Jung Chang wrote this very moving and tragic family history/memoir about her grandmother during the first revolution, her mother’s life during the Japanese occupation and finally her life as a teenager growing up during the Cultural Revolution.

Wild Swans gives you the history of the whole twentieth century, and thus, it makes for a good choice out of these three books on the Cultural Revolution. She’s also a good writer and the story of her family is incredibly fascinating and heartbreaking. Her books are banned in China.

Out of all the books on China set during the cultural revolution, this one is probably the best.

Life and Death in Shanghai is another moving memoir written about the Cultural Revolution. Like Wild Swans and Son of a Revolution, it came out early, in 1987.

However, unlike the other two, Nien Cheng wasn’t a teenager during the Cultural Revolution. She was already a widow. She was also of a different class from the authors of the other two books. She came from a very wealthy and westernized family, and since she was an adult, she was not just an observer but a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Her story makes for an unputdownable read.

Along with Wild Swan, Life and Death is another great book on China set during the Cultural Revolution.

Choosing my all-time favorite of all these 25 books on China was pretty easy to do. Hands down, Red China Blues is definitely my all-time favorite book on China.

Written by Canadian journalist, Jan Wong, Red China Blues is a memoir of her time studying Chinese as a college student in Beijing in 1972. China is still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. People are still wearing those lovely blue Mao suits, waving their little red book around, and throwing out quotes of Mao Ze Dong.

It’s a great book because it’s such a unique story. Most stories about the Cultural Revolution are told from the perspective of the Chinese; this one is told by someone like you and me DURING the Cultural Revolution. How cool is that? While reading it, I literally could imagine myself inside the Cultural Revolution. Fascinating!

Did you know that Peter Hessler is a rock star? Ok. Not a rock star in the traditional sense. He’s pretty much famous only within a small group of people who’ve spent any amount of time living in China or obsessing about the country.

Why is he so admired in China circles? I think it’s because he says exactly what most ex-pats living in China or who have lived in China think and experience.

If you want to read a journalist who really knows and understands China, then read any of these three books by Peter Hessler.

Rivertown, his first book, is about his time as an English teacher in a small town in Sichuan province in the 1990s. Rereading this book after so many years makes me very nostalgic for the simple and innocent China of the past. It’s a great book to read about life in the interior of China in the 90s and the life of an English teacher back then. As usual, Hessler has an eloquent way of highlighting the absurdities, the innocence, and the kindness of life in China back then.

Oracle Bones is the best of the three. The author deftly weaves back and forth between telling us about the ordinary lives of the people he met over his time in China to the history of China. Many of the people he writes about are the students from his time teaching in Fuling. He follows them as they migrate from the village to the big cities on the coast. Their stories represent the billions of other stories of ordinary Chinese doing the same exact thing.

At the same time, we get to follow Hessler himself as he makes his way through Chinese bureaucracy, the Chinese reaction to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and returning home after 9-11.

The book is eye-opening. Not only will you learn a lot about China, but if you’re American, you’ll learn something also about your country as well.

If you’ve seen Factory Girls before, it might be because it’s on pretty much everyone’s 10 best books about China list. And it’s deservedly so. It’s a classic that should be read by anyone who wants to understand how China got where it is today. I hear so many people say that China is rich now because it stole from the United States. But really you have to look no further than at these factory girls to understand China’s success.

Chang tells the story of the largely ignored population of Chinese: the young women who have migrated from China’s small villages to the factory towns of the coast.

Chang blended in with the locals in the factory town of Dongguan by dressing, acting, and living like them. She got to know these young women, building up their trust, and in return, they told her some amazing stories of survival, bravery, determination, self-reliance, and grit. All necessary qualities for success.

This book more than any other tells me why China has become so wealthy. It’s not just the powerful, but it’s also these women.

In Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmit Schmitz writes about the stories of the people living on one particular street called the Street of Eternal Happiness in the old French quarter of Shanghai. And oh what fascinating stories they are!

For me, what sets Schmitz’s writing apart from the millions of other China books written by white guys from America is that he’s a much better storyteller than most. And like Leslie Chang in Factory Girls, he tells his stories with so much warmth, love, and affection for people. I became so absorbed in the stories of Auntie Fu, Zhao, CK, and Wang Ming that I didn’t want to move from my sofa until I knew that Auntie Fu would be ok, CK’s business would flourish, and we’d get to meet Wang Ming.

I have to admit that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I thought I’d read enough books on China for a lifetime, and I’d learn nothing new. I was wrong.

In Young China, Zak Dychtwald presents a fascinating portrait of the generation of Chinese born after 1990, also known as the Jiu Ling Huo. He bases himself in the coastal city of Suzhou and the interior megalopolis of Chengdu. Dychtwald tells us what this generation of young people are thinking about–sex, the West, their government, gay people–and what they’re most concerned about—having enough money for an apartment, finding someone to marry, dealing with the pressure of being an only child, and getting into the right school.

While reading his book, most of the time I felt that not much had changed. Sure they’re richer and can travel more, but these young people are still like my students in the 90s back in China.

Stephen Platt writes a character-driven page-turner about the events that led up to the Opium War.

Imperial Twilight isn’t your typical dry history book. Instead, Platt fills the pages with high drama, suspense (Will the British be allowed to forgo the kowtow? Will the Chinese deign to accept Lord Napier’s request?) and absurdity. What he really focuses on are the characters. And oh what characters they are! Platt’s description of some of the most eccentric characters that have ever been written about is what makes this an enthralling read. It’s not only fascinating but also prescient and relevant for what is happening today between China and the U.S.

Probably one of the strangest events in Chinese history was the Taiping Rebellion. One of the greatest scholars of Chinese history, Jonathan Spence writes a very detailed and fascinating history of this rebellion in God’s Chinese Son. In the mid-1800s right after China’s humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars, a failed Confucian scholar named Hong Xiuquan has a dream in which God tells him that he is his son (making him Jesus’s brother) and that he has been sent to China to convert the Chinese people to Christianity, drive out the Manchus and restore the Ming to power. He is so successful in his conversions that he is able to build an army and wage a war against the Manchu government, conquering the southern half of China. The civil war that ravaged China at that time killed over 20 million people.

At times in the book, I had difficulty following the descriptions of the various Gods and beliefs of Chinese folk religions, so I hesitate a bit in recommending this book. Stephen Platt wrote a book on the same subject a few years ago called Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom that might be easier to read, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

My all-time favorite travel writer, Paul Theroux, wrote one of my all-time favorite travel books, Riding the Iron Rooster. Ok. So this book is really outdated. I admit it. But Theroux is so damn good and I love this book so much that I just had to put it on this list of books on China.

Theroux is acerbic and witty as hell. Like Hessler, he writes about things that I myself experienced while in China. If you want to read about what it was like traveling around China by train in the 1980s and see how much China has changed, read this book.