Also of interest...in dispatches from the new China

No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

(Harvard, $30)

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This collection of writings by the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo “shows why the Communist Party fears the intellectual-turned-activist and his ideas,” said Ellen Bork in The Wall Street Journal. Imprisoned for his views in 2008 and subsequently awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, Liu writes with “a keen eye for the cynicism and hypocrisy that warps Chinese society.” Whether writing about China’s rise, Tibet, or the 2008 Olympics, Liu “advances the antithesis to the Party line.”

China in Ten Words

by Yu Hua

(Pantheon, $26)

In these “caustic” essays explaining his country’s recent history, the novelist Yu Hua serves up “a people’s-eye view of a world in which the people have little place,” said Pico Iyer in Time. Yu has built his national portrait using 10 central concepts, “from people and leader to copycat and bamboozle.” He believes China has changed little since Mao, save that the madness has “donned a different costume.” In a nation where dealers in human blood buy $16 million apartments, all he has to do is report.

The Fat Years

by Chan Koonchung

(Nan A. Talese, $27)

Though officially banned, Chan Koonchung’s riotous satirical novel “has enjoyed a considerable underground audience in mainland China,” said Jonathan Fenby in the London Observer. Set in a euphorically prosperous near future, it follows a few citizens who start asking questions when an entire month mysteriously goes missing from the collective memory. A kidnapping eventually cracks open the mystery, but the lingering issue is whether a nation can move forward if it won’t confront its past.

Demystifying the Chinese Economy

by Justin Yifu Lin

(Cambridge, $28)

The World Bank’s chief economist “represents a new breed of Chinese scholar,” said James Pressley in Bloomberg.com. “Proud of his country’s successes yet reasonably frank about its failings,” Justin Yifu Lin attempts here to explain dispassionately how the Chinese economy so quickly shifted from the scarcity of the Mao years to average annual growth of 9.9 percent. China’s fiercest critics won’t agree with 100 percent of Lin’s analysis, but he’s written “the best book on China’s economy I’ve read.”