China in Ten Words

About

Ten words — People, Leader, Reading, Writing, Revolution, Grassroots, and four more — become windows into China's transformation from the Cultural Revolution to the 2010s. Yu Hua uses each word as a lens for personal stories that illuminate the lived experience of ordinary Chinese people navigating decades of upheaval, censorship, and breakneck modernization. This is memoir as etymology: each chapter excavates how a common word changed meaning as the country changed around it. Yu Hua writes with wit, courage, and the particular authority of someone who grew up in the China he describes. China in Ten Words is the book that explains modern China not through politics or economics but through language — and the stories ordinary people tell when they think no one in power is listening.