China in the 20th Century

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:

---

Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder.

The post-Mao period is peculiar enough --- and interesting enough to me --- to rate its own notebook.

Recommended:
• Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
• Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present [i.e., from the 1700s to 2020]
• Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate
• Jonathan Spence
  • Mao Zedong
  • The Search for Modern China

To read:
• Robert W. Barnett, Wandering Knights: China Legacies, Lived and Recalled
• Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History
• Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World [Review by Danny Yee]
• Barry Naughton, The Chinese economy: Transitions and Growth
• Sigrid Schmalzer
  • The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China
  • Red Revolution, Green Revolution
• Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919
• Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China
• Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace
• Eddy U, Disorganizing China: Counter-Bureaucracy and the Decline of Socialism