Top 10 books about China

Paul Mason is the BBC's Newsnight economics editor. He is the author of Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2008), Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2010) and, this year, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. His first novel, Rare Earth, has also just been published in the UK.

One of his top ten books on China, as told to the Guardian:

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

This fictionalised memoir of a journey down the Yangtse River was acclaimed as a landmark in Chinese literature when he won the Nobel prize in 2000. It's a novel of introspection and loneliness. Gao's plays have been banned from performance after the authorities condemned his drama about the Tiananmen Square massacre as "a fabrication" on the grounds that he had not been there at the time.

Read about another book on the list.

Soul Mountain is one of Colin Thubron's six favorite books about Asia.

--Marshal Zeringue