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.
Thanks, although this seems very heavy on the politics of China’s leadership rather than random shmuck life and culture I’ll peruse them and see if anything catches my eye.
Amusing aside: everytime I see “red china” I head Tom lehrer saying “China, who we call ‘red China’” in his live performance of who’s next.
Probably just watch some travel videos and Chinese tv shows for that. Like “In The Name of The People” as suggested by another comment.