China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom

Suggestions for Further Reading

309 Suggestions for Further Reading In addition to the books and articles cited in the preceding section, an excellent resource for the general reader seeking to understand the broad sweep of modern Chinese history, society, and politics is Jonathan Spence’s magisterial The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution (New York: Viking, 1981). For a fascinating firsthand account of one family’s efforts to cope with the turmoil and tragedy of the Chinese revolution and its tumultuous Maoist aftermath, see Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). A sensible, well-balanced overview of Communism’s impact on modern China is provided by Jonathan Fenby, Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power (New York: Harper-Collins, 2008). A number of excellent biographies of Mao Zedong are currently available. The most riveting of these is a memoir covering the last two decades of Mao’s life, written by his personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1996). As indicated in chapter 12, I am rather skeptical of the objectivity of the more recent and deeply critical biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (London: Random House, 2005). Two engrossing personal memoirs of the madness that gripped China during the Cultural Revolution are Gao Yuan, Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); and Carolyn Wakeman and Yue Daiyun, To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987). Orville Schell’s Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) vividly captures 310 suggestions for further reading both the manic excitement and creeping disillusionment that marked the first decade of reform in post-Mao China. The complex, enigmatic modern history of Tibet is made readily accessible in Patrick French’s lively narrative, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Finally, five recent books by China-based journalists provide deep insight into the struggles of ordinary Chinese attempting to deal with a rapidly changing socioeconomic and political environment in post-reform China: Seth Faison, South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); Ian Johnson, Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004); John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of New China (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); and Philip Pan, Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008); and Rob Gifford, China Road (New York: Random House, 2007). For those interested in more intensive scholarly analyses of the dynamics of Chinese society and politics under Communism, I also recommend the following works (in alphabetical order): Esherick, Joseph W., Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder, eds. 2006. China’s Cultural Revolution as History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Based on newly available research materials, this superb collection of essays on the dynamics of Mao’s Last Revolution sheds fresh light on the traumatic imprint of the Cultural Revolution on the lives of ordinary Chinese. Fewsmith, Joseph. 2008. China since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition. 2nd ed. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. A lucid analysis of the complex economic and political crosscurrents of post-Tiananmen China. The reign of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao is examined against a backdrop marked by the erosion of Communist ideology and the regime’s efforts to adapt to the constraints of modernization and globalization. Friedman, Edward, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden. 1991. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2005. Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Based on collaborative fieldwork in a North China village over a span of two decades, these two volumes present a vivid, peasant’s-eye view of Communism ’s impact on the Chinese countryside, from the onset of land reform, agricultural collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s to suggestions for further reading 311 the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Goldman, Merle. 2005. From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A sensitive analysis of the uphill struggle faced by China’s intellectuals in their...