The Best China Books of 2024

Jeff, before we get to the books you’re recommending, could you say how you set about choosing them for this list?

When I get a chance to pick books in a context like this, one of the things that I’m always thinking about is, ‘Are there books that remind readers that no matter what is going on politically, the People’s Republic of China remains a place where there are a lot of people with a lot of different views and experiences?’ There are reductionist views of the Chinese people that come through both when outsiders are romanticizing China and when we’re demonizing it. Simplistic ideas and stereotypes can also be reinforced by official texts and unofficial ones produced inside the PRC. I find appealing works that push back against monolithic views of this big country, and I want to do a bit to amplify their impact.

So, one work I want to draw attention to here, even though I have so far just had a chance to dip into it since I just got my copy, is the special issue of writings from mainland China that Granta has published. Granta 169: China is a kind of collage work, a sort I’m often drawn to about China. Sometimes such works will be made up of profiles of very different individual Chinese people but, in this case, we get a literary collage.

It has a story by Yan Lianke who’s thought of as one of the most critical voices in the literary sphere. He lambasts and satirizes various moves the Chinese Communist Party has made, and his works are often banned inside of China. Then there are other writers represented in the collection who work inside the official writers’ organizations or who are not particularly political.

You get pieces by writers who had very little schooling and learned to write while they were working in factories, as well as poets and writers who have an almost punk sensibility. Then you also have representations of more refined writing.

There is also a lot of attention to how different regions can be in terms of writing. There’s a heavy representation of writers from the Northeast. It’s a way to get out of a Beijing or Shanghai-centric view of China. That’s what I really liked about it.

Is it all short stories and works of fiction? Or are there some essays?

It’s a mix. There are essays. There are a couple of pieces about genres of writing. There’s one reported piece by Han Zhang who is based in New York and has written good pieces, not always related to China, for the New Yorker. There are photo essays sprinkled in, which is quite nice. Some are high-quality color spreads that liven up the book as you’re going through it. The bulk of the volume is translations of short stories and memoirs, that sort of thing.

Have you got a favorite in there, or one that particularly struck you?

I love Yu Hua’s writing. It was a pleasure to get a new short story by him, “Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It.”  It’s translated by Michael Berry, who I admire as a translator as well. It seems autobiographical, except that it’s by a writer who is frustrated by trying to make it, not breaking through for a longer period than it took Yu Hua to do so. You can tell he’s drawing on the experiences he had as a young writer and then as an older one.

I especially like “Adrift in the South,” a memoir by Xiao Hai that is translated by Tony Hao, neither of them people I was familiar with but whose names I will now look for as a reader. It’s about somebody who shows up in Shenzhen and works in factories, making his way and stumbling into a life as a writer. It’s earthy in style and evocative of a world of low wage and no guarantees labour and of drifting from factory to factory. It’s a love letter to Shenzhen. It’s not as though any experience he had there was so great, but it was crucial as a coming-of-age period for him. I describe it as a memoir, but in it genres bleed into each other and he even includes some stanzas from poems that he wrote.

One strength of the collection is that it showcases work by many talented translators. Helen Wang, who has done some wonderful translations of children’s literature from China, is represented in it. Jeremy Tiang, a Singapore translator who seems to be everywhere right now and also writes fiction of his own, was a consultant to the volume.

There’s an enjoyable interview with the editor of Granta, Thomas Meaney, about the creation of this volume on the Sinica podcast. Kaiser Kuo interviews him and he talks about the creation process of trying to get a different set of voices from China out there.

Generally, what was 2024 like for books about China? You’re looking at a lot of them, aren’t you?

Yes, although I do have to stress that I don’t come close to reading—or even looking at—everything that’s published because there’s an enormous amount.

There continue to be interesting works by journalists and various kinds of reportage. Alec Ash has a memoir, The Mountains Are High, about living in Yunnan during COVID. Peter Hessler has a new book, Other Rivers, that’s partly about teaching in Chengdu, decades after he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer in a different part of Sichuan and wrote River Town about that experience. There were also books by Yuan Yang, with a focus on a small group of women, and Ed Wong, with a focus largely on the experiences of his father, which are based on the time they each spent working as journalists in Beijing and traveling around the PRC. The former wrote for the FT for a long time before she went into politics (she was just elected an MP in your country), and the latter wrote in China and still writes for the New York Times (now based in my country in DC). Each of these four books have things to offer. There’s also one coming out next year by a talented journalist, Emily Feng, that I’ve read in proofs and was so taken with that I’d be surprised if I didn’t want to talk to you about it again a year from now if we do a similar interview on 2025 China books.

The kind of writing in all these books by journalists is something to watch because there is likely be a gap in quality books by reporters and freelancers who spent extended amounts of time in China and were able to roam around in unstructured ways. Many journalists with long-time China experience either aren’t there now or if they are there, are confined in their movements.

2024 was also an interesting year for accessible academic writing on China, which I’m always glad to see. There are more academics with deep knowledge of China who are either trying to write books for the general reader or at least create crossover works intended for specialist and non-specialist audiences. There was, for example, Tom Mullaney’s Chinese Computer, a sequel to his Chinese Typewriter. It’s a specialist study but it’s very accessible because it tells stories of people involved in the creation of these new technologies.

So that’s a good trend. Two of the books that I chose this year are by academics who are moving to a more accessible style of writing: in one case, very fully in that direction.

Let’s start with one of those. This is a book by historian Kate Merkel-Hess and it’s called Women and Their Warlords. I’m not sure everyone is familiar with the ‘warlord era’ in early 20th century China, so as well as telling us about the book could you maybe set the stage a bit?

After the 1911 Revolution and the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, there was an inability of the newly-founded Republic of China to get on its feet. One reason for that was the jockeying for power among military strongmen. They had armies that seemed more loyal to them than to the country.

Sun Yat-sen was briefly the provisional president, but he was nudged aside by the ultimate warlord, Yuan Shikai, who had been a powerful general in Qing times. He maneuvered himself into power. He initially ruled as President of the Republic but then set himself up as an emperor.

That’s something that happens periodically in China. In recent cases it hasn’t been as overt, but for a time you couldn’t talk about Yuan Shikai on the Chinese internet without censors stepping in. After Xi Jinping did away with term limits, people used allusions to or images of Yuan Shikai as a coded way to suggest that the president-who-makes-himself-an-emperor phenomenon was not just one of the past.

Kate Merkel-Hess is fascinated by this period of disunity and uncertainty in China—particularly the late 1910s and 1920s—before it settles into a version of one-party rule, first under the Nationalists and then under the Communist Party. (Full disclaimer: Kate was a student of mine at UC Irvine and we were also involved in the collective China Beat blog, of which she was the first editor.) Kate has always been a lovely writer, writing for broad audiences in places like the TLS, and this new book, her second solo written one, reads really well.

I love the title, Women and Their Warlords, rather than the other way around. One of the goals of the book is to unsettle the stereotype of this period as being all about men battling for control of the pie. She wants you to think about them as a set of people who believed in different things and had different ideas about how to strengthen the country—an ongoing concern of Chinese political leaders from the late Qing on. She wants us to think about them as influenced by different kinds of intellectual currents at the time. Liberal ideas made an impact on some of them; they were connected to different religious traditions. Above all, though, she wants you to think about the women in their lives–what these women did on their own and how they influenced powerful and better known men.

Her focus is the wives, consorts, and in some cases daughters of military men, and the new roles these women carved out for themselves in political life. They were political figures whose high profile came in part because of their connection to the men, but who also found creative ways to pursue passion projects and things that animated them. Some were drawn to socialist ideas and to the Communist Party; some to Christianity. The book populates the period with more interesting, complex individuals than standard accounts, a collage of sorts, to go back to the metaphor I used earlier.

There have been a couple of popular histories recently, set in the same era. There was one last year about a train robbery, Peking Express by James Zimmerman, which I reviewed for the TLS. Paul French, a consistently engaging writer, also has a very enjoyable book just out, Her Lotus Year, which is about Wallis Simpson’s time in China.

It was a period of disunity, of China’s weakness in the world, when it was being bullied. But you can also think about it as a time when different groups and individuals, including the women who interest Kate, were experimenting with varied ways that society could be reorganized.

Are these high-society women household names like Soong Mei-ling (aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek)?

It’s mixed. They have different degrees of education. None beside the one you mention was a household name outside of China. At the time there were people who thought of Chiang Kai-shek as just another warlord and there were people who are now thought of as warlords who aspired to be nation-building figures like Chiang Kai-shek was. There have been a lot of biographies of Soong (and some about her and her sisters, two of whom also married important men, Sun Yat-sen in one case), so you could call this a book about her metaphoric cousins.

Given we’re talking about the early 20th century, shall we turn to the essays by Liang Qichao (1873-1929) next? These have just been translated and published in the Penguin Classics series. Is it right to say he had a big influence on this period?

Liang Qichao is somebody who really should be a household name, globally, and isn’t. He is plenty well known still in China—he’s enormously important. It’s hard to come up with a parallel figure. Not being aware of Liang Qichao is like not being aware of Nietzsche or Hegel. And there’s an imbalance—because a well-educated Chinese person would know who Nietzsche and Hegel were, even if they hadn’t read any of their works.

Liang was head of a family that included other influential members. Some of his sons, grandsons and granddaughters made their marks in different fields. His granddaughter, Wu Liming, wrote a history of her grandfather and his progeny and how they shaped the country’s intellectual life.

Liang Qichao himself was a wunderkind. In his 20s he became one of the leading reform figures. In 1898, late in the Qing era, along with his mentor Kang Youwei and others, he got the ear of a youthful emperor and tried to introduce sweeping reforms. And, for 100 days, it looked like China was going to go the way of the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The reformers wanted to keep the imperial exam system and keep the Qing in power, but introduce all kinds of new institutions and forms of education.

Instead, they got driven into exile or were arrested or executed. Liang Qichao ended up in exile in Yokohama in Japan, where, still in his twenties and then into his thirties, he founded and edited periodicals and translated works at a dizzying pace. Most of the translations he did himself or published in his journals were of books or essays that had come out in Japanese after being written in European languages, and were then translated from Japanese into Chinese. These translations introduced ideas like evolution, different varieties of socialism, and constitutional democracy to readers in China and in the Chinese diaspora.

He didn’t settle into a completely unified ideology but he remained intent on figuring out what recipes were out there that could be used by China to prevent itself from being subjugated in the way so many places outside of the West were through processes of formal colonization and other types of domination. He was an extraordinary figure and a prolific essayist.

As if that wasn’t enough, Liang also wrote one of the first science fiction stories. It imagined a China in the future that would be well-respected and would host something like a World’s Fair where a descendant of Confucius would lecture dignitaries from around the world. That story got a lot of play when China was finally hosting the Olympics in 2008 and then a World Expo in 2010.

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio is a fairly slim volume, which has an insightful and clear introduction by its translator, Peter Zarrow, a specialist in Chinese intellectual history who has done a lot of work on the 1898 Reforms and the decades following them. The essays Zarrow chose showcase Liang’s omnivorous reading in Western, Chinese, and Japanese history and thought, and the way he drew on those readings to spread understanding of ideas about citizenship and promote public-mindedness in China.

It’s a good sampler of his writings, particularly from the incredibly productive period he had around the turn of the century. He promoted ideas that had an impact. Nearly everybody who was significant in Chinese intellectual life at the time owed a debt to Liang. He influenced Mao early in Mao’s life—even though Liang Qichao was a Buddhist and often wanted to work with rather than try to topple rulers. He was eclectic and robustly cosmopolitan, a fascinating figure.

And was he very much focused on why some nations succeed and others fail?

Yes, and he not only peppers his essays with varied concepts but throws in all kinds of statistics, like how many people were speaking English at one point in the past, compared to centuries later when London was the hub of a massive empire. He’s trying to make sense of a world that was rapidly changing in that period as the great empires divided up so much of the globe.

We’ve got two books left. Shall we talk about The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian next?

Yes, that fits in well. One way of thinking about the long arc from Liang Qichao to the present is that while people were embracing different kinds of ideologies and strategies the common thread was, ‘How do we make this country cohere and make it strong enough to be able to hold its own in a dangerous world?’ There were all sorts of different formulas for doing this that were tried, most of which involved connecting to parts of the Chinese past and borrowing from clusters of ideas circulating in the wider world.

Chen Jian and Arnie Westad are both historians of China who are also very interested in the Cold War and the international situation. They remind us that there was eclectic borrowing going on during the first decades of PRC history that we sometimes forget when we think in terms of East-West polarities, or communist-capitalist dichotomies. Their book looks at what happened after the exhaustion with Mao’s particular utopian interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. What, they ask, came out of the rubble of the early Cultural Revolution? The heroes of their story, in a way, are a combination of ordinary people trying to rebuild their lives, and leaders who were trying to come up with new, mix-and-match ideas to move China forward.

A lot of times the story about China opening up after Mao is largely about Nixon going to China, and its opening to the West, and then about Deng Xiaoping having a bold new approach. What they draw attention to is the degree to which the Chinese state always needed to have some connections to places outside in the wider world. So even when China was closed off, there were moves toward connecting up with Japan. This was in the 1960s, when China had pivoted away from the Soviet Union but was still feuding with the United States. It wasn’t as though they could eschew connections with all other places and still have any sort of economic development. The authors write about business in a very fine-grained way—they look at which foreign companies began to get footholds in China and at what point. Germany came fairly early in the 1970s.

They’re very interested in details and what they find in the archives. What they cover in the book won’t surprise people who’ve been following the scholarship, but they tell it in an accessible and relatively dispassionate way that’s very appealing. Sometimes, when I’m reading Frank Dikötter’s recent books, as spirited as his writing is, I feel like I’m making my way through a prosecutorial brief against the Chinese Communist Party. There are other writings, focusing on figures like Deng Xiaoping, that veer toward the hagiographic. Both of these kinds of approaches seem to flatten out things that should be, like history often is, bumpy and shaped by contingencies and flukes as well as nefarious plans and good intentions, though those certainly can both exist.

There’s something valuable about just going into the nitty gritty of, ‘How exactly does a country that was in such a shambles in the late 1960s end up surging forward economically by the 1980s?’ A lot of specific choices were made. The book is an argument for the importance of contingency, rather than a grand vision.

And it’s focused mainly on what they call ‘the long 1970s’ isn’t it? Which is a period that doesn’t often get looked at as a unit.

Yes, the long 1970s. It fits with a trend pointing out that it didn’t all start in 1979 with Deng donning a cowboy hat when he went to America, as evocative as photographs of him at that famous rodeo might be. These things were percolating from the early 1970s and then last into the mid-1980s. The Great Transformation, for better and worse, then stops the story with Tiananmen Square events on the horizon.

Rather than treating the Cultural Revolution as one topic and the Reform Era as another, how they overlap is something that scholars have become more interested in lately. This book is an example of that. It’s a very accessible survey book that doesn’t start with the death of one leader and the rise of another.

Finally, we have a book about cooking. Tell me about Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food by Michelle King.

Michelle King is a historian of the Republican period, so this book is a real departure. It’s beautifully written. It’s about Fu Pei-mei who is typically described as Taiwan’s Julia Child. But as Michelle King points out, Fu Pei-mei started her TV show before Julia Child, hence you could just as easily say that Julia Child was the American Fu Pei-mei.

Fu Pei-mei was very important in introducing Chinese food and cooking to audiences in Taiwan as that country was developing. Her cookbooks sometimes came out bilingually, so they introduced Chinese food to Western cooks as well, and she included European dishes in her shows, so the cosmopolitanism went still further.

The book fits in with the recent transnational turn in East Asian and Chinese history, moving between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and also crossing the Pacific in different ways. Michelle King’s interest is drawn partly from growing up an American of Chinese descent. She intersperses the biography of Fu Pei-mei she’s telling with vignettes about what she calls ‘kitchen conversations’ that she has about food with her mother and other women in her family. It’s about their relationship to food and the way in which learning about food links to culture and the role it can play in individuals staying connected to a place that they’ve left behind and sometimes encouraging their children who never lived there to feel connected to it as well.

Along the way, you learn a lot about the history of Taiwan, about migrants from the mainland to Taiwan, about divisions within Taiwanese society, and about other things. It’s got a lot to say about gender. The hero of the story, Fu Pei-mei, is not a natural cook. She doesn’t really know much about cooking but is called upon to provide food for her husband and men who come over. She studies cooking assiduously, becomes an expert at it, and then shares her knowledge. There’s a pedagogic side to this, a pragmatism to helping people to be able to cook.

You also get a lot about the history of television and the world of TV shows.

So did she learn to cook when she was still on the mainland?

No, she left the mainland very young. It’s a Taiwan story. Because of this, the book pairs well with one of my choices from last year: Made in Taiwan. They’re two books that would be interesting to teach side-by-side.

But it also pairs well with Women and their Warlords. How does a story look different when you put female characters at the center of it? You can think of this as a story of Taiwan’s rapid modernization and shifting ties to the United States, told through the life of a woman and what’s traditionally thought of as a domestic-sphere activity.

I think the author, Michelle King, says that she found the recipes being in English as well as Chinese useful, because at that point she didn’t read characters yet.

Yes, it’s a story of discovering and reconnecting with family traditions—and about an author’s shift from having a casual interest in East Asia as a place her family was from and not knowing much Chinese to being a specialist who uses Chinese sources to write good books about that region.

Thank you so much, Jeff.

It’s always a pleasure.

By the way, last time we did one of these interviews you had fairly recently returned to California after spending three months as a visiting professor in London, any plans to be back on this side of the pond?

Actually, yes, I’ll be there for a week early in 2025. A new independent publishing house, Brixton Ink, is publishing a just for the UK updated edition of my 2020 book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink. This edition, which has a different subtitle, places my original text, with the American spelling changed to British spelling naturally, between two completely new parts on developments in the 2020s penned by two talented journalists: a foreword by Amy Hawkins and an afterword by Kris Cheng. I’ll spend 22-27 January traveling around England doing launch events for that work, Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong.