Here are 100 books that One Child fans have personally recommended if you like
One Child.
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I grew up in China during the years of the one-child policy. In 1989 I joined millions of people in the pro-democracy protests. Our hope and joy were crushed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A year later, I left China and came to the States. I wanted to write a story about the students’ fight but create a more meaningful arc. It took me twenty years of soul searching to find my story. At the heart of my novel Living Treasures is a metaphor for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My heroine continues the fight by doing grassroots work and helping rural women, who are victimized by the one-child policy.
The 27 interviews in The Corpse Walkerare selected from the 60 interviews in Liao Yiwu’s book, originally titled Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society in Chinese. Liao gives voices to social outcasts: a human trafficker, corpse walkers, a leper, a peasant emperor, an abbot, a mortician, a Tiananmen father, artists and shamans, crooks, even cannibals. Ironically, every one of them speaks more honestly than Chinese official media, which causes the book to be banned in mainland China. These are the stories of unsung heroes and epic tragedies, but to me, most importantly, the work that people performed, the families they raised, many lost to famines, political purges, and massacres, and the persecutors they forgave, the conscience they wrestled with, their past, present, and future—these are the remarkable stories of ordinary Chinese people from 1949 to present in their raw, unvarnished form.
The Corpse Walker introduces us to regular men and women at the bottom of Chinese society, most of whom have been battered by life but have managed to retain their dignity: a professional mourner, a human trafficker, a public toilet manager, a leper, a grave robber, and a Falung Gong practitioner, among others. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, Liao Yiwu managed to get his subjects to talk openly and sometimes hilariously about their lives, desires, and vulnerabilities, creating a book that is an instance par excellence of what was once upon a time called “The New Journalism.”…
I grew up in China during the years of the one-child policy. In 1989 I joined millions of people in the pro-democracy protests. Our hope and joy were crushed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A year later, I left China and came to the States. I wanted to write a story about the students’ fight but create a more meaningful arc. It took me twenty years of soul searching to find my story. At the heart of my novel Living Treasures is a metaphor for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My heroine continues the fight by doing grassroots work and helping rural women, who are victimized by the one-child policy.
As a writer who works under China’s censorship, Mo Yan spins literary gold in his novel Frogby blending high farce with social commentary. Narrator Tadpole’s aunt Gugu, a feisty woman with extraordinary gifts, evolves from a legendary midwife to a demonic one-child policy enforcer, then becomes an incorrigible go-between for surrogate and intentional parents. Readers see how China and rural Gaomi townships have changed, almost beyond description, from Maoist times to the current hyper-capitalistic phase. Much of the story is funny, brutal, yet firmly grounded, as people endure, and many perish during a half-century of social and political turmoil.
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
From the Nobel-prize winning author of Red Sorghum and one China's most revered writers, a novel exploring the One-Child Policy
Before the Cultural Revolution, Gugu, narrator Tadpole's feisty aunt, is a respected midwife in her rural community. She combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic, and of an unimpeachable political background.
After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family…
I grew up in China during the years of the one-child policy. In 1989 I joined millions of people in the pro-democracy protests. Our hope and joy were crushed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A year later, I left China and came to the States. I wanted to write a story about the students’ fight but create a more meaningful arc. It took me twenty years of soul searching to find my story. At the heart of my novel Living Treasures is a metaphor for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My heroine continues the fight by doing grassroots work and helping rural women, who are victimized by the one-child policy.
Ma Jian, a preeminent dissident writer, returned to Beijing in 1989 and supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square. In his novel Beijing Coma, protagonist Dai Wei, a molecular biology Ph.D. student, was struck by a soldier’s bullet and fell into a deep coma. Dai Wei has lain in bed for over a decade, like a vegetable, but with acute hearing and sense of smell, as he relieves his past—his childhood and student life, and the heady days of the democracy movement—while all around him China continues to change. Beijing Coma examines the confusion and contradictions of the Tiananmen Square protests and evokes the horrors of an oppressive regime in minute, gruesome detail. I admired the story’s stark beauty and Ma Jian’s unflinching gaze.
Dai Wei has been unconscious for almost a decade. A medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he was struck by a soldier's bullet and fell into a deep coma. As soon as the hospital authorities discovered that he had been an activist, his mother was forced to take him home. She allowed pharmacists access to his body and sold his urine and his left kidney to fund special treatment from Master Yao, a member of the outlawed Falun Gong sect. But during a government crackdown, the Master was arrested, and Dai Wai's mother—who had…
I grew up in China during the years of the one-child policy. In 1989 I joined millions of people in the pro-democracy protests. Our hope and joy were crushed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A year later, I left China and came to the States. I wanted to write a story about the students’ fight but create a more meaningful arc. It took me twenty years of soul searching to find my story. At the heart of my novel Living Treasures is a metaphor for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. My heroine continues the fight by doing grassroots work and helping rural women, who are victimized by the one-child policy.
Philip J. Cunningham joined his Chinese friends from May 3 to June 4 in 1989, as a supporter, journalist, and witness in the Tiananmen Square protests. Tiananmen Moon chronicles the protests, hunger strike, students’ leadership, their internal friction, and Cunningham’s meeting with Chai Ling before the massacre. From an American bystander’s perspective, Cunningham voices his concerns about the peer pressure among students, and a few self-claimed radical leaders using the same rhetoric and tactic as the regime to seize power and escalate conflicts. To this day, the Tiananmen Square protests are obliterated by the propaganda machine in mainland China. Tiananmen Moon is a remarkable testament capturing the plaintive and lyrical beauty of a dream that continues to haunt China today.
The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this book is now available.
This compelling book provides a vivid firsthand account of the student demonstrations and massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Uniquely placed as a Western observer drawn into active participation through Chinese friends in the uprising, Philip J Cunningham offers a remarkable day-by-day account of Beijing students desperately trying to secure the most coveted political real estate in China in the face of ever more daunting government countermoves. Tiananmen Moon takes the reader into the thick of the 1989 protests while also following the parallel response of an unprepared but resourceful…
Throughout my teen years, I heard the narrative that mothers are powerless doormats who should be doing something better with their lives. But in time, I realized motherhood is a position of profound power. And I knew that the prevailing messaging on motherhood needed to change! As an author, speaker, and policy advisor for an NGO at the United Nations, I have spent the past 10 years inspiring women to embrace their potential—including their irreplaceable roles as mothers. I have a degree in English, but my finest education came from raising my four college-age daughters and my one young son. Mothers are miraculous!
This book ripped my heart to pieces and somehow put it back together better than it was before. It profoundly changed my outlook on motherhood and freedom and showed me how those two things are intimately connected.
This true story of one woman, her husband, and their unthinkable life in China is riveting, chilling, hopeful, and tender. I cried, and then I cried some more. Copies of this book can be difficult to find; I’m so glad I found one.
Social scientist and China expert Mosher relates the story of Chi An, a former population-control worker in China, whose own second pregnancy became the catalyst for her fight to stay in the U.S. "A searing and candid look at a place where the state brutally intrudes into the most intimate parts of a woman's life."--Kirkus Reviews.
I am a professor emerita of Anthropology at Berkeley. I have written books on Muslim women in runaway factories; the modern Chinese diaspora; Cambodian refugees in the US; neoliberal Asian states; and Singapore's biomedical hub. I also write on contemporary Chinese art. We live in worlds interwoven by assemblages of technology, politics, and culture. Each situation is crystallized by the shifting interactions of global forces and local elements. Given our interlocking, interdependent realities, a sustainable future depends on our appreciation of cultural differences and support of transnational cooperation. For many people, China today is a formidable challenge, but learning about its peoples' struggles and desires is a beginning toward recognizing their humanity.
China's gargantuan size has haunted its efforts to become a modern nation. Anthropologist Greenhalgh argues that in the late 1970s, Chinese rocket scientists, influenced by doomsday policymakers in the West, convinced the Chinese government to impose a one-child family planning program. The draconian enforcement of the one-child policy subjected millions of women to intimate corporeal surveillance that resulted in uncounted numbers of forced abortions, hidden births, and suffering for the masses. By 2016, when the two children policy was instituted, family planning contributed to an unbalanced gender ratio, delayed marriages, and a possibly irreversible population decline. Social engineering is a modus operandi of the Chinese state, and ironically, its most famous strategy threatens the nation's sustainability as a world industrial power.
China's one-child rule is unassailably one of the most controversial social policies of all time. In the first book of its kind, Susan Greenhalgh draws on twenty years of research into China's population politics to explain how the leaders of a nation of one billion decided to limit all couples to one child. Focusing on the historic period 1978-80, when China was just reentering the global capitalist system after decades of self-imposed isolation, Greenhalgh documents the extraordinary manner in which a handful of leading aerospace engineers hijacked the population policymaking process and formulated a strategy that treated people like missiles.…
I love wordless books immoderately, and I also love books that have meta, surreal, or magical realism elements. This list combines these two features! I was personally so happy that The Red Book was described in a review as “a wordless mind trip for tots,” and I think all the books on this list would perfectly fit that description (and much, much more!) too.
This is such a beautiful book to me. In it, a lost child from a crowded urban environment encounters a mythic deer who takes her on a journey filled with wonders. I don’t know how, but the author manages to convey such believable tenderness and deep connection between this large wild animal and the small child. The art is made with a soft pencil style that is a perfect match for the atmospheric, dreamy, and magical content.
Hailed by Entertainment Weekly and the Wall Street Journal as a best book of the year, this gorgeous and imaginative story—part picture book, part graphic novel—is utterly transporting and original. USA Today declared it “a compelling and melancholy debut from an important new talent" as well as "an expansive and ageless book full of wonder, sadness, and wild bursts of imagination.” And like Shaun Tan's The Arrival and Raymond Briggs's The Snowman, it is quickly becoming a modern classic.
A little girl—lost and alone—follows a mysterious stag deep into the woods, and, like…
I have been researching and teaching about moral issues for more than a decade. How people procreate and how often they procreate has a huge impact on both the children born and others who interact with them. Yet even in academic philosophy – a discipline that often questions the appropriateness of ordinary behavior – the moral scrutiny of having children has been lacking. As I observed the population continue to rise and the circumstances of future people become more precarious, I thought the ethics of procreation needed deeper investigation. I hope my recent work on this topic will help others think more carefully about the moral complexities of having and raising children.
Conly starts by examining the problems tied to human population size and raises a powerful moral challenge to the notion that we have the right to procreate as much as we want.
In fact, she leans heavily toward answering the question in her book’s title with a “no” and, within certain parameters, would support a global one-child policy.
While I ultimately defend a different position than Conly’s on this issue, her book had a huge influence on my work on overpopulation, and this work is one of the most accessible and provocative presentations of the environmental challenge to procreative liberty.
Sarah Conly argues that we do not have the right to have more than one child. If recent increases in global population continue, we will reduce the welfare of future generations to unacceptable levels. We do not have a right to impose on others in this way. While voluntary efforts to restrain population growth are preferable and may be enough, government regulations against having more than one child can be justified if they are necessary. Of course, government regulations have to be consistent with rights that we do hold, but Conly argues that since we do not have a right…
I’ve loved reading alternative visions of Britain since I read a Strontium Dog saga in ‘2000AD’ as a boy. What was science fiction then has become closer to reality now. The idea of one event, such as a meteor shower in Triffids or a virus in ‘Grass,’ causing havoc worldwide is gripping. I prefer the British stories because they are closer to home. Many of these were written close to the Second World War, and their authors describe deprivation in unflinching detail. Recent political events have turned my mind to how human actions can cause dystopian futures, as in Orwell’s 1984.
This is no cosy dystopia. I was shocked by the violence and ruthlessness of the protagonists. This is a prescient novel, written 64 years before COVID-19, about a virus that emerges from China and ravages the world. Instead of infecting humans, the virus kills all grass. Brutal decisions are made, and any sense of law and order disappears. We were a gnat’s whisker from this happening in the UK, and I was impressed with Priest’s vision. The book cracks along at a good pace, too.
A thought experiment in future-shock survivalism' Robert MacFarlane
'Gripping ... of all science fiction's apocalypses, this is one of the most haunting' Financial Times
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
A post-apocalyptic vision of the world pushed to the brink by famine, John Christopher's science fiction masterpiece The Death of Grass includes an introduction by Robert MacFarlane in Penguin Modern Classics.
At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns…
I’ve spent all of my adult life writing about American foreign policy, especially Chinese-American relations. My America’s Response to China, the standard text on the subject, has gone through 6 editions. I served as a line officer in the Pacific Fleet, lived in Taipei and Beijing. I also served as chairman of the State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation and have been a consultant on Chinese affairs to various government organizations. And I cook the best mapo toufu outside of Sichuan. (where I negotiated the Michigan-Sichuan sister-state relationship in 1982). It was probably my love of Chinese food that accounts for most of the above.
I’ve known Liz since she was a graduate student and have been delighted to see her rise to become one of the leading authorities on the inside workings of the Chinese state.
After years as the Council on Foreign Relations’ China expert, she left for the Hoover Institute for a quieter atmosphere for her research and writing, but she was drafted to serve as China adviser to Gina Raimondo, Biden’s secretary of commerce. There’s no better book on Xi’s China today.
In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi, himself, the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life, and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power, seeking to reclaim its past glory and…
