Are you traveling to China? Are you an arm-chair traveler fascinated by what's going
on in China? Have you just gotten interested in China and are looking for a small
number of quality books to read on it? I have from time to time been asked to
recommend readings for such travelers and here are some titles I would put on such
a reading list. [Please let me know if you have additional suggestions.]
General History:
Patricia Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1999,
paperback) covers China’s history in one volume. This elegant book doesn’t offer the sort of
detailed scholarly analyses found in the multi-volume and yet-to-be-finished Cambridge History
of China but it conveys the sweep of Chinese history remarkably well. For coverage of recent
centuries, Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China (W.W. Norton, 2001, paperback) is
superbly written, especially in its treatment of the Ming and Qing dynasties. A more scholarly
survey of Chinese history is China: A New History (Belknap Press, 1998), by John King
Fairbank and Merle Goldman, available in an enlarged paperback edition.
DVDs:
For those more visually inclined, the documentary series China: A Century of Revolution is still
excellent in spite of a few inaccuracies; it is now available in a DVD format. The PBS
program, China from the Inside, does a good job of allowing viewers to see China's giddy
growth and growing pains from the insider's perspective.
Travel Books:
Nearly every brand of travel books, Fodor’s, D.K. Publishing’s Eyewitness Travel guides,
Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Let’s Go, already has a volume on China and some of these have
also published volumes dedicated to the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and so on.
Here I would like to point to the books by foreigners or Chinese that convey the immediacy
of life as lived in China. In this genre, Peter Hessler’s story of his life as a teacher in the town
of Fuling, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (Harper Perennial, 2002 paperback), deserves a
look for its perceptive observations of Chinese society and life. A recent and more hilarious
addition to this genre is Rachel DeWoskin’s Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New
China (W.W. Norton 2005, hardcover). DeWoskin was a star in a Chinese TV drama and this
experience offers her a unique perspective on China’s social transformation and much more.
Equally interesting is South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China (St. Martin's,
2004) by Seth Faison, the former Shanghai Bureau Chief for the New York Times.
Foreigners since at least Marco Polo—though the debate continues on whether Polo was
actually in China—have written about their travels through China. After China began to open
up in the 1970s, there have been a large crop of such books. Simon Winchester’s The River at
the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time (Picador, 2004
paperback) has been especially popular. One reader, however, were turned off by Winchester’
s description of corpses floating down the Yangtze in Winchester’s book. For the record, our
tour groups never saw these. And, despite the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the Three
Gorges and the Lesser Three Gorges are still magnificent.
Books by Journalists stationed in China:
Journalists stationed in Beijing have often offered highly readable accounts of their
experiences in China. Titles that have received much attention in the past decade include
China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong (Globe and Mail, published by
Anchor paperback edition 1997); China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising China by the
Pulitzer prize team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (New York Times, Vintage
paperback edition 1995).
Recent additions include Wild Grass : Three Stories of Change in Modern China by the Pulitzer
winner Ian Johnson (Wall Street Journal, Pantheon 2004), which captures the painful
struggles ordinary Chinese have waged for their rights and justice. John Pomfret, formerly of
the Washington Post, tells a masterful story of China's transformation in Chinese Lessons: Five
Classmates and the Story of the New China (Henry Holt, 2006). Former Wall Street Journal
reporter James McGregor offers a vastly different story in One Billion Customers : Lessons from
the Front Lines of Doing Business in China (Free Press, 2005). John Gittings offers a one-volume
history of the PRC in The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market (Oxford University Press,
2005).
Fiction:
Though Chinese writers residing in China have yet to win the Nobel Prize in literature, they
have nonetheless produced many fine works. Many volumes written in the past quarter of
century have received critical acclaim and been translated into English. Here are three--Ha
Jin writes in English--to get you started with. These works contain sad stories, so beware.
Ha Jin, Waiting;
Ha Jin, The Crazed;
Yu Hua, To Live.
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