Let’s go back to the time when the Republic of China was still young, and around the time when China’s Communist Party was founded in 1921. Your first book choice is Call to Arms. It’s the first collection of stories by one of modern China’s most major and influential writers, Lu Xun. Why should everyone know the name of Lu Xun and how does Call to Arms sum up the mood of its time?

Lu Xun should be known to a wide range of readers overseas for two reasons. One – in a sense the more boring reason – is that he is politically very important. He’s always been brought up by the Communist Party as being the single most important writer of the 20th century in China. That’s partly because his message is about how China needed to radically reject its past associated with the Confucian system of ethics that underpinned the old empires, and instead embrace something more new and radical. You can see how that appealed to people involved in the Communist project.

But the real reason why people need to appreciate Lu Xun is that he was a very interesting and subtle writer. Interestingly, although the Communist party were very keen to get him on board, he never actually joined the party. I think this is because one element that runs through his writing which is absolutely core to his being is a very black, nuanced, sardonic sense of humour. Speaking of Communist literature, he once said – probably with a smile on his face – that the Communist idea of a perfect poem went as follows: “O steamwhistle! O Lenin!”

This particular collection consists of a series of short stories, most of which have very subtly – not in a way that shoves the message in your face – an underlying current of ideas about modern China. One of the most famous is “The Diary of a Madman”, homage in part to Gogol’s original in the 19th century, and based on the same idea that a public official who has suddenly gone crazy but actually sees things much more clearly than his supposedly sane counterparts, colleagues and family.

In this case, what he suddenly sees, in the light of the moon while he’s in his mad state, is that the whole of Chinese culture has consisted of cannibalism. He looks between the lines of the great Confucian classics of literary tradition, and sees that the secret message is “go and eat people”. This is clearly a metaphor for Confucian thinking – for the old-fashioned way in which Chinese society had been bound up in expectations of the past, which had almost become encrusted on society and from which they needed to break free.

These short stories were a real indictment of Chinese society as a whole. I should add though – and Lu Xun himself saw the irony – that when Call to Arms was first published, I think the first edition sold a grand total of 40 copies, so it didn’t exactly turn China upside-down on publication. Although there are many very fine English translations, the latest one from Penguin classics translated by Julia Lovell has a very colloquial, lively feel in its translation.

Jumping forwards to the 1930s and 40s, the two rival forces which arose after the failed promise of the 1911 revolution are Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. The book you’ve chosen here is an American perspective on events, Graham Peck’s Two Kinds of Time.

Two Kinds of Time is the only one of the five books I’ve chosen that’s not actually by a Chinese, but I’ve chosen it because it seems to me, of the fairly wide range of things you can read about World War Two in China, to be the single most evocative. It’s quite a long book but it actually goes by quite fast. One doesn’t have to make too much of an effort because the prose is so good. Of the many people who came to China in the 20th century and wrote about it, Peck remains one of the most fluid and sensitive.

His description of a Japanese wartime air raid over occupied China is one of the funniest passages I’ve read on China, which is actually rather odd considering the nature of the topic. This vision of people walking at first with dignity, and then deciding as the planes get closer that they’ll make a run for it and dignity be blown, is very nicely done. It’s not in any way mocking, he is someone who was a friend of many Chinese and lived amongst them. So it’s very much a story with the Chinese, rather than looking at them.

It’s also a very important book because it speaks about a very important historical moment which we’ve almost forgotten, which was the debate in cold war America about – as they put it – who “lost China”. In other words, why did China turn to the communists? Peck’s book is probably the best of those which argue that essentially America spent too long propping up the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek that ruled China at the time, that became corrupt, hollowed out and ineffective – and that essentially cleared the way for the communists to take over, because the Americans clung too long to a failed leader.

The book itself is not important because of what it says about the interpretation, but rather it gives a fabulous picture of this moment when America and the West more generally and China try to come to an understanding and singularly fail, and unfortunately set the path, for the best part of a quarter of a century, for isolation from each other before things change again in the 1960s and 1970s.