University of North Carolina historian Michelle T. King’s wonderfully engaging book Chop Fry Watch Learn focuses on celebrated television chef Fu Pei-mei, the closest counterpart Taiwan has ever had to Julia Child. This is King’s second book, her first being a careful scholarly study, Between Birth and Death (2014), that explored the history of infanticide in 19th-century China. This new title not only deals with a different topic but covers more ground geographically (northeast China and the U.S. as well as Taiwan), moves between genres (oral history, memoir, biography), and crucially for the prize criteria was created with the goal of enlightening not just specialists but also general readers. She accomplishes that goal with élan, and provides insight into everything from the history of gender in Taiwan to what cooking has meant to two generations of her own family.

— Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The Chinese Computer is a technology detective story, written with verve and subtle humor. Most people who write in Chinese characters today no longer use brushes or pens; they use QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney’s spirited narrative, filled with vivid personalities, explains how this is possible, through a more complicated version of autocomplete software that gives the writer a choice among Chinese-character equivalents of a spelled-out Mandarin term. This is a sequel to his equally fascinating book, The Chinese Typewriter (2018). The story reaches back to the late 19th century problem of how to send Chinese characters by telegraph, through to the near future when computers will instantly offer whole phrases in autocomplete. It is already faster to compose text in Chinese characters than in an alphabetic language — a startling reversal of the longstanding belief that the Chinese written language could not survive in the modern age.

— Andrew J. Nathan

How does a state like China’s see? This is the question at the heart of The Sentinel State. While much of the public attention on state surveillance has been trained on the role of new technologies, Minxin Pei cuts through the hype to focus on a more mundane yet pervasive technique: the use of people, from law enforcement professionals to casual informants. A professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, Pei was among the first cohort of Chinese students to study abroad after the Cultural Revolution, and has long been a keen observer of politics in his birth country. Rigorously researched and carefully argued, The Sentinel State traces the evolution of the Chinese state surveillance apparatus since the Mao years, examines its buildup post-Tiananmen, and compares the case in China with those in other autocracies. At a time when China is routinely exoticized in the West, and democratic freedoms are in peril globally, The Sentinel State is an urgent and important intervention.

— Yangyang Cheng

A family memoir and a reporter’s story, brilliantly combined in one compelling volume. Edward Wong served as The New York Times Beijing bureau chief, and brings a keen reporter’s eye as well as an appreciation of Chinese history, as it affected the lives of his family. His father’s story encompasses the Wong family’s early migration to Hong Kong, a return to China as a patriotic volunteer for the war in Korea, then long years of political discrimination. His uncle migrated to the U.S., a decision that meant his father, the soldier, was assigned to the army in distant Xinjiang, before he eventually emigrated to the U.S. Wong’s account is enlivened and informed by Wong’s father’s lived experience of the suspicion that empires can have about territories far from the center of power. As Wong puts it, his father had gone to the edge of empire for the Party, but still they didn’t trust him.

— Isabel Hilton

Private Revolutions tells the story of contemporary China through intimate and up-to-the moment portraits of four Chinese women. It is a considerable achievement that Yuan Yang managed to report these stories through Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2013 and the Covid pandemic — an exceptionally challenging period in China for journalists, and of course for the protagonists of this book. After clawing their way out the countryside, they crash into the reality of Chinese inequality. A thriving education company falls victim to the crackdown on private education; a labor activist goes into hiding as her friends disappear. Yuan Yang writes with grace and empathy in this compelling account of what we might call the age of thwarted ambition. The book stands as a sobering antidote to the rags-to-riches stories that China once produced in such abundance. The much-vaunted Chinese dream may not be dead, but it is so much more elusive to achieve. 

— Barbara Demick