Interesting Books About China

Below are some of the better books about China that I’ve run across, ranked in order of recommendation:

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler spent two years in the late 1990’s as an instructor at a college on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. This book describes his experiences there. What makes the book exceptional is Hessler’s ability to bring the location and the individuals to life for the reader. I gained a different, and I think better, perspective on China and Chinese individuals from reading this book.

Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China, by Rachel DeWoskin

This book is about the author’s experiences in Beijing during the early 1990’s, where she became a star in a soap opera with the same name as the book title. It simply is a great story, and like Hessler, DeWoskin is able to bring the location and the people to life in her writing.

One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China, by James McGregor

James McGregor was the Wall Street Journal China bureau chief for many years. This ostensibly is a business book, but it provides insights well beyond the bounds of business. Just as the two books above bring individual locations and personalities to life, McGregor is able to bring alive the inner workings of the government bureaucracy and business culture. He is able to break down the general western perception of “China, Inc.” as a single, giant, homogenous entity. Instead, it is what all large bureaucracies are: a collection of many different individual tribes and fiefdoms, often in conflict with each other.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, by Peter Hessler

This is a follow-up to River Town. The author kept in touch with a number of his former students, many whom migrated to the coasts after graduating from school. So, this book further enhances the character and lifestyle insights provided by the first book. His background discussion of the originations of the written language (the oracle bones) and the scientists who study them seemed a little tedious to me, but was tolerable.

China Road, by Rob Gifford

Rob Gifford worked as the National Public Radio correspondent from China for six years. This book is about a journey he took across China on Route 312 from Shanghai to the far western border. Gifford describes interactions with a broad diversity of people he meets along the way, so the book offers breadth, but not much depth. I probably would have appreciated this book more if it was the first book I had read about the country, rather than the most recent. And, the author’s obsession with the question of whether or not China is or will become a “super power” is somewhat tiresome. By itself, this is not an important question, other than as a small component of the much broader topic of where overall the country is going and what it will become. After all, the Soviet Union was a "super power"… ?

The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck

This book is about the early 20th century and doesn’t provide much insight into modern China, but it is a classic, and is very unique in nature.