The Best China Books of 2023

Posted: December 21st, 2023 | No Comments »

My pesonal favourites, in no particular order….

Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China  – Scott Seligman (Potomac Books) – the Semyon Kaspé kidnapping and murder in 1930s Harbin has long deserved a detailed telling – White Russian fascists, collabos, crims, spooks and commies all come together in one of the great, often now overlooked, cosmopolitan cities of northern China. 

Shanghai Demimondaine From Sex Worker To Society Matron – Nick Hordern (Earnshaw Books) – occasionally a book comes along that breaks new ground. Who knew Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill had a real inspiration? More flesh on the bones of old Shanghai.

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future – Ian Johnson (Allen Lane) – History is invariably the first and last battleground for repressive regimes and the fight for control is real and nasty. Recovering those that seek to truthfully record their country’s past is important stuff.

Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution – Tania Branigan (WW Norton) – and so too with Red Memory, the most powerful and beautifully written of the recent and ongoing crop of Cultural Revolution books.

Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong – Vaudine England (Corsair) – cometh the hour, cometh the book – there could not be a better time for a new history of Hong Kong that gets us away from a litany of governors and officials and gives the city back to its multicultural roots.

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food – Fuchsia Dunlop (Particular Books) – a wonderfully meandering and charming study of Chinese cuisine thankfully (for us non-cooks) recipe free to make us feel bad about eating out all the time.

Bernadine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China – Susan Blumberg-Kasson (Post Hill Press) – the first Shanghai focussed biography of the super well-connected Bernadine Szold-Fritz, arts patron, salon host, social maven.

Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China – James Zimmerman (PublicAffairs) – like Semyon Kaspé we also needed a full-length study of the Lincheng Outrage and the sensational cast of characters involved.

The Race to the Future: The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century – Kassia St Clair (John Murray) – a highly readable account of one of the most bonkers events ever – the 1907 Peking-Paris Car Race – and additional meditations on the coming of the modern to China and the world in the form of the combustion engine, petrol, the telegraph etc.

Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning – Edward Weech (University of Manchester Press) – A great study (based largely on Manning’s correspondence) of one of England’s first China scholars. To say it was tricky to get to China and learn Chinese in the early 1800s would be the understatement of the century. 

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