This is a list of recommended China books published in English this year. They are all available on Amazon.com; delivery to China is reliable, sometimes taking as little as a week.
China Candid — The People on the People’s Republic by Sang Ye
This is a superb book. It’s an almost psychedelic tour of China during the last 50 years, told through the life stories of 26 Chinese people.
Author Sang Ye is a Chinese journalist who lives in Australia, but returns to China frequently for research. He interviewed 26 people during the last decade, got them to tell their life stories candidly, and then compiled the transcripts into a collection of eloquent, anonymous autobiographies.
The subjects include:
– A Shenzhen prostitute who explains how her “big cunt” enables her to do a better job
– A retired cadre who is still a true believer in communism, and is disillusioned by the reforms
– A profiteering businessman who operates entirely outside the official system, and a successful entrepreneur who is a loyal Party member and considers his business to be for the public good
– A disabled woman who managed to gain admission to university despite a discriminatory system, and the fact that she has no use of arms
– A veteran executioner who describes the procedure for carrying out the death sentence in China
– An elite athlete who dishes the truth about doping in Chinese athletics
– A couple who run a private orphanage in Hubei
– A PLA soldier who ran some of armies lucrative businesses in Hainan
Every story in this book is fascinating. What’s more, it’s highly readable, and as entertaining as it is informative. If it had been released by a commercial publisher instead of the University of California Press, it would have been talked about at least as much as the other books on this Christmas list.
The book is also available in Chinese (called 1949, 1989, 1999). The English version was edited by Geremie R. Barmé with Miriam Lang. You can get a taste of the book by reading Beijing’s Bloody August, the tale of two people who did not make it into the English language version of the book because of length considerations.
Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler
This is Peter Hessler’s second book, a follow up to his bestselling
Oracle Bones follows a few of the author’s students whose stories he first told in River Town, and also tells the stories of a range of Chinese people, including the lovable Uighur trader identified by the pseudonym Polat. The finely detailed recent histories of the characters Hessler knew personally are woven in a rather literary manner together with Hessler’s search for the truth behind the suicide of Cheng Mengjia, a scholar of Chinese oracle bones which are the earliest known writing in Asia. It’s shines lght on some dark personal corners of contemporary China and it’s a damned good read.
Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret
Pomfret also looks at China through the eyes of several very different Chinese people: four of his classmates from Nanjing University, where the author was one of the first American students to gain admittance after China and the U.S . began diplomatic relations.
He lived in a Chinese university dormitory with Chinese room mates, a rare experience for a foreigners until very recently. Pomfret covered China in 1989 for AP, and was expelled for his efforts, but returned in 1998 as the Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post.
The light touch that Pomfret uses to trace his classmates’ lives from the Cultural Revolution until 2005 makes for a compulsively readable account of recent Chinese history.
Will the Boat Sink the Water? by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
First published in 2004 in Chinese as “A survey Chinese peasants” and banned shortly afterwards, the book still sold millions in pirate editions in China. This year sees the publication of the English version. Despite the unrelenting misery of the peasants and the corruption and cruelty of the officials whose stories are told in this book, it’s a gripping read. There is a review of the book by on Danwei by Göran Leijonhufvud here.
Buy this book on Amazon
China Shakes the World — The Rise of a Hungry Nation by James Kynge
Opening with the tale of a German steel mill that was bought, dismantled and rebuilt completely in China, Kynge’s book examines what’s behind China’s economic rise and describes the effects China is having on everyone else on the planet.
It’s a sober and balanced look at China’s strengths and weaknesses, told through Kynge’s rich personal and journalistic experiences — he first arrived here in 1982, and was the China Bureau Chief of the Financial Times from 1998 to 2005.
Highly recommended.
One Billion Customers — Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China by James McGregor
This book is something in between a how-to guide and a rollicking tour of some of the worst moments in Sino-foreign business. Your correspondent’s favorite chapter is a description of the war between Xinhua and Dow Jones and Reuters ten years ago, when China’s state-owned news agency pulled the same stunt it did a few months ago: requiring foreign news agencies to sell their information products through Xinhua. The foreign news agencies won that battle; it took another decade for Xinhua to try it again.
Buy this book on Amazon
Also noteworthy:
• Mr China by Tim Clissold (published last year so not on the list above)
• Carl Crow, A tough Old China Hand by Paul French (your correspondent has not yet read the book although I have heard good things about it, but can recommend the classic written by Carl Crow himself in 1937 — 400,000 customers, now in reprint.