GOD'S CHINESE SON, Jonathan Spence, HarperCollins, $340 This new title from Jonathan Spence, history professor at Yale, can only add to his reputation as the West's paramount historian of China. His last book, The Search for Modern China, was a brilliant history of China's last 300 years and promptly became fundamental reading for anyone interested in the subject. There seems no reason to doubt that God's Chinese Son, will receive an equally good reception.
Indeed, this latest work from Spence's pen is more than a virtuoso work of history; it also has great literary qualities. In this regard God's Chinese Son harks back to another of Spence's historical biographies and one of his best and earliest books, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
With much Taiping material already on the shelves, we have to ask if God's Chinese Son adds anything to that knowledge. The answer is emphatically yes.
Spence has been able to draw on new, original Taiping source material only recently uncovered in London and Paris (most Taiping texts were burnt by Imperial order after the movement's collapse). In addition, he has added his own sparkling depiction of leader Hong Xiuquan's unbalanced character and the great social upheaval Hong created.
How gigantic an event the Taiping rebellion was can be gauged from the fact that even Mao Zedong believed China's political and social revolution began in the middle of the last century with Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping uprising.
Hong was, as the author notes, both the brilliant creator-mentor of the Taiping movement and, through his growing madness and fanatical Christianity, ultimately and inevitably the destroyer of it.