The problem of China - Bertrand Russell. Published in 1922. It's not recent but is an incredible insight for the era and forward thinking piece. It is incredibly relevant today.
A book from 1922? That's back during the Republican era, pre-civil war. I think any resource from before 30 years ago is totally irrelevant in today's setting, except maybe to explain how Chinese modern history developed.
It's shocking how accurate his predictions were, and I think it's really important to understand that these weren't lucky guesses. They were the product of a deep and insightful analysis of Chinese culture and society that is still very much relevant today. The personalities have changed, but in many ways China is still China.
He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant joke.
"In fact, [the west] have quite as much to learn from [China] as they from us, but there is far less chance of our learning it."
"[There's] a great eagerness to acquire Western learning, not simply in order to acquire national strength and be able to resist Western aggression, but because a very large number of people consider learning a good thing in itself"
But is there something specific to Chinese culture that he argued made them more corrupt? Because it seems to me like basically all poor countries are corrupt, that they tend to get less corrupt as they get richer (or rather, they get richer as they get less corrupt) and China in 1922 was very poor indeed.
Honestly it's very hard to tell. It's quite short. My wife is Chinese and I've spent a bit of time over there. It's hard for me to tell which aspects of cultural behaviour over there are a product of several generations of communist rule and which date back earlier. What I can say is the business environment over there is bare naked ruthless. It's always possible to make a deal, right up to the moment it isn't and then you're done. As for social order, the Chinese believe in the rule of authority, not law.
> most Chinese don't even understand how CCP works
That's on purpose, the first test of getting power to work for you is an intelligence and ambition check: can you focus enough ability for long enough to sniff out where the networks of power are ?
It works because a large part of it is based not just on Chinese culture, but on human nature.
Its the reason that the Ten Commandments are still relevant today, because as Paul Mooney said, "It puts its foot in man's ass", or in other words, because many of the stories in the Bible were written by people with an understanding of human nature.
The same reason so much of the Constitution of the United States of America still works. Its written to humanity's nature, not current events of 1776.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. He covers pilot error a lot in this book in how it falls back on design and usability. Very interesting read.
