CWN#12.5: 2025 in books, according to China's official media
A slightly obsessive synthesis of 20 end-of-year book lists
Welcome back to the Cold Window Newsletter. Maybe it’s bad form to still be writing end-of-year content in late February, but there’s one more book list I want to get off my chest before I’m ready to leave 2025 behind.
EOY: Round-up of round-ups
I’ve already written about what books educated urban internet users in China read in 2025, and I’ve told you what I personally think were the best Chinese fiction collections of the year. But the big picture is still missing.
For better or for worse, print culture in China is very top-down. It’s the books that get support from authorities—academics, influencers, and, most crucially, official media—that tell the most complete story of where publishing in China is going. The types of books that will dominate the next publishing cycle are the ones that won official approbation, not the ones that appealed to ordinary readers like myself
So here I am again, ringing in the Year of the Horse with a round-up of round-ups. Last year, I tallied eight end-of-year book lists from official and semi-official media and wrote about the most frequently recurring titles. This year, I’ve expanded the slate to cover 20 book lists from cultural departments, (state-affiliated) magazines, and publishing industry blogs.1 I’ll leave links to all the lists at the bottom of this post so you can peruse at your leisure.
This is a very unscientific way to measure publishing in China, but it does turn up a few fun discoveries:
The publishing market is extremely fractured. Besides a handful of runaway vote-getters by authors with strong establishment ties, nearly no books appeared on more than a handful of lists. Everyone I know in the Chinese publishing industry has told me that sales are dropping rapidly across the board, but from what I can see, the number of books getting published (especially nonfiction) is still high. When a lot of books are produced and few people read them, does it become harder for any one book to capture broad attention?
The books that win official acclaim are not always good. It’s blindingly obvious that being an established public figure, or holding a leading position in the national Writers’ Association, is heavily correlated with getting praise on these lists. Maybe I’m just salty that almost none of my favorite books from last year had a strong showing.2 But I do find it notable that a handful of books that I and other Douban users found very lackluster slipped onto one list after another anyway.
Mass appeal is a non-factor. These lists favor academic books. They favor new books by older authors who published their best work decades ago. They’re meant to tell you what books you’re supposed to consider important, not what books you’re supposed to be reading. If you’re looking for book recommendations, take these with a big grain of salt.
Let’s get started.
Nonfiction: A mental health odyssey, wartime chronicles, and a solid brick of Joan Didion
梁鸿《要有光》 (You Have to Shine by Liang Hong), an investigation into youth mental health from big cities to remote villages (9 lists)
吴真《暗斗：一个书生的文化抗战》(Silent Struggle: A Student’s Cultural War of Resistance by Wu Zhen), a history book about students’ contributions to resistance against Japan in the 1940s (8 lists)
易彬《幻想底尽头：穆旦传》(Deepest Roots of Fantasy: A Biography of Mu Dan by Yi Bin), an academic biography of the 20th-century poet (5 lists)
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion, a thousand-page collection of her essays that’s heavy enough to bash someone’s head in (3 lists)
Kafka: The Years of Realization, 1916-1924 by Reiner Stach, volume 3 of a magisterial biography (3 lists)
Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps, an investigation into the tragic 2017 London high-rise fire (3 lists)
Nonfiction always performs better than fiction in China, and the unambiguous winner of these lists was 《要有光》 You Have to Shine by Liang Hong, her investigation into youth mental in China. High-profile book-length treatments of mental health are vanishingly rare in China, and as a fan of Liang’s earlier Liang Village trilogy 梁庄三部曲, I’m inclined to believe the hype surrounding her new book. Perhaps slightly less so on the many, many books memorializing China’s wartime struggle against Japan, as their presence on these lists feels like an inevitable consequence of last year’s coordinated push to highlight patriotic war stories in time for the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II.
Translated nonfiction on these lists is mostly literary essays and academic biography. But a few more topical books also made appearances, including translations of Jonathan Haidt’s (exasperating) The Anxious Generation, W. David Marx’s (also exasperating) Status and Culture, and, most interestingly, Peter Apps’ account of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen.3
Fiction: Late-career male writers suck up all the glory
苏童《好天气》 (Elegy for the Dying Township by Su Tong), a 700-page epic following one urban and one rural family across decades (5 lists)
刘震云《咸的玩笑》 (Salty Jokes by Liu Zhenyun), the author’s latest novel to mine humor from ordinary Chinese life (5 lists)4
刘亮程《长命》 (Long Life by Liu Liangcheng), a new novel about Northwestern Chinese village life by the winner of 2023’s Mao Dun Literature Prize 茅盾文学奖 (4 lists)
The Collected Stories by William Trevor, 1,700 pages of translated fiction by the late Irish master (3 lists)
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, the Chinese-American novelist’s tale of female friendship in postwar France (2 lists)5
The Geography Teacher Drank His Globe Away by Alexei Ivanov, about a downtrodden Russian middle school teacher (2 lists)
Surprising no one, every single Chinese novel to win top recognition across these official book lists was by a celebrity male author. This is more or less true every year, but at least last year some space was reserved for classic female authors like 王安忆 Wang Anyi and newcomers like 龚万莹 Gong Wanying. Not this year. It’s wall-to-wall middle-aged men: 苏童 Su Tong, 刘亮程 Liu Liangcheng, 陈彦 Chen Yan, 路内 Lu Nei, 徐则臣 Xu Zechen... Some of these authors are still producing good work, but it’s been decades since any of them was truly at the cutting edge of Chinese fiction.
Not many stand-out translated novels this year, but I’m glad to see Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li 李翊云 finally getting her due in the country of her birth. And, since contemporary Russian novels in translation get very little shelf space in the US these days, it’s interesting to watch them continue to be translated and praised in China.
Magazine fiction: Big acclaim for little-known authors
胡性能《惊慌的驼鹿》 (“Startled Moose” by Hu Xingneng, 5 lists)
刘汀《富贵如云》 (“Skies Full of Fortune” by Liu Ting, 5 lists)
陈彦《人间广厦》 (Mansions of Man by Chen Yan, 5 lists)
The slate of book lists that I tallied also includes several prestigious lists of the year’s top fiction published in magazines, including the Harvest Magazine Best Literature of the Year list 收获年度文学榜, probably the highest honor that a short story or novella can receive in China. Once again, the most widely-honored authors are all men, mostly older, mostly high-ranking within the state Writers’ Association 作协. Unlike in the book categories, though, many selected authors in the short fiction categories aren’t celebrities—they’re literary authors with little name recognition and few books to their name, dutifully plying their trade in little-read magazines and gaining coveted awards without the tastes of ordinary readers getting involved at any stage. It’s an interesting glimpse into a closed-off elite literary community that could only exist in a country where culture has historically been kept separate from the market.
That doesn’t mean the stories are bad, but I’m more excited about personal favorite authors whose short works appeared further down on the lists, like 班宇 Ban Yu (《清水心跳》，3 lists), 崔君 Cui Jun (《上重楼》, 3 lists), 陈春成 Chen Chuncheng (《南朝的嗡鸣》, 3 lists), and 赵松 Zhao Song (《细雨》, 2 lists).
Internet literature
Official media is not quite on board with internet literature yet, but in the halfhearted smattering of internet novels that were cited on these book lists, the title that came up most often was 《没钱修什么仙》 No Money to Cultivate Immortality? by 熊狼狗 Bear-Wolf-Dog, a satirical cultivation fantasy about hustle culture and the involution 内卷 grind. Ironically perhaps the most topical book of all.
Predictions
Last year, I predicted that 杜梨 Du Li, 朱婧 Zhu Jing, and 王玉珏 Wang Yujue would release major new fiction collections in 2025. I was only right about Du Li, whose new collection was my second-favorite Chinese book of the year. But I’m ready to try my luck again:6
陈春成 Chen Chuncheng, the wunderkind author of 2020’s 《夜晚的潜水艇》 A Submarine at Night, has been reappearing in literary magazines, so I bet he has a new collection coming. Following up a masterpiece is thankless work—I’m a bit scared for him.
淡豹 Dan Bao’s debut collection in 2020 won her a massive following, but she hasn’t released a follow-up yet. I think this may be the year!
I am a big fan of 辽京 Liao Jing. And while she’s been releasing books at a furious rate these last few years, I think I’ve clocked enough uncollected stories by her in literary journals recently that we might get yet another collection from her in 2026. Fingers crossed.
Book lists tallied for this post:
That’s it for this issue. Next month: introducing a buzzy new class of amateur writers, and hopefully my first author interview of the year. Thanks as always for reading.
On WeChat public accounts. These lists are a good gauge of mainstream publishing but are definitely dwarfed in reach by Xiaohongshu bookfluencers. Something to look at next year.
But 《歌杰斯》 “Gorgeous,” the terrific drag queen novella by 陈思安 Chen Si’an, made the otherwise rather stodgy Harvest Best Novellas of the Year list, which just goes to show that official media and canon-making in China are never as predictable or consistent as you expect them to be.
The Douban reviews of the Chinese edition are worth skimming. Many tiptoe around the political sensitivity of publishing a book about preventable urban tragedy in China right now. Apparently the translation was delayed for years, during which time the draft title changed from 《让我看到真相》 to 《我们是如何让格伦费尔塔楼火灾发生的》 to 《格伦费尔塔楼火灾是如何发生的》.
Which you can translate a chapter of before April 19, for a chance to win £1500!
Strongly recommend the review essay about The Book of Goose over at The Chinese Room.
I’m not cheating! Book releases seem typically to be announced much closer to the book’s actual publication date in China than in the US and Europe, so most of the 2026 literary release schedule is still a mystery. If there is a reliable way to find out about book releases more than a month or two before they happen, I would love to know it.
agreed! very happy that there are chinese translations of yiyun li, and am very curious to read them, in her, first, but translated language.