/lit/ - Literature

It doesn't cover the present but "Mao's China and After" by Maurice Meisner is probably the best single volume history of the modern PRC in English. Written from a left-wing but critical perspective.

"China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation" by David Shambaugh is a D.C. liberal / glowie book but it's actually a good one IMO because (1) it's written for other glowies and not a popular audience so there's less bullshit and (b) it deals seriously with the problems that were building up into the Hu Jintao era and goes into the CPC's research on what went wrong with the USSR. I'd say Schambaugh generally caught the trajectory of where things were going in a way most Western commenters didn't.

>>18488216
They use Schmitt mostly as a lens to study liberalism, since that's mostly what Schmitt was writing about. Schmitt's own take on liberalism (and its flaws) doesn't implicate the Chinese system by contrast either. See, most liberal writing tends to contrast it with "bad" authoritarian systems, but Schmitt doesn't care about that, so for Chinese political theorists, Schmitt is like a "safe" way for them to study Western political systems. Of course they see flaws in it.

>>18488291
A related issue for Western writers is that there's very little overarching / holistic takes on China. It became very compartmentalized so a lot of books just cover some very niche little issue. Or they're just blatant propaganda written by weaponized right-wing exiles.

https://youtu.be/qdyWnQ8FGpg?t=182