May 13, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By VERA SCHWARCZ; Vera Schwarcz, who teaches history and East Asian studies at Wesleyan University, is the author of 'Long Road Home: A China Journal' and 'The Chinese Enlightenment's Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May 4th Movement of 1919.'
Lead: LEAD:
THE SEARCH FOR MODERNCHINA
By Jonathan D. Spence.
Illustrated. 876 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.
Text:

THE SEARCH FOR MODERN CHINA
By Jonathan D. Spence.
Illustrated. 876 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.

China is a land haunted and sustained by history. The specter of past dictatorships and mass frenzy cast a shadow over last year's demonstrations in Tiananmen Square - although the West was too taken by televised images from Beijing to notice more than the promise of the moment. A commitment to remembering the history of 1989 and of previous movements for democracy continues to inspire hope in China today, despite the current campaign to enforce political amnesia.

To understand the burdens and opportunities embedded in China's past there is no better place to start than Jonathan D. Spence's excellent new book. 'The Search for Modern China,' a comprehensive explanation of four centuries from the decline of the Ming dynasty in 1600 through the demise of the democracy movement in June 1989, will enlighten both general readers and students of Chinese history. Other books have attempted to cover the political and social history of China from imperial to Communist times. But they lack the narrative technique, the wealth of illustrations and the thematic focus of this work.

The central theme is China's troubled search for identity in the modern world. A dramatic, wind-swept Chinese ideograph on the jacket of the book illustrates this theme. The character zheng means at once 'strife' and 'strive.' It suggests both the great efforts and the bitter controversies involved in charting China's passage from a bureaucratic empire to a modern nation-state. Zheng is also a metaphor for the struggle between reform and revolution, between peasant nationalism and a more cosmopolitan vision of a democratic, industrialized China. Finally, zheng evokes the presence of the Chinese past in the minds of those who seek to complete the process of modernization today.

Emperors and bureaucrats, intellectuals and peasants, men and women, foreigners and natives have all been partners and contenders in the struggle to define modern Chinese identity. The great achievement of Mr. Spence, who is the George Burton Adams Professor of history at Yale University, is to capture the common striving of all of them and at the same time to reveal the differences among them.

In this work, he has sought to encompass a longer time framework and more characters than in any other of his previous books. The masterly narrator who walked us through 'The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,'

'The Death of Woman Wang,' 'The Question of Hu' and 'Emperor of China,' the autobiography of the Kang Xi Emperor, now shows himself capable of weaving a tapestry that includes and transcends these discrete stories. The same esthetic sensibility is at work here, the same gift for setting the stage for ambiguous events, the same respect for the inner life of historical characters.

Because the canvas is so much larger, it is inevitable that certain details become blurred, certain nuances lost. Oddly enough, the loss is most noticeable where the richness of the text is most ample: in its use of fiction and poetry to breathe life into the process of historical change. For example, 'The Dream of the Red Chamber,' China's greatest novel, becomes a way to talk about the social and economic life of the Confucian gentry in the 18th century. The novel's dreamy eroticism and its Buddhist musings are, by necessity, mere background to this history. Similarly, Lu Xun, the foremost writer in 20th-century China, becomes an emblem for the tension between cultural and political revolution. In the process, this writer's unique metaphor for Chinese tradition - an iron prison house on fire where most inmates prefer deep sleep and an unconscious death - loses its evocative power in a descriptive passage that has none of the fury of Lu Xun's own voice.

This inadvertent flattening of narrative terrain is more than compensated for by a liberal use of direct quotations from other Chinese sources. Folk songs bring to life entire peasant movements and help us understand, for example, the fierce antiforeign feeling of the Boxer rebels in 1900. Equally effective is the use of diplomatic correspondence, including unsent and unanswered letters that reveal the complexity of official thinking about what constitutes China's national interest from the Manchu Emperors to Mao Zedong. A passage in a personal letter from H. H. Kong (Chiang Kai-shek's finance minister in 1937) to Adolf Hitler, for example, concludes and underscores an excellent chapter on the Nationalist experiment with German-style state building.

Because of its ample use of previously unavailable or untranslated sources, 'The Search for Modern China' will challenge and enrich Western thinking about contemporary China. For those tempted to judge that country solely in light of recent developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, here is an analysis that situates Deng Xiaoping in a century-old continuum of reformers wrestling with the problem of political versus economic reform. Mr. Deng's violent reaction to the democracy movement of 1989 makes no sense unless we also understand his indebtedness to 19th-century Confucian statesmen who had tried to save the Chinese spirit by limiting reliance on Western technology. These men foreshadowed Mr. Deng's distaste for popular participation in politics as well as his deeply held conviction that dissent is synonymous with disloyalty.

But if Deng Xiaoping has his predecessors in the Chinese past, so too do the students and the older Chinese intellectuals who have pitted themselves against the present autocracy. Their intellectual home, Beijing University, has been at the heart of the movement for science and democracy that has erupted over and over again since 1919. Its spirit of tolerance for scholarly and political diversity continues to inspire dissidents even after Tiananmen Square.

Voices of conscience in contemporary China are also indebted to a long tradition of Confucian humanism. This heritage mandates the educated few (the wenren, literally 'men of the word') to speak about the anguish of the many who are wordless. The Confucian sense of responsibility endures in the works of contemporary social critics such as the noted journalist Liu Binyan. Persecuted repeatedly from 1957 through 1987, he has continued to speak out against corruption and the abuse of power. His 1979 speech 'We Must Listen Carefully to the Voice of the People' expresses the moral obligation in

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