Books like Tombstone by Yang Jisheng

In Benjamin P. Gibson’s return to his community after a 10‑year imprisonment, the village of St. Michael’s faces the harsh reality of post‑war survivor “crisis,” as family and tradition vie for survival.

An analytical study of the Great Chinese Famine, exploring its social, economic, and political dimensions during Mao Zedong's rule.

Insightful memoir by former personal physician to Mao Zedong, detailing the Chinese leader’s daily life, political decisions, and personal quirks from 1954 to 1976.

Nien Cheng, a Shanghai expatriate educated in London and former Shell employee, endures six years of solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution, documenting her heroic resistance and quest for justice after release.

In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history, Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.

An account of the famine that killed roughly thirty-six million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward examines how the communist ideologies and collectivization campaigns perpetuated by the country's leaders caused the catastrophe.

"When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth-rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society. In One Child, she explores its true human impact, traveling across China to meet the people who live with its consequences. Their stories reveal a dystopian reality: unauthorized second children ignored by the state, only-children supporting aging parents and grandparents on their own, villages teeming with ineligible bachelors, and an ungoverned adoption market stretching across the globe. Fong tackles questions that have major implications for China's future: whether its 'Little Emperor' cohort will make for an entitled or risk-averse generation; how China will manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old; and above all, how much the one-child policy may end up hindering China's growth. Weaving in Fong's reflections on striving to become a mother herself, One Child offers a nuanced and candid report from the extremes of family planning."--