Notable China books of 2021
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Loading... - Alex Pinyin
- 31 Jan 2022
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While journalism in China was being hit by tit-for-tat media expulsions, the longer production time for books meant 2021 still yielded a very healthy crop focusing on the Middle Kingdom. There were memoirs, economics explainers, diplomatic surveys, political theses, and historical analyses. Being a China politics nerd, I veer more toward the nonfiction side, and there were some absolutely sterling examples this year. Let’s take a look at the best books in English focusing on China in 2021.
Empire of Silver by Jin Xu
Jin Xu’s book was originally published in Chinese in 2017 but first published in translation this year. It’s about the importance of silver to the Chinese economy, but also a guide to the precious metal’s role in Chinese diplomacy, the rise and fall of several dynasties, its part in inhibiting China from “taking off” economically when European states were just beginning to do so, and even its central role in the Opium Wars, which as Xu demonstrated could as easily be called the Silver Wars. Xu is the editor of the Financial Times’ China edition and has a solid grasp of both the economic facts and how to keep the book readable: it is far from being a tedious agglomeration of data. However, it is noticeable that Xu refuses to use her historical perspective to comment on present-day economic issues.
China’s Leaders From Mao to Now by David Shambaugh
Remember when people thought Xi Jinping might be a reformer and open up China? Yeah. I know. Chinese leaders matter a lot; sitting at the apex of a top-down political system, they dictate how Chinese politics goes, whether the unilateral displays of power from Mao and Xi or the more collective methodologies of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. David Shambaugh’s excellent book features potted biographies and political analyses of China’s five paramount leaders since the inception of the People’s Republic (thus excluding Hua Guofeng and Zhao Ziyang, who never enjoyed full control). Shambaugh examines each leader in turn, considering how their early lives, personalities, and political contexts affect their time in charge. Shambaugh may not have had the archive access of Ezra Vogel or Frank Dikotter, but he does a great job in forming a coherent narrative for each leader and comparing and contrasting their leadership styles.
Red Roulette by Desmond Shum
It’s rare that a book about China gets the attention that Red Roulette received on publication, but with its tales of power and corruption at or near the apex of Chinese society, it was one of the sexiest books to come out in many a year. Spurred on by the sudden disappearance/abduction of his ex-wife and business partner Whitney Duan, Red Roulette aims to be a tell-all indicting the endemic corruption and transactional relationships of China’s business and political elite. (Only you feel he is protesting too much: “The more I asked around, the more I realized that every relationship formed among those who work within the Party system in China is saturated by calculations of benefit and loss,” he says at the beginning when discussing Duan’s disappearance. If he did not know that before, you wonder how staggeringly naïve he must have been.) Though the book takes some time to get going (Shum detailing points like his dad coaching a girls’ volleyball team and his youthful swimming lessons), it’s eventually a deliriously heady mix of money, power, sex, and corruption, with a starring role for Zhang Peili, the wife of China’s then-premier Wen Jiabao, to whom Duan acts as a protégé. “We were like the fish that clean the teeth of crocodiles,” Shum writes. Eventually, of course, the jaws snap shut, with Shum affecting shock and surprise that such a thing could happen. But as a story, Red Roulette is unmissable.
AI 2041: Ten Visions For Our Future by Kaifu Lee and Chen Qiufan
Kaifu Lee is one of China’s most prominent tech experts, boasting more than 50 million followers on Weibo. Following his 2018 book AI Superpowers, which examined the effects of technology in China and the U.S. (and how the former is moving ahead of the latter), AI 2041 leaves the geopolitics behind for a sequence of 10 futuristic scenarios detailing how AI will affect everyday lives, followed by analyses explaining the technical aspects. Deliberately global — with narratives located in Mumbai, Lagos, and Tokyo, etc. — AI 2041 is a book that tries to meld the visionary with the practical by delineating the technologies that will change our lives and postulating their real-world applications. As futurology goes, it’s one of the best-informed examples of that arcane discipline — although the narratives are not the best writing you’ll ever read. Read More…
