Can anyone recommend a good book of the history of Chinese socialism? I’m interested in a complete overview from Mao to Jinping but not sure which books are going to be more or less biased from a western point of view. Written by actual Chinese people would be best.
I’ve haven’t finished it yet but I’ve been working my way through The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century by Carlos Martinez. It doesn’t satisfy your latter condition, but so far I’ve found it to be a good broad overview of the PRC and it goes on to argue that China remains socialist contrary to some Western misconceptions that China abandoned socialism with the Deng Xiaoping reforms. I guess I’d liken it to Blackshirts & Reds in that it’s an introduction to what Actually Existing (Chinese) Socialism is like and how it developed. It’s available on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/the-east-is-still-red-chinese-socialism-in-the-21st-century
I second this. Carlos was at our party’s yearly festival, he’s a great guy. His book is great too. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of socialism in China.
I recommend it too. Read it last year. My main takeaway was in fact “read the Chinese Marxists more”. They are super based for the single reason of having put in practice Marxism for ~80 years. Let no Western Marxist ever weasel out of the fact there is almost zero practical governmental experience in Western socialist-communist cadres. “China bad” actually is “China knows”.