Jonathan D. Spence

Jonathan Dermot Spence CMG (11 August 1936 – 25 December 2021) was an English-born American historian, sinologist, and writer who specialized in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. His most widely read book is The Search for Modern China, a survey of the last several hundred years of Chinese history based on his popular course at Yale. A prolific author, reviewer, and essayist, he published more than a dozen books on China. 

Spence's major interest was modern China, especially the Qing dynasty, and relations between China and the West. Spence frequently used biographies to examine cultural and political history. Another common theme is the efforts of both Westerners and Chinese "to change China" and how such efforts were frustrated. Spence was born on 11 August 1936 to Muriel (née Crailsham) and Dermot Spence in Surrey in, England. 

His mother was a French researcher, while his father worked at an art gallery and a publishing house. Spence was educated at Winchester College and at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1954. After graduating, he spent two years in the British Army and was deployed in Germany during this period. He received his BA in history from Cambridge in 1959, studying at Clare College, Cambridge. During this time, he was the campus magazine's editor and the co-editor of the British literary magazine Granta.

He went to Yale University on a Clare-Mellon Fellowship to study the history and culture of China, receiving an MA and then a Ph.D. in 1965, when he won the John Addison Porter Prize. As part of his graduate training, he spent a year in Australia to study under Fang Chao-ying and Tu Lien-che, scholars of the Qing dynasty.

Spence taught a popular undergraduate course at Yale University on the history of modern China, which formed the basis for his book The Search for Modern China (1990). He taught for more than 40 years at the university. During this time, he wrote many books on China that furthered the understanding of the country and its culture with Western audiences. 

Some of his books during this period included The Search for Modern China (1990), which was published on the back of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (1996). Spence was president of the American Historical Association between 2004 and 2005. While his primary focus was on Qing dynasty China, he also wrote a biography of Mao Zedong and The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a study of twentieth-century intellectuals and their relation to revolution. He retired from Yale in 2008.

His book The Search for Modern China was a New York Times bestseller and documented the evolution of China starting from the decline of the Ming dynasty in the early 1600s to the pro-democracy movement of 1989, while his book Treason by the Book (2001) documented the story of a scholar who took on the third Manchu Emperor in the 1700s.