John Rabe: The Good Man of Nanking. 2000 (Vintage)

The German businessman John Rabe was an eye witness of what happened at Nanking.

Barbara W. Tuchman: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. 2001 (Grove Press)

Argues that the US should have supported Mao.

David L. Shambaugh: Modernizing China's Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects. 2004 (Univ. of California Press)

Solid. Scholarly.

Deirdre Chetham: Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges. 2004 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Describes an ancient world that had been lost.

Li Zhisui: The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memories of Mao's Personal Physician. 1994 (Random House)

Judith Shapiro: Mao's War Against Nature. 2003 (Cambridge University Press)

Maurice Meisner: The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-94. 1996 (Hill & Wang)

Highlights achievements and failures of the Deng era.

Andrew Scobell: China's Use of Military Force: Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March. 2003 (CUP)

Sun Shuyun: The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth. 2007 (Doubleday)

Sun's reconstruction of the Long March, based on interviews with eye witnesses, shatters some of the myths cultivated by the Communist Party's propaganda.

Robert G. Sutter: Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy since the Cold War. 2007 (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.)

Shows how Beijing's foreign policy is hampered by domestic constraints.