What is the price of development? On top of the necessary capital, there has also been a social and a cultural cost to China’s economic boom — one that has left marginalized communities and ethnicities behind and sullied China’s international reputation. Nowhere has this been more obvious in recent years than in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs have been interred in re-education camps to eradicate their culture. But it is also happening in Tibet, where this month’s top pick brings much-needed reporting and visibility to an opaque corner of the nation.
Altogether, as this month’s books show, the human costs of China’s economic development has forced a moral calculation for anyone doing business there. From the standardization of China’s language, which is at the expense of local voices, to the forced labor in Xinjiang, which reportedly produces some of our goods, the below selection of books, almost all of which were published in 2020, includes essential reading on marginalized voices, in addition to historical context of how China got here.
The One to Read
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
Tibet is often viewed through a lens of either the romantically spiritual or the politically apocalyptic. Through deeply reported individual stories, journalist Barbara Demick digs deeper to show the true face of the land as part of China. On the tail of a previous book that humanized North Korea, Nothing to Envy (2009), Demick gives the same treatment to Tibet. She focuses on the town of Ngaba, in western Sichuan province — or eastern Tibet, depending on your perspective — where there has been a wave of self-immolations over the past years in protest of Chinese policies that constrain Tibetan religion, culture and language. Eat the Buddha tells a story both historical and personal, drawing out the dilemma that Tibetans face on a daily basis: whether to become a willing part of China, or to break Buddhist principles and fight against it.
July 28, 2020 |Random House. $28. | Buy
The Shortlist
The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures by Justin Jacobs
If, in the West, you have admired a Chinese statuette, fresco, or even an old chair, there is a decent chance it was plundered from its homeland in the age of imperialism. Yet was this plundering as simple a story as the deceitful white man hoodwinking locals into handing over their treasures? In this historical reconstruction, Jacobs argues that the Chinese who enabled their nation’s exodus of antiques in the 19th and early 20th century were well aware of what they were doing, and well compensated for it. In the process, he gives us a portrait of the late Qing era that serves to show why modern China is demanding its treasures back.
July 13, 2020 | University of Chicago Press. $27.50. | Buy
The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Despite its insistence that the Chinese Communist Party is the only factor that made the nation rich, China also owes a debt to the foreigners who helped build its modern economic powerhouse and connect it to the rest of the world. Jonathan Kaufman, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, tells one of those stories in this closely reported historical book: that of two Jewish business families who arrived in Shanghai two centuries ago and got involved in every manner of business, from opium to banking. In their small part, they helped to open the gates of trade and set the scene for the economic miracle of the last 40 years — only to be kicked out of communist China themselves.
June 2, 2020 | Viking. $28. | Buy
Dialect and Nationalism in China
by Gina Anne Tam
To understand a culture, you must understand its language. And the homogenizing force of standard Mandarin — the “common tongue” — says a lot about how China has tried to impose a single identity on all its local and linguistic diversity. Scholar Gina Anne Tam parses how China’s myriad dialects, from Cantonese to Shanghainese, have been framed by the state as lesser variants of Mandarin, presenting a single face of ‘Chineseness’ ever since the creation of standard Chinese in the 1950s. Drawing on literature, folksong and hip-hop, she also presents an alternative vision of the Chinese nation: one made up of many voices.
Apr. 16, 2020 | Cambridge University Press. $99.99. | Buy
Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center
by Harriet Evans
Just as China’s language has been standardized, so too have the streets of its capital city. Harriet Evans focuses on the historical hutong neighborhood of Dashilanr, tucked to the south of Tiananmen Square, to demonstrate how its inhabitants have been displaced by relocation campaigns and planned gentrification. Using oral history to bring us into their lives, she shows that their marginalization is not a story of clinging to the past for the sake of nostalgia, but rather of how China’s economic development has paid a price in terms of lost identity and social communality.
May 1, 2020 | Duke University Press Books. $26.95. | Buy
The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City
by Juan Du
One of the most tried and true clichés of China’s economic boom is how Shenzhen — the glistening metropolis across the bay from Hong Kong — was an oyster fishing village just 40 years ago. Juan Du, an award-winning architect and urban planner, tells the full story of China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and how Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 experiment with market economics that gave birth to a digital megacity with a population of twenty million. By tracing the origins of the city’s success, Du also questions how much socialist central planning can take the credit, as opposed to Shenzhen’s original farmers-turned-capitalists.
Jan. 7, 2020 | Harvard University Press. $35. | Buy
In Case You Missed It
China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State
by Nick Holdstock
There are a number of forthcoming books about Xinjiang’s current crisis, but for those who want more context about China’s suppression of Uighur culture than the news gives, this title from five years ago is a good primer on the region’s politics. Journalist Nick Holdstock reports from the ground and doesn’t shy away from the question of radical terrorism that has long been Beijing’s excuse for its crackdowns.
July 12, 2015 | I.B. Tauris. $25. | Buy
Guest Recommendation
Recommended by Julian Gewirtz, author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China.
Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
by Leslie T. Chang
Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls is a classic: a deeply reported and deeply moving perspective on the lives of China’s many millions of migrant workers, especially the young women whose labor powered so much of China’s economic growth. The book draws unforgettable portraits of several women and widens its historical range by looking back on the migrations of Chang’s own family. Much has changed in China and the rest of the world since it was published in 2008, but as China’s migrant workers suffer the fresh crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic’s economic dislocation, it is a good time to revisit this important book.
Oct. 7, 2008 | Spiegel & Grau. $18. | Buy
Alec Ash is the books editor for The Wire. He is the author of Wish Lanterns. His work has also appeared in The Economist, BBC, SupChina, and Foreign Policy. @alecash
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