Chen Village Under Mao and Deng

Rating:
Summary: China in a nutshell
Review: It's remarkable that this book is not better known. So often, even good scholarship on Chinese social, political, and economic policy is described on a grand, macro scale.

Chen Village shows how CCP policies since 1949 transformed the lives of one village's inhabitants, making those policies infinitely more understandable. It's one thing to study the Cultural Revolution, for example, but to see how it shaped and even destroyed the social and community fabric of one group of people is more revealing than any other approach I have seen. Chen village does it with clear writing and expert scholarship, and I can't recommend it enough to specialist or generalist alike.

Rating:
Summary: The goods
Review: Rather amazed to find this book unreviewed. There are many grand overviews of Chinese history, but this is one of the few books that takes you to the grassroots where the massive changes in Chinese society have been occurring. It also one of the few books written by China experts that avoids forcing the authors' views down the reader's throat. A unique piece of scholarship.