18 Best China Books

A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million Uyghurs, placing them in what it calls “reeducation camps,” facilities most of the world identifies as concentration camps. There, the genocide and enslavement of the Uyghur people are ongoing. The tactics employed are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, but the results are far more insidious because of the technology used, most of it stolen from Silicon Valley. In the words of Turkel, “Communist China has created an open prison-like environment through the most intrusive surveillance state that the world has ever known while committing genocide and enslaving the Uyghurs on the world’s watch.”

As a human rights attorney and Uyghur activist who now serves on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel tells his personal story to help explain the urgency and scope of the Uyghur crisis. Born in 1970 in a reeducation camp, he was lucky enough to survive and eventually make his way to the US, where he became the first Uyghur to receive an American law degree. Since then, he has worked as a prominent lawyer, activist, and spokesperson for his people and advocated strong policy responses from the liberal democracies to address atrocity crimes against his people.

The Uyghur crisis is turning into the greatest human rights crisis of the twenty-first century, a systematic cleansing of an entire race of people in the millions. Part Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt, No Escape shares Turkel’s personal story while drawing back the curtain on the historically unprecedented and increasing threat from China.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

There are more than 320 million Chinese between the ages of sixteen and thirty. Children of the one-child policy, born after Mao, with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they are the first net native generation to come of age in a market-driven, more international China. Their experiences and aspirations were formed in a radically different country from the one that shaped their elders, and their lives will decide the future of their nation and its place in the world.

Wish Lanterns offers a deep dive into the life stories of six young Chinese. Dahai is a military child, netizen, and self-styled loser. Xiaoxiao is a hipster from the freezing north. “Fred,” born on the tropical southern island of Hainan, is the daughter of a Party official, while Lucifer is a would-be international rock star. Snail is a country boy and Internet gaming addict, and Mia is a fashionista rebel from far west Xinjiang. Following them as they grow up, go to college, find work and love, all the while navigating the pressure of their parents and society, Wish Lanterns paints a vivid portrait of Chinese youth culture and of a millennial generation whose struggles and dreams reflect the larger issues confronting China today.

This program is read by the author.

The author, in his twenties, who is fluent in Chinese, examines the future of China through the lens of the Jiu Ling Hou–the generation born after 1990.

A close up look at the Chinese generation born after 1990 exploring through personal encounters how young Chinese feel about everything from money and sex, to their government, the West, and China’s shifting role in the world–not to mention their love affair with food, karaoke, and travel. Set primarily in the Eastern 2nd tier city of Suzhou and the budding Western metropolis of Chengdu, the book charts the touchstone issues this young generation faces. From single-child pressure, to test taking madness and the frenzy to buy an apartment as a prerequisite to marriage, from one-night-stands to an evolving understanding of family, Young China offers a fascinating portrait of the generation who will define what it means to be Chinese in the modern era.

Zak Dychtwald was twenty when he first landed in China. He spent years deeply immersed in the culture, learning the language and hanging out with his peers, in apartment shares and hostels, on long train rides and over endless restaurant meals.

Praise for Young China:

“To make sense of contemporary China, it is crucial to understand the varied aspirations, anxieties, fears and fantasies of the many millions of Chinese — as big a group as the entire populations of some sizeable countries — who were born after the year that soliders killed protestors near Tiananmen Square. Young China provides an excellent starting point for doing just that.” — The Wall Street Journal

The startling picture of how China’s revolution in finance and technology is changing both Wall Street and the way individuals manage their personal finances.

The future of finance – the way Wall Street operates and how individuals manage their money – is on the verge of upheaval. And the force underlying the change comes from China, where finance and technology are being merged into a system with consequences that resonate far beyond China’s border. The changes of this global revolution in finance and technology – fintech – will be as powerful as those wrought in social media, retailing and advertising by giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which have overturned how we shop and communicate.

China reinvented money with lightning speed, transforming a backward, antiquated cash-based finance system into one centered on super-apps created by technology giants Alibaba and Tencent. More powerful than anything available outside of China, they allow their billion users to pay, borrow, invest, buy goods and services, travel, chat (and far more) all fused together in one mobile phone application. Think Facebook, Google, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, J.P. Morgan Chase all rolled into one app.

We in the West need to understand China’s cashless revolution for reasons ranging from the macroeconomic to issues of personal liberty: The cutting edge of finance is now in China, forcing major financial firms in the United States and the West to figure out how not to be left behind.. China’s cashless revolution is also a harbinger of our future if we let the genie out of the bottle and allow big tech to become big finance. As money goes digital and central banks around the world consider launching digital currencies, we may have both immense convenience and a frightening concentration of power that could violate our privacy, stifle competition, increase financial risk, and give big firms or the government more control over our financial lives. And, once this genie is out of the bottle, the struggle to put it back in may be impossible.

National Public Radio’s Beijing correspondent Rob Gifford recounts his travels along Route 312, the Chinese Mother Road, the longest route in the world’s most populous nation. Based on his successful NPR radio series, China Road draws on Gifford’s twenty years of observing firsthand this rapidly transforming country, as he travels east to west, from Shanghai to China’s border with Kazakhstan. As he takes the reader on this journey, he will also take us through China’s past and present while he tries to make sense of this complex nation’s potential future.

As any traveler knows, some of the best and most honest conversations take place during car rides. So, when a long-time NPR correspondent wanted to learn more about the real China, he started driving a cab–and discovered a country amid seismic political and economic change.

Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation’s brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the “victory”–a key foundation of China’s rising nationalism.

For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization–and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home.

China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory–including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media–define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim.

The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war–an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.

“THE BOOK CHINA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ.” –CNN

SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by THE ECONOMIST and FINANCIAL TIMES

This “powerful and disturbing” (Bill Browder, author of Red Notice) New York Times bestseller is narrated by a man who, with his wife, Whitney Duan, rose to the top levels of power and wealth–and then fell out of favor. Whitney had been disappeared four years before, but this book led to her dramatic reemergence.

As Desmond Shum was growing up impoverished in China, he vowed his life would be different. Through hard work and sheer tenacity he earned an American college degree and returned to his native country to establish himself in business. There, he met his future wife, the highly intelligent and equally ambitious Whitney Duan who was determined to make her mark within China’s male-dominated society. Whitney and Desmond formed an effective team and, aided by relationships they formed with top members of China’s Communist Party, the so-called red aristocracy, he vaulted into China’s billionaire class. Soon they were developing the massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, and they followed that feat with the creation of one of Beijing’s premier hotels. They were dazzlingly successful, traveling in private jets, funding multi-million-dollar buildings and endowments, and purchasing expensive homes, vehicles, and art.

But in 2017, their fates diverged irrevocably when Desmond, while residing overseas with his son, learned that his now ex-wife Whitney had vanished along with three coworkers.

This vivid, explosive memoir shows “how the Chinese government keeps business in line–and what happens when businesspeople overstep” (The New York Times) and is a “singular, highly readable insider account of the most secretive of global powers” (The Spectator).

From the author of the international bestseller Mr. China comes another rollicking ride through the slick mega-cities and industrial backwaters of twenty-first-century China–part adventure story, part erudite myth-buster, and part practical rule book to help Westerners win in China.

China’s role as struggling underdog is now firmly a thing of the past. The world has tilted eastward in its orbit even as the West seems mired in self-doubt. Through living and working in China for more than two decades, Tim Clissold has uncovered stealth methods Westerners can use to straighten out complicated situations in China and achieve their own objectives.

Revealing the hidden logic that governs the Chinese business and political landscape, Clissold puts China’s cultural, political, and military history into context and explains the mind-set that drives Chinese political and business leaders–a resource that has been sorely lacking in most books about doing business in China.

Here, with sharp observations and a deep appreciation for China’s rich past, Clissold presents five rules anyone can use to deal effectively with modern Chinese counterparts. These include understanding that:

• China has its own set of rules that provide a unique pathway to success;
• the quest for stability overrides all others;
• in China, one should never attack directly;
• in solving problems, stick to practicalities and avoid arguments over theory;
• and knowing yourself and knowing the “other” will help you survive a hundred battles.

Combining exuberant storytelling, sly humor, and counterintuitive insights, Chinese Rules traces Clissold’s latest adventures, providing an object lesson in the contradictions between reality and conventional belief that continue to make China a fascinating, perplexing, and irresistible destination for Westerners.

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she’d died. This was in Xi’an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang’s father built her a coffin. Over the next fifteen years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma’s burial, a regular source of friction and contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. Years later, Huang came to understand how much the coffin had influenced his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family.

Hong Kong is the world’s most exciting city, at once fascinating and exasperating, a tangle of contradictions. It is a dazzling amalgam of conspicuous consumption and primitive poverty, the most architecturally incongruous yet undeniably beautiful urban panorama of all.

Through firsthand reportage, world-renowned travel writer Jan Morris takes us through the crowded streets of this enigmatic city, offering the most insightful and comprehensive study of Hong Kong thus far. She reviews Hong Kong’s early days as a British opium port controlled by pirates, cutthroats, and scoundrel tycoons, and looks ahead to the city’s future as part of the People’s Republic of China.

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In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman (“Elegant and scrupulous”–New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa (“A mesmerizing page-turner”–Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world’s most technologically advanced country.

No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair.

He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind’s most familiar innovations–including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper–often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people.

After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country’s long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever.

Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham’s remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great–related by one of the world’s inimitable storytellers.

The spectacular Beijing Olympics of 2008 signaled China’s arrival as a superpower on the world stage. The global economic crisis that followed in 2008-9 saw it become banker to the West, poised to eclipse the United States. This new edition of Kathy Flower’s bestselling Culture Smart! China has been revised and updated by the author to take on board the transformation in China’s fortunes and the changing face of Chinese society. This edition of Culture Smart! China is the indispensable visitors’ guide to the complexities of a rapidly changing world power whose ancient culture and traditions owe little to the West.

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was “to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas” and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.

When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China’s long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed was how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans and transplanted in America and other countries the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.

Unveiling incontrovertible evidence of these astonishing voyages, 1421 rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this landmark work of historical investigation.

“Two hundred years ago China’s imperial rulers sensed a threat to a past-oriented society in the dynamism of the West and tried to frustrate foreign entry.”- Foreign Devils … “Today, one cannot escape the impression that if only it were not for world pressures Maoist China like that of the Ming and the Manchus would be happier if it could withdraw into the broad isolation of the Middle Kingdom.” – Ping-Pong … Just one year after China’s long-closed doors reopened to the West in 1971, Barbara Tuchman journeyed through its cities and countryside drawing the human face on this inscrutable giant. “A creative writer’s sense of drama and a scholar’s obeisance to the evidence.” -New York Times

Author Ha Jin’s celebrated works have claimed several top literary awards, including three Pushcart Prizes. In Nanjing Requiem, the Japanese are poised to invade Nanjing. The dean of Jinling Women’s College, Minnie Vautrin mistakenly believes her American citizenship will protect the school. But Vautrin’s life becomes a daily struggle as the school becomes a refugee camp-and the slaughter of refugees begins. “Jin paints a convincing, harrowing portrait of heroism in the face of brutality.”-Publishers Weekly

At forty-four, acclaimed cardiologist Dr. John Day was overweight and suffered from insomnia, degenerative joint disease, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. On six medications and suffering constant aches, he needed to make a change. While lecturing in China, he’d heard about a remote mountainous region known as Longevity Village, a wellness Shangri-La free of disease where living past one hundred was not uncommon. In the hope of understanding this incredible phenomenon, Dr. Day decided to spend time living in Longevity Village. During his time there, he discovered seven principles that work in tandem to create health, happiness, and longevity-rules he applied to his own life. Six months later, he had lost thirty pounds, had lowered both his cholesterol and his blood pressure, and had even been cured of his acid reflux and insomnia. Now Dr. Day shares his story and the proven program he’s developed to help you, too, feel sharper, productive, more motivated, and pain-free.