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Six books will give you a working understanding of China before you travel: two pieces of long-form reporting, one novel, one practical travel guide and two short primers on the country’s politics and its economy. None of them replaces a route-planning guidebook, and all of them explain the things a guidebook assumes you already know. Reading even one adds a layer to a trip to China that a map cannot.
Prices below are Amazon US prices as they stood in September 2026, converted at the rate of 11 September 2026, when $1 bought about €0.86. Book prices move constantly, so treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a quote.
6 of the top books about China
The 6 books below are ordered by how useful each one is before a first trip, starting with the reporting that explains the country and ending with the primers you can dip into on the flight.
1. Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler (2006)
Oracle Bones is the book to read first, because it explains China through individual people rather than through statistics. Peter Hessler follows a handful of ordinary lives, including former students of his from a teaching post in Sichuan, as they move to the coastal boom cities, alongside the story of Chen Mengjia, a scholar of the inscribed oracle bones who was persecuted in the late 1950s and took his own life.
The structure is the reason it works. Hessler moves between the ancient and the contemporary without either feeling like a history lesson, and you finish it understanding why the generation that built modern China behaves the way it does. Any Hessler book on China is worth your time; this is the one that made his name, and it is still in print in the Harper Perennial paperback at $4.56 to $19.99 (about €4 to €17).
2. Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China by Alec Ash (2016)
Wish Lanterns does for the generation born after 1980 what Oracle Bones does for the country as a whole. Alec Ash, a writer who was living in Beijing and is the same age as his subjects, follows six young Han Chinese from schooling through work, marriage and disappointment.
The six are deliberately varied: a military family’s son, the daughter of a Party official, an aspiring rock star, a rural migrant with a gaming habit, a hipster from the frozen northeast and a rebel from Xinjiang. What you get from it is the pressure that generation grew up under, and the gap between what their parents expected and what they want, which is useful context the first time a young Chinese person strikes up a conversation with you. It is in print from Picador at $3 to $24.84 (about €3 to €21) depending on format.
3. Travel to China: Everything You Need to Know Before You Go by Josh Summers (2019)
This is the practical one, and it answers the questions other guidebooks skip. Most China guides tell you where to go and what it costs; this one covers how to function once you land, including applying for the visa, getting around without Chinese, using local transport and staying online behind the firewall.
One honest caveat: the edition on sale dates from January 2019, and readers reviewing it since say the visa and mobile-payment chapters have aged badly, which is fair given how fast Alipay and WeChat Pay changed what a foreign visitor can and cannot do. The material on expectations, transport and language holds up. Check for a later edition before buying, and use the current official visa guidance alongside it. The Kindle edition runs around $14.92 (about €13).
4. China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham
This is the short political primer, built as a set of questions with direct answers, and it is the one to read on the plane. It works backwards from the legacies that shape the present: Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Two things to know about the edition. The one linked here is the third edition, published in March 2018, which means its treatment of China and the United States is framed around the Trump administration’s first term and its Hong Kong material stops before the 2019 protests and the national security law. Later editions exist, so check the edition before you buy. As a 228-page introduction to how the Communist Party governs and why, the third edition is still the clearest short book on the subject, from $6.77 (about €6).
Buy China in the 21st Century on Amazon
5. Jade King: History of a Chinese Muslim Family by Huo Da (1992 in English)
Jade King is the novel on this list and the hardest to get hold of. It follows three generations of a Hui Muslim family running a jade-carving business in Beijing, from the early Republican period through to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and it is one of the few widely read Chinese novels that puts Islam in China at the centre rather than the edge.
The narrative does not run in a straight line. It jumps between generations, and the characters use different names at different ages, so part of the pleasure is working out who you are reading about. The Hui detail is the reason to persist: the book shows concretely how Hui practice and Han practice differ, and it threads in Zheng He and the Butterfly Lovers along the way.
Be warned about the price. The English translation, published by Chinese Literature Press, is out of print, and only used copies are on sale, currently from about $78 up to $409 (roughly €67 to €352). Try a library first, and treat the Amazon listing as the fallback rather than the plan.
6. China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Arthur R. Kroeber
This is the economics primer, and it is written for people who are not economists. Arthur Kroeber founded the research firm Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing in 2002 and edits its China Economic Quarterly, and he explains how the machine actually works rather than arguing about whether it is about to collapse.
The parts worth the price are the ones Western coverage skips: how the state-owned enterprises function, how central and provincial governments pull against each other, how the agricultural economy changed over forty years, and how large the non-state sector really is. Note that the edition linked here is the first edition from March 2016, and a second edition was published in 2020, so check which one you are ordering. From $8.79 (about €8).
Which one should you start with?
Start with Oracle Bones if you want to understand the people, and with Travel to China if your trip is in the next two months and the visa is still unsorted. Those two cover the two different kinds of unpreparedness.
If you have time for a third, pick by interest: Wish Lanterns for the generation you will meet, China in the 21st Century for the politics behind the headlines, China’s Economy for how the growth actually happened, Jade King if you would rather arrive having read a novel than a briefing. Nobody grasps the full scope of Chinese history and politics before a first trip, and the point is not to; it is to have enough context that what you see makes sense.
Other interesting books about China
Read the six above and want to keep going? The 10 titles below are the next tier, and most libraries carry them.
- Country Driving by Peter Hessler, the third of his China books, built around a road trip along the Great Wall.
- Factory Girls: From Village to City in Changing China by Leslie T. Chang, on the young women who staffed the export boom.
- Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century by Orville Schell and John Delury.
- Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction.
- China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, ten essays by one of the country’s most widely translated novelists.
- When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques, the argument that China will not converge on a Western model.
- The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson.
- The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor.
- China’s War with Japan, 1937 to 1945 by Rana Mitter, published in the United States as Forgotten Ally.
- The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
The 4 tips below each affect what you end up buying, and three of them turn on the edition rather than the title.
- Check the edition before you buy either Oxford primer. China in the 21st Century is linked at its third edition from March 2018 and China’s Economy at its first from March 2016, and both have later editions. On books about current politics and economics, the edition is the whole point.
- Do not plan on buying Jade King. The English translation is out of print and used copies start around $78 and run to $409. A library request costs nothing.
- Treat the practical guide’s 2019 visa and payments chapters as historical. Chinese visa rules and the mobile-payment situation for foreign visitors have both changed since, and reviewers who travelled recently say so.
- Oracle Bones is the cheapest good option of the six. The Harper Perennial paperback starts at $4.56, which is less than a coffee at the airport you will read it in.
About the author. This reading list was written by Josh Summers, an author and entrepreneur who first moved to China in 2006, whose writing has been published by the BBC and Lonely Planet and who has appeared on CCTV. He continues to write about China travel at TravelChinaCheaper, and you can follow his work on Facebook and Pinterest. The page is maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the team covers China for independent travellers, including the books, tours and guides worth buying, and updates this page when editions and prices change.
