History Archives | China Books Review

Shen Fu: Floating Life in a Fallen Realm

A Qing dynasty failson’s memoir of genteel poverty, parties and potting soil was rediscovered in a Suzhou book stall in 1874 and remains one of...

Inside the Camps

In 1991, a CBS investigation into China’s reform-through-labor camps shocked the world, exposing how prison-made goods were being exported to the U.S. Three decades later,...

Spies in Shanghai with Heather Salter

The author and historian discusses a dramatic Soviet espionage case in interwar Shanghai that rocked the international community and presaged the Cold War.

The Missing Pages

Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained...

W. Somerset Maugham: On a Chinese Screen

Over a century after it came out, Maugham's travelogue of his trip to China in 1919–20 reveals less about China itself, more about the foreigners...

China and the Mediterranean

The Middle Kingdom and the Middle Sea have had contact for millennia. Two books explore how China has viewed the Mediterranean, and the state of...

Frank Dikötter on the Rise of the Party

The historian talks about the early days of the Chinese Communist Party, and how they prevailed in 1949, in a China Books Review book talk...

Tiananmen in Fiction

After 37 years, the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown of 1989 have been preserved in novels as much as in memory. But does the Anglophone...

Xu Zhiyuan on Chinese Intellectuals

A journalist, author, bookstore owner and vlogger talks about the legacy of Liang Qichao, the changing nature of China’s intellectual scene, and whether studying history...

The Bomb is Back

The myth of China's nuclear restraint obscures the dangers of its rapidly expanding arsenal. A trio of recent books take us from the bomb’s origins...