Reddit reviews The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present
We found 3 Reddit comments about The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Penguin Global
The Penguin History of Modern China
is a great overview and very easy to read.
One of the best books on the subject I've read is
The Search for Modern China by. Jonathan Spence but it is very dry.
Today's books can't tell you much about national-level politics in the Mao era, I'm afraid. State- and national-level Party Archives are locked down tight and will almost certainly continue to be for the forseeable future. We have some scraps from regional archives which were guarded by archivists who like money and foreign liquor, etc, but they're just scraps. Nothing national, and nothing substantial.
Some authors have not let the lack of information stop them from drawing what the scholarly community would call "bold conclusions unsupported by evidence". One such book is Jung Chang's "Mao: The Unknown Story". Like many "Histories" of the Stalin period produced using defector testimony in the 1950s-70s, it has an at best extremely tenuous relationship with the facts of national-level Chinese politics.
A relatively cheap general history which does not much overstep the bounds of the evidence is Jonathan Fenby's History of Modern China (https://www.amazon.com/Penguin-History-Modern-China-Present/dp/0141975156). If you can afford it ($300 per volume), the Cambridge History of China are the gold-standard for generalist history.
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Again, if you want more specific direction then you're going to have to be more specific about what you want.
https://www.amazon.com/Penguin-History-Modern-China-Present/dp/0141975156/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494110571&sr=1-1&keywords=chinese+fenby