100 Best Chinese History Books of All Time

Edward Norton

The definitive book about modern Chinese history. [source]

Joshua M. Brown

It’s book 3 on my summer reading list and the revelations are eye-popping. Dikotter was among the first to gain access to formerly hidden government reports from the era. https://t.co/XdQtenV7vl https://t.co/zZ45fUeSiO [source]

Greg Norman

Greg Norman said this is one of his most-recommended books. [source]

Jennifer Steil

Let’s start with River Town by Peter Hessler. River Town is his memoir of two years teaching for the Peace Corps at a teacher training college in China in a very remote city – a small city of 200,000 people or so, very few of whom had ever met foreigners. So Hessler really was in a very isolated, alien place. I love this book for many reasons. Firstly because he’s a beautiful writer and he gives you this wonderful sense of what it’s like to actually be there: the landscape and the people and the hustle and bustle, the pollution and the way the city’s built in the mountains with stairs going up and down, and the porters to carry your stuff that they call ‘stick-stick men’. He makes it really easy for you to visualise this foreign place. [source]

Hyeonseo Lee

She includes great details that show everyday life in North Korea. [source]

Ma Jian

It’s a very thick book. My first impression of Tombstone was that it really surprised me, in a good way. We all know that in the sixties, during the Mao era, there was a terrifying period of the Great Famine. That was a secret for a long time, which no-one revealed. But with this book, we can now read extensive evidence of it. Of course, Yang Jisheng isn’t a literary writer, he’s a historian. He lives in Beijing and spent many, many years collecting the material for Tombstone. It’s absolutely terrific, and I really admire him. [source]

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

I love the way it’s written, and the way that Chang blends her own life story in with it. She pairs the story of her family’s migration out of China to the United States, where she grew up, to the movement of young women from rural China to urban China today. And she sets up a parallel between the way that American cities were transformed by overseas immigrants who fuelled the American industrial rise, with the enormous migration today – that doesn’t involve crossing an ocean or leaving one country for another – of rural dwellers to the world of Chinese cities. I also love the way she brings to our attention the distinctive personalities of young Chinese women. She describes them as working in very difficult conditions, but often experiencing them as liberating, because they have so much more freedom and control over their private life than they had in their villages, where male-dominated family structures remain powerful. [source]

Simon Sinek

Author

This is another book that trains us to keep an open mind. It offers a theory of how the Chinese discovered America 70 years before Columbus. The practice of being open to new ways of seeing things makes a leader open to the ideas of others — an essential characteristic of great leadership. [source]

Armistead Maupin

The novel is structured around the four corners of the mahjong table. The device makes clear the distance between the old world of China and the new world that these women inhabit in San Francisco. The novel focuses on the memories and secrets that these women carry about their mothers and their daughters. It shows modern Chinese-Americans dealing with cultural differences across generations. Although it might sound like that terrible term chick lit, it’s completely compelling because Amy writes with remarkable wit. [source]

Dambisa Moyo

This is why I think Richard’s book is particularly interesting. It’s a sneak peak into the way the Communist Party works. Clearly the Chinese government has succeeded in providing a policy environment that incentivises people to do things – to work hard, to make money – without it necessarily being democratic. Like it or not, they have a rule of law, they have some transparency – certainly enough that foreigners are happy to invest there. It’s not a model of democracy or transparency as we know it in the West, but it’s clearly a good enough system that people feel they want to invest their money there. [source]

Norbert Mao

@rkabushenga @cobbo3 @AgaSekalala @dfkm1970 @Kalinaki @TioKauma A fascinating book. Next you should read this one by Michael Pillsbury. Reminds me of the race between the hare and the tortoise! One is faster but distracted while the other is slow but steady. https://t.co/231fMeO0TP [source]

Michael Dillon

He was a writer who was respected in the 1930s and 1940s. He was the editor of the Pacific Affairs, an influential journal, and he was an influential commentator on Asian affairs. What impresses me is the breadth of his knowledge of Asia, his knowledge of Asian languages, his knowledge of Asian culture, and his ability to relate to people living in the region. However during the 1950s he suddenly fell foul of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist House Committee on Un-American Activities, as did a number of American China specialists, although he, like many of McCarthy’s other victims, was not a Communist. Unable to find work in the United States, he came over to the UK where he established a Department of Chinese Studies and a Mongolian Studies Centre in Leeds. He was my first teacher of Chinese history and taught the period of history that he had experienced himself without notes, combining analysis and anecdotes which made the China of the 1930s and 1940s come alive. [source]

Harry Wu

This is all about the famine in China from 1958-1962. It was very much part of Mao’s plan, ‘The Great Leap Forward’. So the book is a historical record of how many people died, maybe 35 to 40 million, although the Chinese authorities still refuse to release all the information. The author, Jasper Becker, had lived in China for many years as a correspondent. [source]

Richard Baum

This is another book along the lines of Will the Boat Sink the Water? Its author, the Washington Post investigative reporter Philip Pan, presents moving portraits of several victims of China’s corruption-tainted economic growth. Pan also draws attention to the few brave souls – mostly journalists and lawyers – who at great personal risk to their careers, and occasionally to their lives, dared to unmask egregious wrongdoing by local officials and their underlings. Unlike Chen and Wu, whose case studies are drawn exclusively from rural China, Pan selects his vignettes from a broad array of contemporary Chinese settings, from the well-connected real estate tycoon who ordered the eviction of hundreds of Beijing residents in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, to the unscrupulous township officials in East China who forced local women to undergo late-term abortions so they could meet their birth-control quotas, to the bravery of a lone army surgeon who dared to violate a government-imposed curtain of silence about the burgeoning 2003 Sars epidemic in China. In these and other vignettes, Pan catalogues typical abuses of official power in post-reform China, while calling attention to a handful of true Chinese heroes who bravely exposed these misdeeds. In doing so, he vividly illuminates the dark side of China’s developmental miracle, while at the same time helping us to rekindle our faith in the ultimate decency and humanity of those ordinary Chinese who dare to speak truth to power. [source]

Khurshid Alam

This is a very interesting book – it contains some very good storytelling about the late Victorian famines in Africa, India, China, Brazil and elsewhere. It could almost be described as a narration of human suffering. It also contains many rare photographs depicting the famines. [source]

Elizabeth Perry

This book really is a very easy read. It’s a memoir of Liang Heng who himself had been a rather young Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. And what I like about this book is that it gives a first-hand understanding of why Chinese during the Cultural Revolution did the things they did. We now look back on that period of the 1960s and say, ‘Oh, all of China went crazy, there was this large cult of personality, Chairman Mao manipulated everyone to do this, that, and the other.’ [source]

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

It’s set in the Qing dynasty, mostly in the 19th century, and it tries to bring to life the experiences of the women of a single family. One of the challenges of biographies of women in different settings is the limited records that are left of their lives. But with these particular women, they wrote a lot of poetry, and Mann uses that to great effect. She also experiments with the form of writing. She’s doing something that in Chinese would be called waishi, which means ‘unconventional history’. As Mann describes it, it records things that might have happened, based on invented or unauthenticated sources or on gossip. So she takes what these women wrote, and then she tries to weave fully textured lives around them, drawing on everything that could possibly help to illuminate their lives. These were elite women – but the fact that they were women also makes them one of the groups that gets left out of the historical record. [source]

Elizabeth Perry

One thing I should say about all of the books that I have chosen is that they are written by people who devoted an extraordinary effort into really getting inside these particular stories. And they did so either with an exceptional research effort, or with access to first-hand information about China. In the case of Joe Esherick, he spent 1979-80 in China. He was part of the first group of American academics (as was I) who came over to China that year. And he spent the year at Shandong University doing very detailed archival and oral history work. And what he comes up with is really a very novel interpretation of the Boxer Uprising, which emphasises the importance of local popular culture and local ecology in creating different strains of Boxer movements. [source]

Isabel Hilton

Mao believed the theories of Lysenko: that man is in charge of nature; that nature is there to be exploited and that anything at all can be achieved with the right political attitude and a scientific approach. Well, they called it a ‘scientific’ approach, but actually it was very bad science indeed. Lysenko’s theories produced probably the worst famine in human history. In China, between the late 50s and early 60s, between 30 and 80 million people starved to death. [source]