Paul French studied history, economics, and Mandarin at university and has an MPhil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is the author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–winning Midnight in Peking, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.
Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao exposed much corruption and misbehavior through their investigations of rural villages — and saw their book banned despite its enormous influence on commoners and Party leaders alike.
Han Shaogong’s novel is a collection of vignettes written by a sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution. As Kirkus Reviews says, "The result is a subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought."
Graham Peck identified and sympathized with the suffering of the Chinese people under a corrupt Nationalist government. His observations ran counter to popular China scholarship at the time, but then again, Peck was a different kind of China Hand.
‘The Era of Jiang Zemin’ is dense with detail, built up from a wide range of interviews with Chinese executives, officials, academics, diplomats, and businesspeople. In that sense, the book itself was a product of a more open political system under Jiang.
Book No. 2 on the Ultimate China Bookshelf is Joe Studwell's "The China Dream: The Quest for the Last Great Untapped Market on Earth."
American journalist Carl Crow was a man genuinely fascinated by China and the Chinese people. He felt strongly that a world well-informed about China was a safer and more mutually profitable planet.
The China Project is delighted to announce a new regular feature by Paul French: The Ultimate China Bookshelf.
In this excerpt from Destination Peking, abridged and lightly edited for The China Project, author Paul French introduces us to Lev Karakhan, a Bolshevik whose work as the Soviet Union’s first ambassador to China earned him the trust of the early Chinese republic’s most powerful leaders.
John Le Carré’s Asia-set magnum opus is his 1977 novel "The Honourable Schoolboy." The book is one of le Carré’s most personal, offering us a number of insights into Asia and China that are key to understanding the trajectory of Western relations with China after World War II.