“This book is set in a small corner of northeastern China during the seventeenth century. The precise location is a county called T’an-ch’eng, in the province of Shantung, and most of the action takes place there in the years between 1668 and 1672. Within that time and place, the focus is on those who lived below the level of the educated elite: farmers, farm workers, and their wives, who had no bureaucratic connections to help them in times of trouble and no strong lineage organizations to fall back on.”

Spence’s purpose in writing The Death of Woman Wang is to examine a poor area of 17th-century rural China—the sort of region that more traditional histories would ignore (xi-xii). He hopes to examine “rural areas for their own sake” (xi), ng exploring the lives of the rural poor in China.

“I observe these people in the contexts of four small crises: the first involved the working of the land and the collecting of taxes from that land; the second, the attempt by a widow to protect her child and her inheritance; the third, the burst of violence that sprang from a local feud; and the fourth, the decision of a woman named Wang, who was unwilling any longer to face an unacceptable present and chose to run away from her T’an-ch’eng home and husband.” 

This explains the thesis of The Death of Woman Wang—especially the four “crises” that Spence will examine. Spence argues that these four cases provide flashpoints in which one can examine the lives and social and economic circumstances of the rural poor.

“I have deliberately tried to keep this story both rural and local, since the accounts that have been written of rural China in the pre-modern period are not based on one local area but assemble evidence across an immense geographical area and over great stretches of time, a process that makes depersonalization almost inevitable. And when local studies have been made, they have tended to focus not on rural areas for their own sakes but rather on areas that had some prior claim to fame: the number of talented men who were born there, for instance; or else the savagery of a rebellion that raged there, the variety and interest of economic conditions, the historical complexities of social organizations. Whereas T’an-ch’eng county was not famous for anything; it produced no eminent men in the seventeenth century, the data on economic and social conditions are scant, and although disasters struck repeatedly the people themselves did not rebel.”

The problem with previous rural histories of China, Spence suggests, is that they are so broad they do not focus on the experiences of ordinary individuals. Likewise, other histories focus on a region famous for an individual or an event. By focusing on an area like T’an-ch’eng, Spence can discuss issues and circumstances relevant to rural China without being overshadowed by another historical topic.