Do You Want to Read More About China?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/books/do-you-want-to-read-more-about-china.html Version 0 of 1. Last month, The Times published a five-part series about China’s rising power and reach. Some readers wrote to ask for suggestions of books they could read to dive even deeper into the topic. Here’s a start that’s far from complete. [Click here to read The Times’s five-part series, “China Rules.”] General Interest Hessler’s “Country Driving” is an “exploration of China’s burgeoning highway system, and it definitely contains some epic drives: Mr. Hessler, for example, undertakes a 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall all the way from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau, his rental car packed with a tent and food supplies that will make your teeth ache: Coca-Cola, Oreo cookies, candy bars, Gatorade.” The big story here is that China is “a country that’s feverishly on the move,” from “farming and folkways, to new cities and their sprouting factories.” Read our review. “Age of Ambition” is a “riveting and troubling portrait of a people in a state of extreme anxiety about their identity, values and future.” In the book, “Osnos paints a China rived by moral crisis and explosive frustration, whose citizens are desperate to achieve wealth, even as they are terrified of being left with nothing. The Communist Party leadership, Osnos writes, is so morally and intellectually bankrupt that only the uneasy bargain to provide ‘prosperity in exchange for loyalty’ allows it to retain a semblance of legitimacy. Even so, ‘the gap between the society’s meritocratic myth and its oligarchic reality was becoming clear and measurable.’” Read our review. Pan’s “Out of Mao’s Shadow” assesses the “current state of the world’s most populous nation, looking at both the growing personal freedom its citizens now enjoy and the Communist Party’s continued monopoly on power. He notes that prosperity has raised people’s expectations and access to information, even as it’s helped the government forestall democratization: many citizens who might once have become dissidents have grown increasingly focused on their private lives and the opportunity to make money quickly, while party officials, who ‘can often determine who succeeds and fails in the new capitalist economy,’ wield ‘tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen and entrepreneurs that might otherwise support political change.’” Read our review. Chinese Voices “China in Ten Words” is a collection of essays in which Yu Hua “depicts a morally compromised nation, plagued by escalating unemployment, class polarization and endemic corruption and waste. At the extremes, peasants traverse the land selling their blood to the highest bidder while multimillionaires build mansions that are replicas of the White House.” Read our review. “In richness, moral urgency and drama, there can be few events of history with greater literary potential than the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Yang Jiang’s ‘Six Chapters from My Life Downunder,’ her slender account of being sent ‘down’ for two years to a re-education school in the countryside, is one of the few memoirs of the period and all the more precious for that.” Read our review. “The Corpse Walker” a collection of conversations, is an “industrious, well-crafted recording of oral histories, almost all from the southwestern province of Sichuan. … an area of extremes: mountains and plains, industry and farms, the newly rich and the perpetually poor. Its continuum of orthodoxy slides between animism, Taoism, Maoist atheism and the quasi capitalism of its favorite son, Deng Xiaoping.” Read our review. Statecraft “Kurtz-Phelan’s book, ‘The China Mission,’ tells the story of Marshall’s unsuccessful mission to China. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, it is at once a revealing study of character and leadership, a vivid reconstruction of a critical episode in the history of the early Cold War and an insightful meditation on the limits of American power even at its peak.” Read our review. “Peraino’s absorbing book covers that tipping-point year, 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party came to power and things not only changed radically within China, but also for Chinese-American relations. After several decades of close ties to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, including a wartime alliance, the United States plunged first into Cold War with China and then hot war (in Korea), followed by several decades of almost complete diplomatic separation.” Read our review. “In ‘A Contest for Supremacy’ Friedberg outlines several reasons a closer relationship between the two powers is possible: economic interdependence, the prospect that China may become more open and democratic, its continuing integration into the international system, common threats like climate change, and nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, he believes two other factors — a growing clash of interests and deep ideological and political differences — will prove more decisive and will make the relationship more tense and competitive.” Read our review. Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” … he reflects on his remarkable run. Read our review. HISTORY “Dikotter’s gripping, horrific and at times sensationalistic ‘The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976,’ the third volume of his work on the Mao years, challenges the Chinese people to address those missing years. Drawn from hundreds of English-language and Chinese eyewitness accounts, newly available archival records, online Cultural Revolution documentary projects and foreign and Chinese scholarship, the book paints … a damning portrait of Mao and Communist Party governance.” Read our review. In this book, Schell and Delury “argue that for generations of influential Chinese, shame has been a stimulant.” Their examination of how this “unusual trait in Chinese culture worked its way through politics and intellectual life is a fascinating attempt to reconcile China’s current success with its past suffering. It also sets the stage for perhaps the biggest challenge facing a much wealthier and more powerful China today, since it cannot go on fighting its vanquished ghosts forever.” Read our review. “Platt has written an enthralling account of the run-up to war between Britain and China during a century in which wealth and power were shifting inexorably from East to West. But if this history holds a lesson today — as wealth and power shift equally inexorably back from West to East — it is surely the same one that Karl Marx identified just a decade after the Opium War, that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Read our review. Women and children “The emergence of China’s titanic manufacturing base has been chronicled in numerous books and articles in recent years, but Chang has elected to focus not on the broader market forces at play but on the individuals, most of them women, who leave their villages and seek their fortunes on the front lines of this economy.” Read our review. In “Leftover Women,” Fincher argues that women in China “are pressed to accept unsuitable marriages while in their mid-20s. The state, alarmed by gender imbalances and the potential for unattached men to create social unrest, has allied with insecure parents to describe them as ‘leftover’ if they delay, she says. The women are systematically deprived of homeownership because of parental and spousal pressure to put real estate in the husband’s name, even if the woman, or her parents, has contributed significantly to the purchase.” Read our review. “One Child” examines how “the repercussions of population control will continue to reverberate throughout China.” The book’s greatest strength is Fong’s reporting. She “meets Liang Zhongtang, who fruitlessly attempted to dissuade China’s leaders from adopting the policy in the 1980s. She interviews people at adoption agencies that are suspected of seizing second children and selling them to Westerners.” She highlights earthquakes and other natural disasters and shows “how unexpected are the tragedies of China’s population policy.” Read our review. “China is such a vast, contradictory land that the most illuminating books often explore it through an intense focus on a single topic … Education is a particularly transparent window, as demonstrated by the perceptive “Little Soldiers,” which turns over cultural rocks from bribery to the urban-rural divide while delving into the nation’s school system, deeply rooted as it is in both ancient Confucianism and Communist dogma.” Read our review. There are countless other good books on China. For instance: “Wild Swans,” by Jung Chang; Ian Johnson’s “The Souls of China”; Richard McGregor’s “The Party”; “From Heaven Lake,” by Vikram Seth; Jonathan Spence’s “Mao Zedong” and Peter Hopkirk’s “Trespassers on the Roof of the World.” Let us know in the comments below if you have a favorite. |