WThe Age of Openness: China Before Mao is a 2008 book by historian Frank Dikötter. It provides an account of the Republican era of Chinese history, spanning from the early 20th century to the Communist Party takeover in 1949. In it, Dikötter describes a period of unprecedented openness during which China was actively pursuing engagement with the world, as evidenced by what Dikötter described as a pluralistic intellectual environment, thriving open markets and economic growth, and expanded liberties and rule of law.
WAncestors: 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family is a book first published in 1988 written by the Hong Kong-based journalist Frank Ching, in which he tells the story of his ancestors in the Qin (秦) family, beginning with the 11th-century Song dynasty poet Qin Guan. He also relates many details about the history of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, the home of the Qin clan. The book has since been translated into other languages and published in France, the Netherlands, China, and Taiwan. An updated edition was published in 2009 by Rider, a part of Random House. Frank Ching is knowledgeable about Chinese history and has conducted extensive research.
WBad Elements is a book about contemporary Chinese history by Ian Buruma, published by Random House on November 20, 2001. The book's subtitle, Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, indicates the main focus of the book.
WBattle Hymn of China, by Agnes Smedley. Also published as China Correspondent. This book is a first-hand account of the Sino-Japanese War, from the viewpoint of a left-wing US woman who tried sharing the lives of ordinary Chinese.
WA Brief History of Chinese Fiction is a book written by Lu Xun as a survey of traditional Chinese fiction. It was first published in Chinese in 1930, translated into Japanese, Korean, German, and then into English in 1959 by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. It was the first survey of Chinese fiction to be published in China, and has been influential in shaping later scholarship.
WChina's Red Army Marches (1934) is a book of reportage by American radical journalist Agnes Smedley on the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi from 1928 to 1931, It describes a stage in the Chinese Communist Revolution after the break-up of the First United Front with the Chinese Nationalist Party and before the Long March of 1934-1935, a stage in which the party followed a radical land and class policy. The book deals with events up to 1931 and cannot anticipate the destruction of the Jiangxi Soviet and the subsequent Long March. It does have detailed accounts of the words and actions of Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong, whose name is transcribed as 'Mau Tse-tung'. It includes a full speech by Mao and some shorter remarks, perhaps the first time his words had appeared in English.
WChina's Wings: War, Intrigue, Romance and Adventure in the Middle Kingdom during the Golden Age of Flight is a 2012 book by Gregory Crouch, published by Bantam Books. The book discusses the history of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) and is focused on William Langhorne Bond as the central character. Harry Eagar of the Maui News stated that "is largely a biography of Bond." The book also describes Moon Fun Chin, a Chinese-American who rose from peasant roots, to become a lead CNAC pilot and finally to owning his own airline. Among other events, the book discusses the establishment of the first airline in China, the Second Sino-Japanese War, "The Hump" airlift, and the 1938 Kweilin incident. The book ends after the 1949 Communist takeover.
WChinese History: A New Manual, written by Endymion Wilkinson, is an encyclopedic guide to Sinology and Chinese history. The New Manual lists and describes published, excavated, artifactual, and archival sources from pre-history to the twenty-first century, as well as selected up-to-date scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. Detailed annotations evaluate reference and research tools and outline the 25 ancillary disciplines required for the study of Chinese history. Introductions to each of the 76 chapters and interspersed short essays give encyclopedic and often witty summaries of major topics for specialists and general readers, as well as directives on the uses of history and avoidance of error in thought and analysis. The New Manual received the Prix Stanislas Julien for 2014.
WCollaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China is a history book which investigates collaboration between the Chinese elites and Japanese, following the attack on the Chinese city of Shanghai in August 1937, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and during the subsequent military occupation of the Yangtze River Delta in China by Japan.
WThe Crippled Tree is a history and biography by Han Suyin. It covers the years 1885 to 1928, beginning with the life of her father, a Belgium-educated Chinese engineer of Hakka heritage, from a family of minor gentry in Sichuan. It describes how he met and married her mother, a Flemish Belgian, his return to China and her own birth and early life..A man's life begins with his ancestors and is continued in his descendants. My father's life, and after my father my own life, begins with the Family. To describe the Family I must go back into time past and tell how the progenitors came to the land where they settled. For they were Hakkas, the Guest People, wanderers within the continent that is China.
WDay of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall is a 2007 book by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua.
WDeath by a Thousand Cuts is a book by the historians Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue and scientific researcher Jérôme Bourgon which examines the use of slow slicing or lingchi, a form of torture and capital punishment practised in mid- and late-Imperial China from the tenth century until its abolition in 1905.
WDiscovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past is a book by Paul A. Cohen introducing the ideas behind American histories of China since 1840. It was published by Columbia University Press in 1984 and reprinted with a new preface in 2010.
WThe Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, written by John M. Hobson in 2004, is a book that argues against the historical theory of the rise of the West after 1492 as a "virgin birth", but rather as a product of Western interactions with more technically and socially advanced Eastern civilization.
WA Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History (1999) is a history of international relations written by journalist Patrick Tyler. The book details high level relations between the United States and China from the Nixon administration to the Clinton Administration. Primarily focused on the actions and motives of members of the president's cabinet and their counterparts in China, the book illustrates the large role personal politics and bureaucratic infighting had on the direction of China policy in the United States. Well received in the popular press, the book garnered mixed reviews in scholarly journals. However, the book won both the Lionel Gelber Prize and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2000.
WThe Historical Atlas of China is an 8-volume work published in Beijing between 1982 and 1988, edited by Tan Qixiang. It contains 304 maps and 70,000 placenames in total. The Concise Historical Atlas of China was published in 1991.
WImperial China: 900–1800 is a book of history written by F. W. Mote, Professor of Chinese History and Civilization, Emeritus, at Princeton University. The book was published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01212-7.
WMao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, is a 2010 book by professor and historian Frank Dikötter about the Great Famine of 1958–1962 in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong (1893–1976).
WQuelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement is a history book which investigates the conflict between the Chinese democracy movement in Beijing, China and the communist-ruled Chinese state's People's Liberation Army, culminating in the confrontation between the citizens of Beijing and the People's Liberation Army at Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
WRed Star Over China, a 1937 book by Edgar Snow, is an account of the Communist Party of China that was written when it was a guerrilla army and still obscure to Westerners.
WScience and Civilisation in China (1954–present) is an ongoing series of books about the history of science and technology in China published by Cambridge University Press. It was initiated and edited by British historian Joseph Needham (1900–1995). Needham was a well-respected scientist before undertaking this encyclopedia and was even responsible for the "S" in UNESCO. To date there have been seven volumes in twenty-seven books. The series was on the Modern Library Board's 100 Best Nonfiction books of the 20th century. Needham's work was the first of its kind to praise Chinese scientific contributions and provide their history and connection to global knowledge in contrast to eurocentric historiography.
WThe Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 is a book by University of Hong Kong historian Frank Dikötter. It is the second book in a trilogy about the history of China under Mao Zedong, based primarily on newly opened government archives, as well as on interviews and memoirs. Dikötter's first book in the series, Mao's Great Famine, covered the period of the Great Leap Forward, whereas The Tragedy of Liberation examines the establishment and first decade of the People's Republic of China.
WUnbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival is a narrative nonfiction book by author Dean King. It follows the stories of the 30 women who undertook the Long March as part of the Chinese Red Army in 1934. While only 10,000 of the original 86,000 soldiers survived the 4,000 mile trek, all 30 women survived. To research the project, King interviewed the last surviving woman who marched with the First Army, and delved into historical accounts previously untranslated into English. As with his previous book, the nonfiction national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara, he also traversed one of the most dangerous portions of the journey on foot, trekking in the Snowy Mountains and on the high-altitude bogs of western Sichuan Province. Unbound has been released in hardback, eBook, and audiobook.
WVermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World is a book by the Canadian historian Professor Timothy Brook, in which he explores the roots of world trade in the 17th century through six paintings by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer. It focuses especially on growing ties between Europe and the rest of the world and the impact of China on the world, during what Brook sees as an "age of innovation" and improvisation.
WThe Wars for Asia 1911–1949 by S. C. M. Paine is an award-winning book published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press. The work presents a view of three "nested wars" in early twentieth century East Asia, seen as distinct conflicts which, while carried on simultaneously, had their own welter of cause and dynamic: the Chinese Civil War 1911-1949; the Second Sino-Japanese War 1931-1945; the Second World War 1941-1945.
WWill the Boat Sink the Water?:The Life of China's Peasants, is a 2006 non-fiction book authored by husband and wife team Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. It is the English translation of Zhongguo Nongmin Diaocha, published in Chinese in 2004.