So I came across this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/18/five-of-the-best-books-to-understand-modern-china and the headline piqued my interest but the books all seem of a rather particular slant. I am a fan of reading from a series of broad perspectives when trying to understand huge things and it’s obviously a bit farcial to suppose the lives of 1.4 billion people are gripped by terror and pain in a country that somehow still chugs along.
Since of everywhere on lemmy I think I’m likely to get some pretty interesting recommendations here, if we can do it without igniting the china good/bad flame war what books would you recommend to give insight into “understanding modern china”. That is phenomenally broad and vague so I’m keen to see anything from histories to fiction.
edit: thank you all for your opinions, I will endeavour to check most of them out and communicate my thoughts on them later. I’m especially interested in what the lives of boring arse people are like in different sectors of society (e.g. migrant underclass, party bureaucrate, officer worker, house wife, farmer etc) , if anything like that comes to mind.
The Hexbear bulletins has a reading list with books on the history of various countries and lists these for China
These books mostly focus on the post-Mao period up to the present day:
- China’s Socialist Economy by Xue Muqiao (1981).
- The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought by Wang Hui (2004).
- Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century by Giovanni Arrighi (2007).
- The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity by Wang Hui (2009).
- Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel (2011).
- China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Equality by Wang Hui (2016).
- Marxism and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Jin Huiming (2017).
- Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi by Christian Sorace (2019).
- I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China by Ramin Mazaheri (2019).
- Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners by Roland Boer (2021).
- China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices by John Ross (2021).
- Ten Crises: The Political Economy of China’s Development by Tiejun Wen (2021).
- The East is Still Red - Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century by Carlos Martinez (2023).
- China and the American Lake by Mark Tseng Putterman - an article (2021).
Thanks, although this seems very heavy on the politics of China’s leadership rather than random shmuck life and culture I’ll peruse them and see if anything catches my eye.
Amusing aside: everytime I see “red china” I head Tom lehrer saying “China, who we call ‘red China’” in his live performance of who’s next.
random shmuck life and culture
Probably just watch some travel videos and Chinese tv shows for that. Like “In The Name of The People” as suggested by another comment.
a bit farcial to suppose the lives of 1.4 billion people are gripped by terror and pain in a country that somehow still chugs along.
Lol. Every video I see out of China is just the most normal looking place.
I’m afraid I don’t have any books for you, but I’ma follow this to see what people recommend.
Great pain can exist among normalcy, when I visited the usa as a kid something that distressed me was that it was possible to walk a few streets and go from insane luxury to seeing people sleep over vents to avoid dying in the cold.
But to “understand modern usa” you have to recognise that these are extremes and a lot of people are just living their lives, with a mix of good and bad. Even people who might be subject to government tyranny can, in another phase of life, see that as some aspect of the past they disliked but which didn’t turn them against the whole project.
In my life my government made me get steralised and “inspected” to change my ID card, but also I have a house because my dad had a good government job with a pension that got blown up to insane levels because of privatisation near the end of his career, I’ve been saved from death by doctors for free a few times, I have access to safe food and water. Things are getting worse and were always very unequal which is why I’m a watermelon but even so life is complicated and you can’t judge how my country works throughthrough any one of these simple stories.
The Governance of China is a collection of Xi Jinping’s speeches where he explains what he’s trying to do in honestly pretty clear terms. I read it on high speed trains zooming over the Chinese countryside.
Big “you are not immune to propaganda” moment for me. You always need to take leader’s speeches with a dish of salt but while I’ve looked up and listened to many speeches throughout my life it never occurred to me that English translations of Chinese speeches would be available :|
Carlos Martinez’s The East is Still Red.
I haven’t got to it yet, but Wen Teijun’s The Ten Crises is supposed to be good
China’s revolution and the quest for socialist future on 1804 books is excellent! https://1804books.com/products/chinas-revolution-and-the-quest-for-a-socialist-future
Not a book but a TV series, check “In the Name of People” (eng sub on Youtube).
The Bible
