Mao Dun's classic about 1930s Shanghai depicts a city built on violence and corruption, with great wealth sitting alongside low wages, awful conditions, and exploitation. This is Shanghai as a powder keg about to explode.
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.
From reform-era history and present-day policy to wartime history and protest fiction, we round up our top picks from the China bookshelf of 2022.