Books on China

China's minority peoples have shaped the country's history and its identity. They led its most successful dynasty, the Qing. But nowadays, their role has been reduced to that of tourist spectacle. Beijing-based writer James Palmer picks the best books on China's ethnic minorities.

Discussions about Tibet are often reduced to arguments about China's right to run it. Tibetologist Robbie Barnett says this obscures a much more subtle debate about what it means to be Tibetan in modern Tibetan society.

The changing relationship between China and America will be one of the defining foreign policy issues of our times. To understand its dynamic, says sinologist Orville Schell, we must take account of China's lingering sense of victimhood.

In October 1911, China’s last imperial dynasty fell. The legacy of that revolution remains deeply ambiguous in today’s People’s Republic. China scholar Rana Mitter tells us about the country’s tumultuous changes from 1911 to the present day.

The author and economist argues that the West is in decline, the U.S. faces structural unemployment, and authoritarian states like China are in many ways better positioned to deal with financial busts

Historian and Sinologist Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor's Professor, History at UC Irvine, says that to get a real sense of China you need to focus on individuals and their stories. Here he chooses five books that draw on the country's long tradition of biographical writing.

The renowned sinologist and holder of the Legion D'Honneur reflects on Chinese attitudes towards life. Discusses the five books she feels gives the reader the best all-round appreciation of Chinese society

Editor of the website China Dialogue, Isabel Hilton says the evidence of environmental disaster in China is dramatic. She discusses six of the most influential books on environmentalism in China.

Former Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times shares his insights on the Chinese Communist Party - from the absolute horror at the destruction of Maoist times, to Yao Ming, to political power structures and more

Professor Kent Deng says there are no grounds for Eurocentricism in explaining the world history of economic growth. Intensive growth of the modern type was first recorded in Song dynasty China