Can anyone recommend a good book of the history of Chinese socialism? I’m interested in a complete overview from Mao to Jinping but not sure which books are going to be more or less biased from a western point of view. Written by actual Chinese people would be best.
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The Unknown Cultural Revolution, by Dongping Han.
You need to start with the Century of Humiliation and the Opium Wars.
I recommend people’s history of ideas podcast.
It’s by a Maoist academic who tries to present an unbiased view of the history of China.
It goes into extreme detail, reviewing multiple primary accounts, as well as going into China’s relationship with the Soviet Union.
If I were you, I’d start with the People’s Republic of China page on Prolewiki. It isn’t going to be as in-depth as full books would be, but it will help you get your bearings. Then, I’d follow it up with Roland Boer’s Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners and Qiao Collective’s Socialism With Chinese Characteristics - Introductory Study Guide. All of them combined will give you a fairly comprehensive view of the PRC, at least from the outside.
Could go into more detail regarding the KMT and the communist split from the KMT in the Shanghai Massacre in 1927, the formation of Chinese Soviet Republic.
IMO, this period in time is foundational to China’s development in China as a socialist state.
But it’s pretty good overall.
To my knowledge there isn’t just one [English language] book that goes over the whole era from Mao to Xi, unfortunately.
Right now I’d reccomend Han Suyin who wrote autobiographical histories about chinese history from the late 1800s to 1976. They’re fairly good, although she’s not the most rigorous communist really, and I think understanding the 1911-1937 era is really important to understand the rest of 20th century china. [She does have a book on post 76 history but its very short, compared to her other works].
I think this book here [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-96-1881-1] might be what you’re looking for in modern history. Also it should be available on Sci-hub last time i check. But I haven’t read it myself yet so I’m not sure if it’s 100% what youre looking for
Edit: they are both written by Chinese people
I’ve haven’t finished it yet but I’ve been working my way through The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century by Carlos Martinez. It doesn’t satisfy your latter condition, but so far I’ve found it to be a good broad overview of the PRC and it goes on to argue that China remains socialist contrary to some Western misconceptions that China abandoned socialism with the Deng Xiaoping reforms. I guess I’d liken it to Blackshirts & Reds in that it’s an introduction to what Actually Existing (Chinese) Socialism is like and how it developed. It’s available on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/the-east-is-still-red-chinese-socialism-in-the-21st-century
I recommend it too. Read it last year. My main takeaway was in fact “read the Chinese Marxists more”. They are super based for the single reason of having put in practice Marxism for ~80 years. Let no Western Marxist ever weasel out of the fact there is almost zero practical governmental experience in Western socialist-communist cadres. “China bad” actually is “China knows”.
I second this. Carlos was at our party’s yearly festival, he’s a great guy. His book is great too. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of socialism in China.
