One Westerner’s special access to China’s top politicians is the basis for an important new book

The Chinese Communist Party has from time to time relied on foreigners to explain and characterize their leaders to the outside world. Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China gave an account of Mao’s early and middle years. Agnes Smedley’s biography of General Zhu De, The Great Road, profiled the Red Army founder’s life and times. Now, the seemingly impossible task of explaining the collective and individual psychology of the leaders running the world’s largest one-party state has been taken on by American Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn in a new book called How China’s Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China’s Reforms and What This Means for the Future.

Make no mistake; this is an important book which deserves a wide audience. It is important because it is the first attempt by a foreigner to explain the thinking of China’s current leadership across a range of subjects (the book runs to well over 500 pages), and because Kuhn’s access to that leadership is unprecedented – and entirely unique - for any Westerner outside of diplomatic circles.

Take a ride with Peter Hessler's Country Driving

Peter Hessler has built a deserved reputation as perhaps the best writer about contemporary China, and this fascinating read is the fruit of his long experience here and ability to glean insight from the smallest of interactions. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, his third book after River Town and Oracle Bones, has three distinct sections. In the first he embarks alone on a series of drives, following the path of the Great Wall – or rather, as he is at pains to point out, the many different walls that make it up. The second section covers six years in which he spends time in Sancha, a village once remote but now gradually being encroached upon by Beijing. And in the most traditionally journalistic section, he follows developments over two years in Lishui, one of the many sudden boomtowns of Zhejiang Province, focusing on one factory in particular.

Su Tong’s bleak new novel is a triumph

It’s hard to know what to make of Chinese author Su Tong’s memorable and incredibly readable disturbing new novel, winner of the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. What does one draw from a novel where violence and posturing are never tempered by rational consideration, where characters elicit less and less sympathy? A novel that seems intent on rubbing the reader’s nose in the muck of physical degradation and moral imbecility?

Ku Wenxuan is celebrated as the orphaned son of a martyred revolutionary heroine, based on the fish-shaped birthmark on his backside. However, when he is declared a fraud, he and his son Ku Dongliang find themselves banished to the barges working the river. Ku Dongliang, cruelly nicknamed Kong Pi (‘empty fart’), yearns to somehow prove his father’s bloodline is true.

Xinran’s new book is her most personal yet

Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, Xinran’s sixth and latest book, is the one she found most painful to write. So painful, in fact, that the London-based Chinese author put it off for over 20 years, although she has spent that long collecting material for it. The book, published this month by Random House, is made up of stories of Chinese mothers who gave up their daughters for adoption, or were forced to abandon them outside hospitals or orphanages. Xinran gives a voice to these ordinary women just as empathically as she did with her breakthrough first book, 2002’s The Good Woman of China, a memoir based on stories she heard while hosting a nightly radio show in Beijing back in the 80s when she was one of China’s top broadcast journalists.

Another week, another book from the prolific Shanghai indie publisher Earnshaw Books. This time: Tales of Old Hong Kong, written and edited by Earnshaw Books' head staffer, Derek Sandhaus, who also wrote Tales of Old Beijing, the second in the 'Tales' series after Shanghai.

The series does what every Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Time Out guidebook doesn't – it finds that ineffable allure of a place, which is invariably shrouded in local history, which, in the case of Hong Kong, is miles deep. Did you know, for instance, that mischievous British journalists at The Star newspaper created an epidemic in the 1960s by reporting on the real psychological disorder Koro, which was said to cause the victim to believe his penis was shriveling up and disappearing?