Books set in China

1989: shot at Tiananmen, a student lies in a coma for ten years as Beijing changes.

1970s: a diplomat’s little daughter wages war in Beijing’s San Li Tun embassy compound.

Early 1970s: Albania’s alliance with Mao’s China begins to crack, seen from Tirana.

A country boy in Beiping saves for his own rickshaw, and the city keeps taking it.

1911: a young Belgian claims to know the Forbidden City’s secrets as the empire falls.

1930s: a family of sorghum-wine makers in Gaomi and their war against the Japanese.

1941–1945: a British boy lost in Shanghai when the Japanese take it, then in Lunghua camp.

The communist rising of 1927 in Shanghai, and the men who plan it, to its defeat.

Two Austrians escape a British camp, cross Tibet on foot and settle in Lhasa for years.

Disguised as a beggar, the first Western woman to walk into the forbidden city.

1971: two boys sent to a Sichuan mountain for re-education, a seamstress and banned books.

Smiley’s man in Hong Kong follows Soviet money through the colony and into Indochina.

A Eurasian doctor and a married English journalist in Hong Kong, as China turns red.