So I came across this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/18/five-of-the-best-books-to-understand-modern-china and the headline piqued my interest but the books all seem of a rather particular slant. I am a fan of reading from a series of broad perspectives when trying to understand huge things and it’s obviously a bit farcial to suppose the lives of 1.4 billion people are gripped by terror and pain in a country that somehow still chugs along.
Since of everywhere on lemmy I think I’m likely to get some pretty interesting recommendations here, if we can do it without igniting the china good/bad flame war what books would you recommend to give insight into “understanding modern china”. That is phenomenally broad and vague so I’m keen to see anything from histories to fiction.
edit: thank you all for your opinions, I will endeavour to check most of them out and communicate my thoughts on them later. I’m especially interested in what the lives of boring arse people are like in different sectors of society (e.g. migrant underclass, party bureaucrate, officer worker, house wife, farmer etc) , if anything like that comes to mind.
The Governance of China is a collection of Xi Jinping’s speeches where he explains what he’s trying to do in honestly pretty clear terms. I read it on high speed trains zooming over the Chinese countryside.
Big “you are not immune to propaganda” moment for me. You always need to take leader’s speeches with a dish of salt but while I’ve looked up and listened to many speeches throughout my life it never occurred to me that English translations of Chinese speeches would be available :|