So I came across this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/18/five-of-the-best-books-to-understand-modern-china and the headline piqued my interest but the books all seem of a rather particular slant. I am a fan of reading from a series of broad perspectives when trying to understand huge things and it's obviously a bit farcial to suppose the lives of 1.4 billion people are gripped by terror and pain in a country that somehow still chugs along.
Since of everywhere on lemmy I think I'm likely to get some pretty interesting recommendations here, if we can do it without igniting the china good/bad flame war what books would you recommend to give insight into "understanding modern china". That is phenomenally broad and vague so I'm keen to see anything from histories to fiction.
edit: thank you all for your opinions, I will endeavour to check most of them out and communicate my thoughts on them later. I'm especially interested in what the lives of boring arse people are like in different sectors of society (e.g. migrant underclass, party bureaucrate, officer worker, house wife, farmer etc) , if anything like that comes to mind.
Great pain can exist among normalcy, when I visited the usa as a kid something that distressed me was that it was possible to walk a few streets and go from insane luxury to seeing people sleep over vents to avoid dying in the cold.
But to "understand modern usa" you have to recognise that these are extremes and a lot of people are just living their lives, with a mix of good and bad. Even people who might be subject to government tyranny can, in another phase of life, see that as some aspect of the past they disliked but which didn't turn them against the whole project.
In my life my government made me get steralised and "inspected" to change my ID card, but also I have a house because my dad had a good government job with a pension that got blown up to insane levels because of privatisation near the end of his career, I've been saved from death by doctors for free a few times, I have access to safe food and water. Things are getting worse and were always very unequal which is why I'm a watermelon but even so life is complicated and you can't judge how my country works throughthrough any one of these simple stories.