Nobody Cares About the Party’s Recommended Readings

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Age: 18 hours

Xi Jinping reads a book. (Source: CCTV)

Executive Summary:

  • The Propaganda Department’s top books from 2024 highlight those by Xi Jinping, as well as ones focused on military themes, Party history, and China’s place in the world.
  • This official book list has virtually no overlap with similar lists on platforms like Douban or WeChat, and minimal interest in the list indicates that citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) largely ignore the Beijing’s attempts to shape national culture.
  • RC citizens’ reading preferences from the last decade heavily skew toward foreign books, and in 2024 focused on feminist and socially progressive literature, as well as works that reflect social malaise in the country.
  • The Party’s inability to prevent the Chinese people’s openness so-called “Western values” could be an indicator of its future success in preventing Western influence in emerging large language models, which are trained primarily on Western source material.

On April 23, page 6 of the People’s Daily carried a story announcing the selection of 42 books as “China’s Good Books from 2024” (2024年度“中国好书”) (People’s Daily, April 23). The list has been published annually since 2014 by the China Book Review Society (中国图书评论学会), an organization supervised by the Central Propaganda Department and managed under the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The People’s Daily article does not detail the criteria for selecting the books, other than saying that the process took place “under the guidance of the Central Propaganda Department” (在中宣部指导下). A decade ago, a similar article about the first annual list said that it sourced books from rankings released by major national media, monthly lists from the China Book Review Society, best-selling books with a print run of more than 30,000 copies, and “outstanding books recommended by renowned book critics” (知名书评人推荐的优秀图书), without specifying who these critics might be (Henan University of Urban Construction, April 28, 2015).

Looking over the list, it is clear that the selection is intended to emphasize the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) priorities. These include the centrality of Xi Jinping, history—especially Party history—and cultural pride, martial values, and the PRC’s place in a global context. The most notable absence is any real input from the people themselves. The China Book Review Society receives little attention online, and its lists are largely ignored, with minimal references on platforms such as WeChat, RedNote, Weibo, and Douban. This, along with this list’s almost complete lack of overlap with other “best books” lists from 2024, suggests that the Party’s approach to culture work is falling short in its struggle to win hearts and minds, let alone in “casting the soul of the nation” (铸造民族灵魂) (Qiushi, October 15, 2024).

The Party’s Reads For You

True to form, the “China’s Good Books from 2024” list followed previous iterations by starting with two “honorary books” (荣誉图书) that center on the so-called “people’s leader,” Xi Jinping. This year, readers are strongly recommended to read Outline of Xi Jinping Though on Culture (习近平文化思想学习纲要), which covers Xi’s theoretical formulation that was officially unveiled at the National Conference on Propaganda, Ideology, and Cultural Work in late 2023 (People’s Daily, October 9, 2023); and the second volume in a series that chronicles Xi’s interactions with university students, Xi Jinping and University Friends (习近平与大学生朋友们).

The rest of the list is divided up into categories: “theme publishing” (主题出版类), “humanities and social sciences” (人文社科类), “literature and arts” (文学艺术), “popular science and life” (科普生活), and other shortlisted books. These have stayed largely consistent over the last decade, with the exception of a section on “imported books” (引进版), which appeared in the first list but then quickly vanished from subsequent versions. The two “imported books” featured in 2014 were British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and American biologist David Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. This is unsurprising, as scientific progress has long been a priority area for the Party, and is, in theory, less controversial than other fields.

Xi Jinping’s appearances on the list were not limited to the two honorary mentions at the top of the list. He also managed to top the “theme publishing” section through the book Interpretations of Poems Quoted by Xi Jinping (习近平引用诗词释读), a compilation of 99 classical poems and phrases cited by Xi in his speeches and writings since the 18th Party Congress in 2012. Xi’s predecessor, Deng Xiaoping, is also highlighted in a book narrating his political exile in Jiangxi province, The Xiaoping Trail (小平小道). The title is a reference to a short path Deng walked every day, which the Jiangxi Daily has claimed is “the site of the origin of the Reform and Opening policy” (中国改革开放的策源地) (Qiushi, May 6, 2019).

The large number of military-related works in the list is unambiguous. These include Beijing 1949 (北京1949), which captures the events leading to the founding of the PRC; Why is the Flag of War as Beautiful as a Painting? (为什么战旗美如画), which explores the stories behind battle flags and their symbolic significance in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA); The Flag of Destiny: Theoretical Innovations in the New Era and the Mission of the New Journey (命运之旗：新时代理论创新与CCP新征程使命任务), which surveys Chinese history over the last 200 years and articulates recent theoretical underpinnings of the Party’s power; and Forging a Shield for the Nation: The Road to China’s Atomic Bomb (为国铸盾：中国原子弹之路), which covers the scientific, political, and strategic challenges the developers of the PRC’s nuclear weapons faced. This last book in particular is notable given the PRC’s ongoing buildup of its nuclear arsenal, which the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) estimates surpassed 600 warheads as of mid-2024 and is expected to surpass 1,000 in the next five years (DoD, December 18, 2024).

Other titles included works that advance the Party’s view that it is synonymous with the nation, the inheritor of China’s past, and the driving force behind China’s prominence on the world stage. These include a book examining the writer Lu Xun’s (鲁迅) alleged mutual respect for early Chinese Communist Party figures; a work that details the conception and design of the PRC’s national emblem; books about Chinese modernization, the rise of great powers, and how modernization impacts the PRC’s rise; and even a children’s book that introduces the youth of today to China’s global role. [1] One featured work on science and technology has scientists and science fiction writers discuss futuristic technologies, including those such as brain-computer interfaces that the Party has identified as priority areas for development (China Brief, March 28).

People’s Preferences Diverge

The “China’s Good Books from 2024” list was announced the same day that the Fifth National Forum on Party History and Literature (第五届全国党史和文献论坛举办) opened in Jinan, Shandong Province (People’s Daily, April 23). One could be forgiven for thinking that it would be greeted with some fanfare or interest by the general reading public. However, all indications from social media and other coverage suggest that, outside of official and Party channels, the list has been ignored for the most part.

To see what people in the PRC are actually reading, platforms like Douban (a forum for reviewing books and other media that is roughly equivalent to Goodreads on the anglophone Internet) and WeChat provide annual “best books” lists. Douban’s list in particular is striking for how steeply it diverges from the official list curated by the Propaganda Department (Douban, accessed April 25). Except for a poignant memoir, My Mother Does Cleaning (我的母亲做保洁), there is no overlap between the two lists. In many ways, the lists could not be more different. All the paternalism and chauvinism of the official list is replaced by books with socially progressive, feminist subject matter, as well as many international works. The top 10 for the year include two books by American authors (linguist Amanda Montell’s Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language and computer scientist Fei-Fei Li’s The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn Of AI and ) and three by European authors, while the top 10 books in the history and culture category include titles like Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century.

Some of the topics of books that make the lists may be indicative of underlying social malaise within the PRC. These include translated works such as Februar 33: Der Winter der Literatur, which tells the story of the fate of German writers during the first six weeks of Hitler’s rule, or Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, which “captures the shattered world of a life in exile,” according to its American publisher.

More worrisome for Chinese cultural production within the PRC is that these lists suggest a deficit of good books and literature emerging in recent years: eight of Douban’s list of the top 10 books from the last decade are foreign. Data on the publishing industry compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics suggest something of a crisis in book publishing in recent years. Total new books published (新出版) in 2023 numbered 217,041; down from a peak of 262,426 in 2016 and the 3rd-lowest since 2011 (along with the Covid-19 years of 2020 and 2022) (NBS, 2024). These data points are anecdotal and may be explained by other factors. For instance, low consumer demand could be due to economic weakness or the rise of internet fiction as a more popular genre. Alternatively, rising censorship could be discouraging book writing. Whatever the proximal factors at play, the popularity of international literature coupled with the steady decline in book publishing over the last decade do not constitute endorsements of the Party’s approach to encouraging a wider reading public. Clearly, initiatives like “storytelling sessions” (故事会) in which farmers discuss how reading promotes civilization and rural revitalization are not having the desired effect (People’s Daily, April 23).

Conclusion

The CCP sees literature and art, in the words of Mao Zedong, as “a component part of the whole revolutionary machine, [which] operates as a powerful weapon for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy” (整个革命机器的一个组成部分，作为团结人民、教育人民、打击敌人、消灭敌人的有力的武器)” (Marxists.org, accessed April 24). Increasingly, this means promoting works that push themes of cultural confidence and self-reliance. This in turn stems from the Party’s concerns over “cultural nihilism” (文化虚无主义), which the Party perceives as an existential threat that could undercut the Party’s cultural power and lead to wholesale Westernization (China Brief, March 28). As a result, foreign works have disappeared from Party-approved book lists, and militarism is ascendant.

If PRC citizens were eagerly reading works on the country’s weapons development programs and valorizing CCP culture heroes, this would be a cause for concern. Assessing the actual reading habits of most PRC citizens, it appears that the Party may have more to fear. The popularity of books by Western writers, and especially ones that seem at odds with “core socialist values,” suggests that what the Party dismisses as “Western values” are already shared by many people across the PRC—at least among the online, educated population that are active on platforms such as Douban.

There is a parallel here with artificial intelligence (AI). The Party is keen to excise so-called Western influence from emerging large language models. However, it might be too late to reverse the tide there too, as some scholars in the West have noted (The Free Press, April 13). This is simply because models are primarily trained on Western outputs. If there is one lesson in the Party’s failed attempt to steer the reading public toward core socialist values, it might be that success in doing so with AIs is just as unlikely..

Notes

[1] In the order in which they are referenced in the above paragraph, these titles are:

  • Of One Mind: Lu Xun and the Chinese Communists (同怀：鲁迅与中国共产党人));
  • The Emblem of the Republic: The Birth of the National Emblem of the People’s Republic of China (共和国之徽：中华人民共和国国徽诞生记);
  • China Chooses Modernization (现代化的中国选择);
  • The Wind Rises and the Clouds Fly: Qian Yuandan on the Rise of Great Powers (风起云飞扬：钱乘旦讲大国崛起);
  • Developing and Surpassing: Core Issues and Strategic Directions for Chinese-style Modernization (发展与超越：中国式现代化的核心问题与战略路径);
  • China in the World (世界里的中国).