Books

There are many out there and it's a challenge for me to recommend a specific order and set because I would want to think about tailoring it for a given person or audience. China is a large and multicultural country, the target of immense negative propaganda, and has an oft-ignored history of being colonized that is an essential part of the story. In another comment I recommended Wemheuer as a competent liberal historian, but that was only for the topic of famine when Mao was chairman, a counterpoint to Dikötter. Reading Wemheuer alone will give an incomplete picture and will be embedded with the author's capitalistic and Western biases, so I then recommended reading Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts as a contextualizing piece and an introduction to a more appropriate historical, economic, and ecological framing of famine in China and other colonized and imperialized countries. But really there is a ton to read and I don't know which parts you would be most interested in. If you give me some direction I can recommend some works.