Category / Books

by Andrew

The best books I read in 2025

Here are the most memorable of the books I read this year, listed in roughly the order I read them. It seems like reading 19th century authors was a theme in the culture this year, and I ended up participating in this trend without really planning to: Twain, Stevenson, Whitman were some of my highlights.

Fiction

  • Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest. I re-read all of Hammett’s novels this year, and this, his first, held up the best. The later and better-known books seem more and more artifacts of their time: The Maltese Falcon is implausible and its plot famously incomprehensible; The Thin Man‘s clever repartee feels empty. Red Harvest has both a harsh portrait of the breakdown of state capacity and the effects of social violence (the setting is based on Butte, Montana) and a truly harrowing detective plot (the narrator suspects himself).
  • Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I read this in tandem with Percival Everett’s James, which re-narrates the same events from a different perspective. Despite all the accolades for James, Twain’s original is, still, the better book. What is remarkable is how much the flaws and virtues of the two novels mirror each other: both start strong, with an immediately captivating narrative voice, and then fall apart at the end, as the characters perform unrealistic actions in service of some authorial conceit.
  • Samantha Harvey, Orbital. One of the most perfectly crafted pieces of prose I’ve ever read; short, basically plotless, almost unbearably intense. It is hard to call the book anything other than science fiction, since it is literally fiction about science, though it was mostly ignored by the genre community. Yet it succeeds more in evoking what used to be called the “sense of wonder” than most stuff in the genre does these days. Going to space is awesome.
  • Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. A hard-boiled mystery set in an alternative 1920s America, by turns familiar and strange. Spufford is frank that he is imagining a utopia in which the Native American population was not erased by disease and thus could negotiate a political settlement with the European colonizers. But what gives the book its grit and charm is how messy and non-utopian his imagined mixed society is: prejudice, violence, and corruption persist.
  • Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety. How many novels are there that take as their main subject adult friendship? Stegner’s last, great work is an understated, closely observed portrait of the relationship between two couples. There are no affairs, and only the ordinary dramas of work and family. This year I also re-read his The Big Rock Candy Mountain, written more than 40 years earlier, which is an amazing but very different book: a more ambitious portrait of the character of America, or at least of one very American character.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, The Ebb-Tide. Stevenson’s last published novel is not particularly famous but deserves to be better known. It came out in 1894, and the connecting line of inspiration and influence to Joseph Conrad, whose first book came out in 1895, is clear. There’s a South Pacific setting, a focus on interior psychology, a concern with colonialism. Scott Sumner thinks it might be Stevenson’s best novel.

Nonfiction

  • Robert Louis Stevenson,  The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays. Stevenson is best known as a novelist, but I think I prefer his nonfiction: he had an interesting life and was interested in lots of things, and the sentences are marvelous and daring. All of the essays are out of copyright and readily available online, but this is a good curated selection that is easier to manage. I picked out some of my favorite excerpts here.
  • Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot. Nominally a biography of Patrice Lumumba, this book is actually a gripping, blow-by-blow account of how the Congo stumbled to independence from Belgian rule. The events are tragic, not just for Lumumba but for the people of the Congo, who never really had a chance at being governed well. It’s a thematic and chronological sequel to Adam Hochschild’s earlier King Leopold’s Ghost, which documented the horrific excesses of Belgium’s colonial rule.
  • Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology. Out of all the reading on India I did this year to prepare for my first visit, this was my favorite: compact, punchy, and argumentative, packed with erudition and information. I also enjoyed Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, an investigation into the long-running argument over the causes of World War I through biographical sketches of historians. Not many writers have this kind of range.
  • Walt Whitman, Specimen Days. In his introduction, Whitman called this collection of his diaries “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” and it may still qualify for that distinction even 143 years after its publication. There is a lot of material from his visits to military hospitals during the Civil War; many long, quiet spells observing nature in southern New Jersey, as well as a journey out West. Tying them all together is Whitman’s love for the American landscape and people, and his unique voice, so fresh he still seems like a contemporary.
  • Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success. One of the lessons I learned as a young student of anthropology is that culture is both subjective and objective: it exists in our heads, but also outside of our heads as a reality that shapes us. Henrich’s book is a remarkable effort to synthesize some of the core insights of anthropology with evolution and psychology (culture, or the “collective brain,” is the secret to humanity’s success). Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
  • Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea. The last voyage of Captain James Cook is one of the more interesting and unique events in history: he was the first European to find the Hawaiian Islands and talk to the people there, and later, returning to the islands after mapping the coast of Alaska, was killed by them. The causes and meaning of those events have been debated ever since, and Sides delivers a careful, sympathetic and engaging account of the entirety of Cook’s final expedition.
  • Hu Anyan, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (translated by Jack Hargreaves). Perhaps the best of the various gig-worker memoirs published in recent years. It’s less of a sociological document and more of a personal one, a story of how someone not well served by China’s educational system or job market gradually found a voice as a writer. (It’s interesting that none of the writers he mentions as inspiration are Chinese.)

Previous lists:

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The best books I read in 2025
by Andrew

Exams are everything in China

The first people you meet in life are your parents. That simple fact makes the family the foundational institution of society: learning how to be a person, and what other people are like, happens first in the family. After that, the next social institution most people encounter, in modern societies anyway, is usually schooling and education. Schools transmit social values to new generations, and help determine the specific social roles that the members of the new generations will occupy. Education is always a window onto society, and the new book The Highest Exam: How The Gaokao Shapes China, by the economists Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, is very illuminating on how China’s educational system has mattered for both social and economic outcomes, and on just why education is so important to so many Chinese families.

More profoundly than that, though, it makes a case for how one specific set of educational practices–the college-admissions exam known as the gaokao–serves as a fundamental structuring institution of contemporary Chinese society. Scores on the gaokao (or more precisely, the relative ranking of those scores) are the sole determinant of which students get admitted to which universities. Because college admissions are determined by gaokao scores–and nothing else, not recommendations or ability to pay–the test functions as a meritocratic channel for social advancement. There is fierce competition for the opportunity to attend the best colleges, but the competition is based on merit and merit is measured by exams.

In this basic structure, the gaokao is widely understood as the modern reincarnation of the keju, the imperial examination system that offered a chance, in theory, for any man in China to join the emperor’s civil service. The authors describe how millions wasted their lives in fruitless efforts to score high enough on the imperial exam to achieve a new and higher social status. But the fact that a meritocratic channel for social advancement existed was important; not having one seems to have, historically, not worked out well. The authors observe: “The exam system persisted for over a millennium, but after years of mounting criticism, the Qing government abolished it. Shortly thereafter, the Qing dynasty itself fell in 1911.” The ending of the exam system meant a huge loss of opportunity for the men who had spent years preparing for it, an experience that politically radicalized many of them.

When the Communist Party took over after China’s civil war, they moved quickly to reinstate a meritocratic channel for social advancement. The gaokao was first established in 1952, in the early years of the People’s Republic, as a nationwide exam that would identify talented young people for further education. The new leaders wanted a modern system for testing useful knowledge, not the ability to recite the Confucian classics, so the gaokao was a self-conscious modernization and reform of the old system. But the cultural memory of the keju was broadly positive: the population was already prepared to accept the idea that an examination system is, in fact, a fair way to identify merit. By associating itself with a traditional culture of exams and meritocratic advancement, the new Communist government gained rather than lost legitimacy.

The next Chinese leader foolish enough to mess around with exams was Mao Zedong, who during the Cultural Revolution shut down the gaokao, along with the normal functioning of the entire educational system. The Cultural Revolution for a while turned meritocracy on its head, punishing the educated classes and elevating workers and peasants. Universities did eventually resume classes, but they were mostly about ideology, and admissions were done on the basis of political recommendations. But Mao’s death opened the floodgates, and the leaders in Beijing were inundated by protests and petitions demanding the reinstatement of the gaokao. Although the start of China’s “reform era” is conventionally dated to 1978, when some top-level political meetings were held, some people consider the real start to be 1977, when Deng Xiaoping restored the test and univerisites admitted a new class of students selected on the basis of academic merit.

One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not. Such a pattern may have held in previous centuries as well: one of the co-authors’ many papers summarized in the book quantifies how the introduction of the keju system, around the 7th century AD, reduced Chinese emperors’ risk of being dethroned by a factor of 10. Certainly, the way more recent governments have behaved suggests they think the gaokao helps keep them in power. The gaokao is not seen as legitimate because it is instituted by the Communist Party; rather, it is the Communist Party that gains legitimacy by administering the gaokao in an even-handed way.

That’s not to say that the exam system is without downsides. For all of its popular support, the gaokao creates an incredibly high-pressure social environment. It’s not just that there’s one test that everyone has to take, but that children’s entire educational trajectory is built around preparing for success on that test. The gaokao is just the culmination of a series of tests and sorting procedures that choose who will be admitted to China’s elite universities, which to a remarkable extent determines who will be in the social and economic elite. Parents work relentlessly to position their children to do well on the gaokao, because, literally, nothing else matters; there are essentially no alternative pathway to success in Chinese society. Because people arrange their entire lives to help their kids succeed on the gaokao, changes can threaten the investments already made, and lead to strong resistance.

In 2013, according to the book, Hongbin Li was asked by China’s government to design a replacement for the gaokao. The initial idea was to switch out the single all-important test administered on only one day for a series of tests in different subjects, which could be taken multiple times throughout a student’s high school career–somewhat analogous to the Advanded Placement (AP) tests in US high schools. That probably would be less stressful for students, and make for a fairer assessment of their achievements. Li designed textbooks and tests and even started training teachers in the new approach, before the whole effort was scrapped. Even smaller changes to the gaokao system to try to address entrenched inequality had generated surprisingly widespread political protests, and been quietly walked back. The impression is very much that the exam system amounts to an untouchable “third rail” of Chinese politics.

One of the more interesting implications of the book is that because the social prestige of the gaokao is so high in China, and because everyone has been trained to understand and work with that kind of system, that it has implicitly become the model for other social institutions outside of education. The authors analyze the underling structure of the gaokao as a “centralized hierarchical tournament”: the competition between students is centralized because there is only one standard of success, and it is hierarchical because success is defined in relative terms, by doing better than those around you. Once the concept is grasped, it is easy to see many other centralized hierarchical tournaments in Chinese society.

The most consequential of these is probably the competition among local governments to generate economic growth, which many scholars have identified as one of the fundamental structures underlying China’s reform-era growth boom. Local officials are always competing for promotion and advancement, and one of their key performance indicators is economic growth in their jurisdiction. That competition is centralized because there is, effectively, only indicator of success, GDP growth, and only one arbiter of success, the central Party apparatus. And it is hierarchical because success is defined relative terms: it’s about where is your GDP growth relative to your peers and predecessors in office.

That system makes sense for some of the same reasons that the gaokao does: GDP growth, like an exam score, is a relatively objective and transparent metric, better than many alternatives. Also, centralized hierarchical tournaments seem to be good at creating very effective incentives. The competition among Chinese students to do well on the gaokao does in fact result in most of them acquiring real skills and knowledge. And the competition among local governments has in fact delivered a lot of GDP growth.

The centrality of the gaokao, and gaokao-like institutions, in China makes it all the more intriguing that the man now sitting on top of the political system seems less committed to them than many others. Xi Jinping belongs to the last generation of “worker-peasant-soldier” students admitted to university on the basis of political recommendations rather than exam scores. (This wasn’t an automatic result of his being the offspring of a senior Party leader. Joseph Torigian has documented that because Xi’s father had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, his initial applications to university starting in 1973 were rejected; but eventually a sympathetic administrator approved his admission.) This has always set Xi apart from other more “technocratic” figures in the government, like his former No. 2 Li Keqiang (see my old post on “The education of Li Keqiang“).

Xi famously oversaw the shuangjian or “double reduction” campaign launched in July 2021, which aimed at easing the “burdens” on students of excessive homework and after-school tutoring–one of the most high-profile attempts to address the downsides of the gaokao system in recent years. This got a lot more attention outside China than most such political campaign, because it essentially outlawed the business model of some publicly traded companies. While the rules remain on the books, recent evidence suggests that enforcement has been relaxed, and businesses are again being allowed to meet parents’ demand for tutoring, which remains very high. The exam system remains a fundamental social institution of today’s China, and as such very difficult to change.

by Andrew

Historical trajectories of local government in India and China

After doing a round of India-China comparisons that focused on commonly cited macro indicators like manufacturing, investment and literacy (see last month’s post “India and the invidious comparison with China“), I wanted to highlight a lower-profile but perhaps even more interesting contrast: the structure of government and the nature of decentralization in large countries. One of the coolest China-India charts I have seen is in a 2020 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Devesh Kapur, “Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?” It shows how public employees in India, China and the US are distributed across different levels of government:

Notably, India has many more of its public servants at the state level than China does at the equivalent provincial level, and many fewer at the local (i.e. cities and towns) level than China does. (The China numbers come from an interesting paper by Yuen Yuen Ang; the data sources unfortunately stop in 1998). On this measure, state capacity at the local level looks much stronger in China than in India, which helps explain some of the long-running economic differences between them. (The structural similarity of China and the US in public employment is also pretty interesting!)

Some of the major indicators of India’s poor state capacity are its failures in delivering public services like health and education, which happen at the local level. China does much better in basic service delivery–and its local governments have also played a very obvious and important in driving growth, thanks to the competition and experimentation among local officials driven to develop their jurisdictions. That process presumes a certain baseline level of state capacity and autonomy at the local level, which may be harder to come by in India.

Why is the structure of government authority distributed so differently in Asia’s two billion-person continental-scale civilization-states? History. Karthik Muralidharan’s definitive book on state capacity in India, Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap For Effective Governance, says that questions of federalism and devolution greatly occupied the drafters of India’s constitution at independence. Despite the claims of nationalist propaganda, India had not been a unified state prior to British colonialism, and was not really a unified state under British rule. The leaders of the new country quite reasonably did not trust local authorities enough to give them great autonomy:

The political reason [for centralization] was the concern that post-British India would not remain unified, a fear amplified by the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. Further, at the time of Independence, more than 40% of India’s land was ruled by over 500 erstwhile princely states, whose rulers had only recently acceded to the Indian Union, and some had done so quite reluctantly.

To understand the enormity of the challenge of uniting the nation, some historical context is useful. In the 2000 years before British rule, even 75% of the Indian subcontinent was politically unified for less than 200 years: under the peaks of the Mauryan and Mughal Empires (around 300-250 BCE and around 1600-1700 CE). So, preserving national unity was a top priority for the Constitution’s framers. This is why they gave the Central government strong political powers, including the ability to dismiss democratically elected state governments under Article 356.

The national elites designing independent India’s political structure also did not trust the traditional elites at the local level to share their social and economic agenda. They did not want to give local governments lots of authority over money and social programs, because they knew the traditional local power brokers would inevitably influence government for their own benefit:

The lack of autonomy of lower tiers of government reflected the concern that local elites would seek to perpetuate patriarchy and caste inequalities, through actions such as denying or limiting education to girls and disadvantaged castes, if they were given power over local service delivery. This lack of trust is perhaps best captured in the famous words of Dr. Ambedkar, ‘What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?’ …

Though the first principles of federalism suggest that local government should be responsible for service delivery, India’s approach to designing a federal governance system has been much more centralized than almost any other country in the world. A key reason for doing this was to have a professional state-level bureaucracy that could implement government policies and programmes to benefit disadvantaged groups, that may have been resisted or even thwarted by local elites.

Why have China’s political leaders been more confident that they could devolve some authority to local governments? They definitely cared a lot about national unity, but fissiparous tendencies were perhaps less of an immediate risk after the Communist Party’s victory in the civil war. China did have a longer history as a unified state (the boundaries of the People’s Republic of China are largely the same as that of the Qing Empire), and the fight against the Japanese invasion in the 1930s had helped forge strong popular nationalist sentiment.

The new Communist state in China was also just much more ruthless in ripping out traditional social structures and replacing them with its own lines of command. First there was the land reform in the 1950s that dispossessed and killed millions of local gentry. Later the Cultural Revolution eradicated many of the remnants of traditional society, as the nation was consumed with campaigns to tear down any source of authority other than the Chairman. Mao himself always favored local initiative and autonomy, at least rhetorically, but this assumed a framework of uniform nationwide loyalty to the Party. The Cultural Revolution’s relentless political campaigns also ended up destroying much of the ability of China’s new bureaucracy to function. Yet when the post-Mao leaders started rebuilding state capacity, they would have faced less competition from traditional social structures.

by Andrew

Readings on India

Around my trip to India I did some not-very-systematic reading, and had pretty good luck. All of these books were worth reading and helpful in different ways:

  • Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (expanded second edition, 2021). Anderson’s range of erudition is impressive–I read this book after finishing his latest, Disputing Disaster, a deep dive into the historiography of the First World War–and he packs a lot of information into his short, polemical account of Indian politics. The book’s aim is to destabilize what he calls the mainstream narrative of India’s liberal intelligentsia: the celebration of a stable, secular, multicultural democracy. He re-examines key episodes in India’s independence struggle and early history to emphasize the enduring roles of religion, caste and social division.
  • Rukmini S., Whole Numbers And Half Truths: What Data Can And Cannot Tell Us About Modern India (2022). This book by a data journalist is written to explain India to Indians, not to explain India to foreigners, which makes it more useful and interesting. Some background knowledge is required–you need to know what scheduled tribes are, things like that–but it is clearly written and informative, covering topics from crime to marriage to diet. Her mode is patient, careful explication, going as far as the facts allow and no further. Nevertheless she aims her darts to puncture some of the same liberal illusions targeted by Anderson, broadly arguing that India is fundamentally a conservative society where caste, class and religion are dominant concerns, not a primarily secular one organized around economic interests.
  • Ashoka Mody, India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence To Today (2023). Another polemic (does India just inspire polemics?) structured as a detailed history of Indian politics and economic policymaking. Mody’s overriding concern is India’s failure to get onto the East Asian trajectory of export-led manufacturing, and he wants to identify the specific points where it went astray. He puts the blame on two main factors: the failure of the educational system to deliver broad-based improvements in human capital across the population, which is convincing, and the repeated failure of the government to devalue the currency to achieve export competitiveness, which I found less convincing. While hardly impartial, the book is effective in showing how poorly served India has been by its political leadership, and details well the bad decisions and corruption.
  • Karthik Muralidharan, Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap For Effective Governance (2024). A very long book, which I have not yet finished but can still highly recommend. It’s probably one of the best books ever written on state capacity, working steadily and patiently through all of the aspects of the weakness of the Indian state, and proposing reasonable and technical fixes. This is another book written for an Indian audience, so there is more micro detail than all outsiders will want, but it is just this forensic examination of the functioning of state institutions that is so valuable. There should be a book like this for every country–in particular the US, which is also facing its own state capacity crisis and needs this kind of engagement with the realities rather than the theories of governance. The book’s bias is more in the underlying assumption that technical fixes are possible, though he acknowledges that some of the social and political problems identified by the other authors on this list contribute to poor state capacity.
by Andrew

Robert Louis Stevenson, essayist

One of the reasons I keep a blog is as a kind of commonplace book, to keep a record of things that I liked reading and found thought-provoking. I recently stumbled across, then read through The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, a modern and readily available selection of the essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. Yes, that guy–Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll. They were surprisingly enjoyable: nineteenth-century prose is definitely a brain-stretcher for those of us raised on concise and direct twentieth-century English, but after a while I appreciated the great variety in his sentences. Many of his essays have timeless observations that stand with the classics of the genre. Here are three of my favorite bits:

This passage from “The Day After Tomorrow” (1887) wonderfully captures the difficulty of getting a clear and objective view of the present day; the phrase “the obscurest epoch is today” feels particularly apt for 2025, even if it is true for every year:

History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other’s blunders with gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is today; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying island of Laputa.

There is a similar theme that comes up in “Crabbed Age and Youth” (1877), one of his greatest essays, which calls for us to recognize how provisional all of our ideas and understandings are, and embrace the necessity the necessity of change in our views, and ourselves, as time passes.

As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean.

We have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more than an impression. If we had breathing space, we should take the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline towards the grave.

It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgement, but to take action, before the hour is at an end.

And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently we we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade. In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved. Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing. It decidedly harder to climb trees, and nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide and seek has somehow lost in zest.

All our attributes are modified or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

Finally, “Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art” (1888) is wonderful on the satisfactions of work in general, and writing in particular:

If a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too; he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inexistinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind, to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry.

The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is it worth doing? — when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist. …

And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the practical side of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct returns – the wages of the trade – are small, but the indirect – the wages of the life – are incalculably great. No other business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. The solider and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar language. In the life of the artist there need be no hour without its pleasure.

I take the author, with whose career I am best acquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, and that the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon him and words are not wanting — in what a continual series of small successes time flows by; with what sense of power as of one moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to which the whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world; but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it ill paid; the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

by Andrew

Revolution, reaction, reform

If you were to make a list of the most significant pivot points in world history over the past half century or so, there’s no question that high on that list would be China’s move from poverty and isolation to a central position in the world economy. The fact that a backward and mostly agricultural country became the world’s largest trading nation and leading manufacturing power is almost now taken for granted, it’s part of the furniture of geopolitics, but from the perspective of the mid-20th century it was a shocking historical twist. And unlike many important historical changes, which unfold at a pace too slow to be observed except with hindsight, China’s transformation can be tied to an obvious and clearly datable event: the launch of economic reforms in 1978.

Assigning credit for China’s pivot seems straightforward. The death of Mao Zedong in 1976 allowed the feverish political infighting and exhausting campaigns that had consumed China to finally end, and the return of Deng Xiaoping to the leadership put in place a figure willing to make necessary changes. Anne Stevenson-Yang’s recent Wild Ride, a concise and cynical account of the reform era, summarizes the conventional take as: “The forceful and plain-talking Deng ascended and launched an economic revolution.” Deng’s leading role is attested to by both China’s official accounts, and by Western scholarly works such as Ezra Vogel’s acclaimed and comprehensive biography.

Mao and Deng

Such clear, straightforward narratives are, of course, an irresistible invitation for historians to correct and complicate the record. Revisionist accounts of the reform era have articulated two main critiques of the Deng-centric view. One is that while Deng arrogated to himself all the credit for various reformist ideas and programs, he often contributed fairly little. Many figures that Deng dominated or pushed aside–leaders like Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang–were actually responsible for the ideas and initiatives that transformed the economy. The other is that the Chinese people themselves, not any of their leaders, deserve much of the credit. The outcomes of reform were not actually what was planned in advance by the leadership, and often owed more to the initiative of ordinary people seizing opportunities than the wise, foresighted decisions of the elite (for me, the strongest statement of this argument is in Ronald Coase and Ning Wang’s How China Became Capitalist).

Both of these critiques have often been driven by a desire not to give all the credit for China’s economic successes to the same leaders who oversaw the brutal suppression of dissent and the crushing of political freedoms. Even if they are sometimes motivated by political score-settling, these critiques are nonetheless fundamentally correct: economic reform was not a top-down revolution single-handedly launched by Deng. The new book by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, The Great Transformation: China’s Road From Revolution To Reform, comprehensively demonstrates this point, incorporating the revisionist perspectives into a balanced and marvelously readable account of elite machinations, grassroots developments, and international pressures.

Deng was a military leader who spent most of his time on domestic politics and foreign affairs; his appeal was his competence and practicality rather than his economic expertise. Westad and Chen argue that the ideological differences between Deng and other leaders in the 1970s, like Mao’s designated successor Hua Guofeng, were exaggerated; their power struggle was fundamentally personal rather than ideological. Deng simply thought he should be in charge and would do a better job, and Hua acquiesced for the good of the Party.

What Deng, a strong nationalist, did have was a restlessness and urgency about pushing China forward and remedying its weakness; that meant his decisions usually defaulted to supporting economic growth. But he was far from alone in his desire to improve the economy. And more broadly, the dramatic changes that unfolded in China through the late 1970s and early 1980s can’t be understood purely as the implementation of top-down decisions. Changes from below often outran the direction from the top, as farmers, workers and local officials had already started changing economic practices on their own initiative.

It’s easy to tear down the great-man theory of the reform era, but what to erect in its place? Westad and Chen’s organizing concept is the “long 1970s”: treating the period from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s as a single unit. The simplest summary of their overall thesis is that the reform era was a reaction against the Cultural Revolution, while at the same time being conditioned by and dependent on the changes the Cultural Revolution brought.

This is an idea that manages to be both obviously true and subtly subversive of received understanding. Usually the reform era and the Cultural Revolution are treated as polar opposites; the chief contribution of The Great Transformation is to treat them as part of a single historical process. Conventional histories of the reform era usually start in 1978, with the Third Plenum, or in 1976, with the death of Mao. Westad and Chen start theirs a full decade earlier, in 1966, with the launch of the Cultural Revolution that plunged China into years of political chaos.

In this account, 1978 no longer appears as an isolated pivot point, but the acceleration of a process that was already underway. “The most intense phase of Cultural Revolution turmoil was over by 1968, and at least by 1973, if not earlier, there were many new trends and tendencies that point forward to the reform era,” they write. The most intriguing part of their argument is its emphasis on how domestic policy changes were often driven by concerns about China’s international position.

The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the border clashes with China that followed, made Mao feel that the Soviet Union was more aggressive and more of a near-term risk than the United States. Mao thought the Soviet Union was preparing to invade China, and that therefore China needed a stronger economy. It is now well known that Mao’s fears of invasion were the driver for the Third Front program of relocating industrial capacity to inland regions, as outlined in Covell Meyskens’ excellent book Mao’s Third Front (for more discussion, see my post “China’s security fears and the Cold War economy“).

Westad and Chen go even further, and argue that security fears were a key part of high-level political decisions that were made in subsequent years. Because of the risk of Soviet aggression, Mao “feared the strategic consequences of China’s material weakness, although he of course paid no attention to his own role in creating that weakness.” While Mao never wavered in his view that the Cultural Revolution was correct, necessary and successful, after 1969 he began shifting the emphasis slightly more toward economic development and tamping down on political infighting. In early 1970, for instance, the State Council called for “taking class struggle as the key link, firmly grasping preparations against war, and bringing about a new leap forward in the economy.”

The fear of the Soviets was clearly behind Mao’s willingness to respond positively to the secret overtures from newly elected US President Richard Nixon. It also influenced Mao’s decisions on personnel, including rehabilitating Deng Xiaoping and appointing the moderate Hua Guofeng, rather than any of the Cultural Revolution firebrands, as his successor. Mao felt that while the leftists he had elevated in the Cultural Revolution had the right political line, “they were not practical enough to lead the revolution on their own. People such as Deng Xiaoping were needed to keep the state moving forward and to consolidate and solidify the results of the shake-up.” When Deng took over, he maintained Mao’s view of the Soviet Union as “an implacable enemy of China. … It could serve neither as foreign friend nor as an economic model for China, Deng insisted.”

The Great Transformation is a true narrative history that avoids sweeping statements and sniping at other scholars, and instead builds up its argument through the careful depiction of events. The detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of key episodes like the Nixon visit, the death of Lin Biao, and the fall of the Gang of Four are authoritative and valuable. The bluntest statement of the geopolitical thesis is not in the pages of the book, but in an interview Westad gave while it was still being written: “There’s this obsession with the idea that there will be war, that China will be attacked from the outside. … The imperative of growth, of rapid growth, came straight out of that. It’s remarkable to see how often leaders in this time period keep repeating that.” (For a longer excerpt, see my post “What makes China want growth“.)

This argument is logical and well-supported, but Westad and Chen may downplay just how unsettling some of its implications are. Mao’s death seems to have been necessary for clearing the political stage and allowing the country to truly move on from the Cultural Revolution. But who made the strategic decision that China needed a stronger economy? Who elevated the practical-minded leaders who would make the hard choices necessary in implementing economic reform? After immersion in the history of the long 1970s, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the person who began China’s pivot to economic reform was none other than the Chairman himself, Mao Zedong.

by Andrew

The death of a scientist

Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is an unfinished nonfiction book devoted to the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in the woods of Montana, in which 13 of the firefighters who had parachuted in to fight it died. Maclean spent decades returning over and over again to the event, revisiting the site, interviewing survivors, and debating with scientists.

As the editor of the posthumously published edition, Alan Thomas, explained, Maclean struggled with the technicalities of fire science, and those difficulties were part of the reason he never finished the book. As a journalistic explanation of how scientists came to understand the causes and characteristics of forest fires, of the type familiar from the pages of The New Yorker, it feels simultaneously overlong and incomplete. It clearly isn’t a masterpiece on the same level as his famous novella, A River Runs Through It, but it still stuck with me long after I finished.

I think that’s because there was another book that was taking shape inside the draft, and Maclean did not live long enough to complete the transformation. This other book would have been not a conventional piece of science journalism but a personal meditation on mortality and his own search for meaning: more “Old Men and Death” than “Young Men and Fire.”

I started to figure this out about the halfway point, where there’s a powerful scene where you can feel the book shifting from the determinedly factual into something else. It recounts the last day in the life of Harry Gisborne, a Forest Service scientist who was investigating the Mann Gulch fire. There’s a lot of wisdom here:

To Gisborne, science started and ended in observation, and theory should always be endangered by it. … He said to [Bob] Jansson: “I’m glad I got a chance to get up here. Tomorrow we can get all our dope together and work on Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it will lead to a theory.” This was at rest stop 35. By now the rest stops were becoming stations of the cross.

They were following a game trail along the cliffs high above the Missouri River at the lower end of the Gates of the Mountains, and were only a quarter or a half mile from their truck when they reached stop 37. Gisborne sat down on a rock and said: “Here’s a nice place to sit and watch the river. I made it good. My legs might ache a little, though, tomorrow.”

In his report, Jansson says: “I think Gisborne’s rising at point 37 on the map was due to the attack hitting him.” He goes on to explain in parenthesis that “thrombosis cases usually want to stand or sit up because of difficulty in breathing.” Gisborne died within a minute, and Jansson piled rocks around him so he would not off the game trail into the Missouri River a hundred feet below.

When Jansson knew Gisborne was dead, he stretched him out straight on the game trail, built the rocks around him higher, closed his eyes, and then put his glasses back on hi so, just in case he woke up, he could see where he was.

Then Jansson ran for help. The stars came out. Nothing moved on the game trail. The great Missouri passing below repeated the same succession of chords it probably will play for a million years to come. The only other motion was the moon floating across the lenses of Gisborne’s glasses, which at last were unobservant.

This is the death of a scientist, a scientist who did much to establish a science. On the day of his death he had the pleasure of discovering that his theory about the Mann Gulch blowup was wrong. It would be revealing if tomorrow had come and he had got all his dope together and had worked out a new Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it would have led to another theory, probably the right one.

In any case, because of him we have been able to form what is likely the correct theory. Gisborne’s portrait hangs on the staircase of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, which immediately adjoins the Smokejumper base. He looks you square in the eye but is half amused as if he had caught you too attached to one of your theories, or one of his. …

For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us–excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over, get our new dope together, and find a Hypothesis Number One all over again. And being basically on the right track when we were wrong.

This was on November 9, 1949; Gisborne was only 56 years old.

by Andrew

The best books I read in 2024

The blog has been on hiatus for a bit due to a press of other responsibilities, but of course I haven’t stopped reading. These were the most memorable books I read this year, listed in the order I read them.

Fiction

  • Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock. This year I completed a long-running and rewarding personal project to read through all of Cather’s writing in order. Her Death Comes for the Archbishop is generally recognized as a masterpiece, and reading it again confirmed that judgment. Shadows on the Rock was her next book, and resembles it most closely, also being deeply researched historical fiction set in early colonial North America, this time Quebec. It’s another triumph of imagination and sympathy.
  • Natasha Pulley, The Mars House. I haven’t been able to get into much recent sci-fi, but I enjoyed this tale of the travails of climate-change refugees in a Chinese Mars colony: compelling and filled with intriguing political and geopolitical speculation.
  • Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors. Contemporary fantasy fiction has also become mostly unreadable for me; too often it is an endless recycling of tropes with minor variations. This book, the well-deserved winner of this year’s Nebula award, is a delightful exception. Its urban quasi-South Asian setting is unexpected, and the fantastical elements are truly mysterious rather than laboriously systematized.
  • Itamar Vieira Junior, Crooked Plow (trans. Johnny Lorenz). This Brazilian novel depicting the lives of impoverished sharecroppers on the country’s northeastern frontier has been extravagantly praised, and indeed the first two-thirds was one of the best things I’ve read in ages. For me, though, the last third was a real disappointment, so ultimately a somewhat mixed experience.
  • Guzel Yakhina, A Volga Tale (trans. Polly Gannon). The new novel from the author of Zuleikha, one of my favorite books of the last several years, does not disappoint. A schoolmaster in an isolated German-speaking colony inside Russia survives his trials through immersion in local folktales; the fable-like qualities of his own story intensify as socialism advances on the village. The translation is marvelous and vivid.

Nonfiction

  • David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. The harrowing tale of the Wager is one of the ur-texts of nautical fiction, inspiring writers from Herman Melville to Patrick O’Brian. Grann’s book is a feat of research and writing, creating impressive narrative clarity out of the complicated and contradictory evidence (the LRB review points out a few of the inevitable compromises he made).
  • Eileen Chang, Written on Water (trans. Andrew F. Jones). Chang’s first book of essays, published when she was just 24, shows her as something like the Joan Didion of pre-revolutionary China: a preternaturally sharp and cool observer. She is remarkably comfortable with one foot in Chinese culture and one in English, a stance few have been able to hold so well then or since. Here are some excerpts.
  • Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. Though I read lots of China history books, I rarely end up recommending any to non-specialists. I’m happy to say Ian’s latest is an exception: this account of how people today continue to grapple with the harshest episodes in China’s history is written with his trademark grace and sympathy.
  • Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. This fascinating history of little-known episodes in a previous “backlash to globalization” has obvious contemporary relevance. For me, though, the takeaway was how far the 1920-30s popular reaction, driven by understandable fears of the famine and death created by wartime trade embargoes, is from today’s more politically driven trade sentiments.
  • Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. Even-handed and stunningly comprehensive, there is no better way to learn the reality behind the wartime mythmaking. Though Kochanski’s assessment of the accomplishments of the resistance is often deflating, there are still many striking and heroic episodes. To cite just one example, the operation to disable Europe’s only heavy-water plant, in Norway, and thus prevent the Nazis from making an atomic bomb, would make a fantastic movie.
  • Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Critcism and Benjamin Taylor, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather. I couldn’t get enough of Cather this year. These two books–both remarkably concise–were just what I needed, helping flesh out the context of Cather’s work during her life and after. While both are nicely done, they are probably best appreciated when, as I did, you have the fiction fresh in your mind.
  • Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter. In a sterling example of historical writing for the “general reader,” Mortimer explains the big waves of social change across centuries in concrete and practical ways. He shows how the differences between the 11th and 16th centuries are bigger in many ways than between the 16th and 21st.
  • Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. After publishing his famous A River Runs Through It, a nearly perfect piece of American prose writing, Maclean spent the rest of his life working on this nonfiction account of a 1949 forest fire. He never finished it, and it shows: the posthumously published manuscript has some longueurs that editing could have solved. But it’s still a compelling meditation on mortality.
  • Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. A marvelous book integrating the historical big picture and the personal, together making for an illuminating guide to the nature and origins of Eastern Europe’s peculiarities. Mostly, though, it’s a vehicle for the author to stitch together lots of the typically Eastern European style of “tragicomic stories” that he has collected over the years.
  • Richard Flanagan, Question 7. Flanagan interrogates the historical forces behind his father’s survival of a Japanese internment camp, and thus his own birth, resulting in an unclassifiable narrative that takes in his own upbringing in Tasmania, H.G. Wells’ romance with Rebecca West, and the making of the atomic bomb. Brilliant; winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction writing.

Previous lists:

2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012

by Andrew

Eileen Chang on China

Eileen Chang’s first book of essays, Written on Water, in the marvelous Andrew F. Jones translation, has been recently reprinted, and I’ve been savoring it in small pieces. Published when Chang was just 24 years old, the book shows her as something like the Joan Didion of pre-revolutionary China: a preternaturally sharp and cool observer. The discursive, personal essays are not easy to summarize or excerpt, and are short enough that you should just read them. But she made a few offhand generalizations about her country that still rang true to me, 80 years after their first publication, and which can stand on their own.

This one is from “What Is Essential Is That Names Be Right”:

China is a nation of words. When an emperor met with misfortune, he would immediately change the name of the reign period in hopes of turning the country’s luck in the year to come. What used to be the Twelfth Year of the Martial Advent would suddenly become the Inaugural Year of the Era of Great Celebration, thus putting an immediate end to the sufferings of the past. An excessive faith in the power of words is our most distinctive characteristic.

This one is from “Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes”:

Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law, too, not necessarily through murder or plunder of property but by way of trivial and unmotivated violations of the rules. If a wooden sign by the side of the road reads, “Stay to the Right,” they will inevitably walk on the left. …such a spirit [is] less a subversion of the system itself than a playful tug at an object reverenced by all, a tug that ultimately becomes a form of recognition rather than rebellion.

This one is from “Poetry And Nonsense”:

Living in China has something lovable about it: amid dirt and chaos and grief, one discovers everywhere precious things, things that bring joy for an afternoon, a day, a lifetime. I hear the roads in Germany are so squeaky clean that you can use them as a mirror, that they are wide, ruler straight, tidy to a fault, and planted all along their length with towering trees. And yet I suspect that walking along such a road day after day would drive one mad.

Then there is Canada, a country that in the majority of people’s minds seems to lack any distinguishing characteristics whatsoever: a formless and desolate land. And yet my aunt says it is the best place in the world, with a cool climate, blue skies, emerald-colored grass, creamy white Western-style houses with red roofs as far as one can see, each with a freshly scrubbed look and boasting its own garden. If she could choose, she would live the rest of her life there. If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m homesick even before I leave home.

Chang, of course, did leave China, and spent the last 40 years of her life in the US.

by Andrew

The best books I read in 2023

The most memorable of the books I read this year, listed more or less in the order I read them.

Fiction

  • Nathanael Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven. A misfit seeks isolation in the remote Svalbard archipelago but instead finds social connection in the icebound wastes; utterly charming.
  • Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye. I re-read all of Chandler, in the Library of America edition, and this one is still my favorite, one of the great hard-boiled novels. Chandler had real problems writing women and more than one of the Marlowe books are ruined by the totally implausible female characters. This one shows his strengths, being primarily about male friendship.
  • Willa Cather, The Professor’s House. I’ve also been working my way through Cather, who I love unconditionally. She’s best known for her early Prairie Trilogy, which is wonderful, but in this book she begins to tackle subjects outside rural Nebraska. A strange, almost plotless story, it somehow stayed in my head more than anything else I read this year.
  • Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine. A prizewinning and wonderfully translated book that vividly reconstructs an ordinary Belgian life in the early 20th century, and the First World War. It’s billed as a novel though it is based on the author’s own grandfather’s notebooks; intense and extraordinarily moving.
  • Haruki Murakami, 1Q84. Simultaneously engrossing and inexplicable in a manner that only Murakami can pull off. It’s very long and very weird, and trying to describe it in more detail seems pointless. But I can report I was never once tempted to stop reading.
  • Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness. I read this as a teenager and can now safely say it went over my head; re-reading as an adult I was completely bowled over. Perhaps LeGuin’s best single book. It is most often discussed for its portrait of a society without fixed gender roles. But what elevates it to greatness is how much else is going on at the same time: the nature of war, politics and diplomacy, and some of the finest arctic survival writing.
  • Varlam Shalamov, Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories. For literature about surviving cold and human cruelty, there is little to top Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories; this second volume continues his great documentary project of life in the gulag. It’s rewarding, though the whole thing is a lot. Someone should put together an edited selection from both volumes, structured to give a clearer chronology of Shalamov’s time in the camps; that would probably be more accessible for most people.
  • Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait. A gripping and immediate piece of historical fiction, portraying a child bride struggling with the fear and claustrophobia of life in an Italian court in the Medici era.

Nonfiction

  • Romila Thapar, Gazing Eastwards: Of Buddhist Monks and Revolutionaries in China, 1957. An idealistic Indian historian visits Mao’s China and is gradually disillusioned. The book is itself a historical artifact documenting an unusual interaction between the two huge Asian nations. For more, see my review.
  • David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality. Biographies of intellectuals tend to be either more about the work or more about the life. In Parfit’s case the division did not exist, and much of the interest of this book is in how his pathbreaking work in ethics is reflected (or not) in his life decisions.
  • Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasures. Rundell’s occasional series of natural-history essays in the London Review of Books has been one of my favorite things in the magazine; this book collects them and adds more. It’s an absolute treasure, with so many perfect openings (“The Roman poet Horace was stridently anti-giraffe”) and brilliant one-liners that it must be savored in small doses.
  • Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat. Inspirational sports books are not my normal fare, but this one, about the US rowing team that took gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, is great. The effort and reward of training and competition really come through. It’s most interesting, though, as a slice of social history: almost everything about the key drivers of the story–sports, social class and America’s position in the world–has since changed drastically.
  • Tyler Cowen, GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? A surprisingly personal and consistently thought-provoking engagement with the great historical figures of economics. It’s definitely not an “economics for beginners” book; to appreciate it you should have some familiarity with Keynes, Hayek et al. already. For me, it was pitched at just the right level, and there was lots of new info and fresh takes. As Tyler likes to say, “interesting throughout.”
  • Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures. Perhaps the shortest and most accessible introduction to the GOAT of social thought. This new translation is concise and conversational, virtues not normally associated with Weber. Much of what he covers in these famous lectures is still quite relevant a century on; for an example see this excerpt.

Previous lists:

2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 |

2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012