The themes of despotism, cultural synthesis or assimilation, and the modern fate of Confucian humanism shaped the choice of topics in Michaels' academic work and public advocacy, and his experience in 1930s Germany directly influenced his anti-totalitarian and anti-communist stance.
After the war, Michael and George E. Taylor organized the Modern Chinese History Project, an Area Studies program that brought together scholars from different disciplines and periods in cooperative research.
His successful doctoral candidates include Frederick W. Mote, Alice L. Miller, William Johnson, Richard C. Thornton, Philip Huang, James T. Myers, Harry Lamley, Hugh Kang, Harvey Nelson, Felix Moos and Chang Chung-li.
[citation needed] The themes of despotism, cultural synthesis or assimilation, and the modern fate of Confucian humanism shaped Franz Michael's choice of topics in his academic work and public advocacy, and his experience in 1930s Germany directly influenced his anti-totalitarian and anti-communist stance.
[2][3] One of his students wrote after his death that "These times no longer welcomed voices like that of Franz Michael who advocated that the Chinese Communists should be taken for what they were and, actually, wanted to be, namely true Marxist-Leninists, and who insisted that the Sino-Soviet conflict needed to be analysed in other than the traditional terms of clashing nationalisms.
Teng argued that it "should be the best" because the University of Washington group had worked on this period for a long time, with Michael serving as "master writer" who has "judiciously appraised a huge amount of information," and whose "logical organization ties the complicated history together very neatly".
Cohen added that Michael characterized the Taiping organization as "totalitarian" and as providing a "system of total control of all life by the state which had no parallel in Chinese history.
Karl August Wittfogel's conception of Oriental Despotism, Wakeman went on, “appeared to loom behind the entire structure, one imperial dynast after another participating in a steady growth toward greater and great autocracy".
The Manchu court's response to the Taiping Rebellion was to allow Han Chinese military leaders to build regional power, creating a precedent for the development of Warlord Era in the twentieth century.
The reviewer in Journal of Asian Studies reported that the book used the sociopolitical theories of Max Weber to analyze the "fully matured religio-political order" of the four centuries before 1959, when the Dalai Lama left Tibet for India.
"[13] The reviewer in China Quarterly wrote that "as a relatively brief and readable introduction to the subject, the reader could do much worse than to turn to it," commenting that "broadly speaking, this is the Tibetans' 'own' case, fairly made."
Looking at the root causes, Michael said of China's Response to the West edited by Teng Ssu-yu and John K. Fairbank, that in the end the volume "does not pose or answer the question of why the imperial state and Confucian society were 'altogether abandoned.'"