NBN Book of the Day · Marshall Poe
Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)
·1 hr 11 min·5 clips
Xu Guoqi recalls being a peasant kid with 'no hope' under Mao, seeing the famine's toll fall entirely on the countryside.
As heard by us
A family-rooted look at who belongs in China's story.
The piece keeps circling a plain but stubborn question: what counts as China, and who gets counted as Chinese? Its strongest ground is the family history, especially the gap between Xu's own education and the lives of siblings who had little or no schooling and moved through the…
Why you'd press play
If you want China history that starts with lived inequality, press play.
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