The Shortest History of China

I though it was okay. The first 150 pages are history before 1911. As a result, some parts were rushed a bit such as the Yuan Dynasty which I looked forward to reading the most but only got 10 pages.

The general pattern to the pre-1911 chapters was to introduce how the new Dynasty came in power, some fun facts about it and some facts about an emperor of interest, afterwards its mostly just social history such as looking at important inventions or relevant poets, women or philosophers. As a result, this book mostly uses political history to frame social history rather than political history and social history being co-partners.

This pattern breaks with the 1911 Revolution and feels very different to the rest of the book. Before reading this book I took a module on Chinese politics so I had some background knowledge. There were definitely instances where I was raising eyebrows in how she sometimes seemed to side with the CCP, at least to me. I doubt this book would be CCP approved but there's definitely some aspects that leave me suspicious.

Overall, this book is fine/okay/decent. But it's just too short to get any meaningful analysis and generally social history doesn't interest me currently so perhaps my bias impacted my appreciation of this book.