Here is (for whoever may be interested) the list of books on China that I have read in the past 5-6 years;
in no particular order, with my assessments: 5 stars is the best, 2 the worst.
Books I reviewed on my blog are noted with ++.
John Palmer, The death of Mao, Faber & Faber, 2012 **
Jonathan Fenby, Will China dominate the 21st century, Polity, 2014 ***
Quan Yanchi, Mao: Man, not God ***
Jacques Gernet, Daily life in China on the Eve of Mongol Invasion 1250-76, Stanford UP, 1962. ****
++Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century, Verso, 2007. *****
Minxin Pei, China’s crony capitalism, Harvard UP, 2016. ****
Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, Harvard UP, 2006. ***
++Martin Jacques, When China rules the world, Penguin, 2012. *****
Cheng Li, Chinese politics in the Xi Jinping era, Brookings, 2016. ***
++Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China, Harvard 2017. ****
Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the state, Simon and Schuster, 2009. ****
++Wang fan-hsi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, Columbia UP, 1991. *****
++Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, Princeton UP, 2000. *****