Dissecting the Douban Best Books of 2025 lists
An impromptu bonus issue
Welcome to an unusually haphazard issue of the Cold Window Newsletter. I’m knee-deep in preparations for other literature posts I want to get out during the year-end season, but when I scrolled through the freshly-released Douban Best Books of the Year lists last night, I knew I was going to have to put everything else on hold. I have a LOT of thoughts on this year’s featured books and what they say about reading and publishing in China right now. Let’s get into it.
If you’re not familiar with Douban 豆瓣, it’s the rare social media platform in China that has a lot of goodwill among young people, myself included. (Disclosure: I was an intern at Douban for a while, but I was not involved in any year-end Best Books lists, and I’m writing this post purely as an outside user and reader.) In my experience, Douban attracts a primarily young, urban, highly-educated userbase—very artsy, very international-minded, more than a little pretentious. Until a crackdown in 2021, Douban also had a reputation as a gathering space for feminists, and it’s still a largely female space where books by authors like Elena Ferrante, Chizuko Ueno, and Lin Yi-han 林奕含 reign.
All this is to say that, while Douban is by no means representative of all of China, it’s pretty representative of China’s young intellectual class. And in a country with almost no major independent literary prizes or dedicated book review venues, that makes Douban’s annual Best Books of the Year lists a pretty big deal.1
I’m going to move my way somewhat recklessly through the list, commenting on whatever jumps out at me. If you want to follow along, you can do so here.
Top books: good year for literary memoir, dismal year for fiction
It wouldn’t be Douban if I wasn’t blindsided right out of the gate by some esoteric deep cuts. The #1 book this year is an essay collection by Huang Xiaodan 黄晓丹 about ancient Chinese poetry from Qu Yuan 屈原 to Wu Meicun 吴梅村—pretty standard fare for a Chinese bestseller, if surprisingly bland for the top book on the entire site all year. But then, at #2, we have—The Shadow of the Sun, a 1998 memoir about midcentury travels through Africa by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński? I’m sure it’s good, but this is a bizarre title to put at the top of the list, one that doesn’t accord with any publishing trend in China that I’m currently aware of. And, in a big departure from past years, this book about twentieth-century Africa and another about ancient Greece are the only non-Asian books anywhere in the top 10.
Longform personal narrative—approximately what would be called “memoir” in English, but which in Chinese is simply referred to as 非虚构, nonfiction—has been riding high in China for the last few years. It’s somewhat appropriate that the strong nonfiction crop on this list is headed by the new book from Liang Hong 梁鸿, who basically invented the genre with her 梁庄 Liang Village series a decade ago. (The new book is 《要有光》 You Have to Shine, at #3.) Other nonfiction in the top rank shows off the cosmopolitanism of the Chinese publishing market: a Chinese woman’s record of traveling through the Middle East; a debut memoirist’s reflections on her upbringing in an Yi ethnic minority 彝族 community. These books look great. To cover all the good literary nonfiction coming out of China would require a whole other Substack.
But then there’s the fiction. One solitary novel, known in English as A Father’s Liberation Diary, first published in 2022 by the South Korean writer Jeong Ji-a. I had never heard of it, as it’s never been translated into English, but it appears to be based on Jeong’s own father, a socialist guerilla in the 1950s, and his later struggles under the harsh anticommunist policies of the South Korean military dictatorship. It’s won acclaim in Korea and sounds pretty good (I recommend Jiwon Yoon’s post at Understanding Korea if you want to know more). But for this to be the only fiction in the top ten, and the only book by a non-Chinese author writing in her own language about her own country,2 feels like a disappointing shrinking of viewpoints compared to prior years.
Fiction: strong feminist representation in a weak year
Even if fiction had a terrible showing in the top 10, there should at least be some hope on the dedicated fiction lists themselves, right? Well, sort of. On the Best Chinese Fiction list, old favorites of mine like Ban Yu 班宇 and Mo Yin 默音 (both Cold Window features from earlier in 2025!) made appearances, as well as new books by well-reputed female authors like Ning Buyuan 宁不远 and Dong Lai 东来. The only older celebrity author to make the list is Su Tong 苏童, perhaps reflecting readers’ increasing complaints that the older generation of classic authors don’t write as well as they used to.
The problem is, none of these books was a phenomenon. Frankly, I spend all my time thinking and talking about new Chinese literature, and yet I don’t know anyone who’s particularly passionate about any of these domestic books.3 Readership numbers seem to confirm this—the first-place Chinese fiction title, The Swallow Chirps, The White Crane Whoops 《燕子呢喃，白鹤鸣叫》 by Ruan Xiqing 阮夕清, has only 888 Douban reviews, fewer than any novel on the translated fiction list except for Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose.
Is this because there’s no new Chinese fiction worth getting excited about? Emphatically not—I could name a half-dozen new books that deserve to go viral on Douban.4 I think it’s more that Chinese readers as a whole are very pessimistic about domestically-produced fiction right now. The public response to that summer plagiarism scandal, which I wrote about in October, exposed a lot of frustration with the literary establishment, including with young authors who are perceived as profiting from ties to the establishment rather than actual literary talent. My sincerest hope is that a novel will come along next year that readers can rally around, that shoves young writers back into the spotlight the way they were with the Dongbei Renaissance a couple years ago.
There’s some consolation in seeing the feminist turn I wrote about in my summer special post continue to develop. It’s visible not only in the Chinese fiction list, but also in the picks for best foreign fiction and nonfiction: The Trouble with Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen, Prima Facie by Suzie Miller, Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick, A Mother With No Name by Lim Suat Hong. It’s a little funny to me that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper can storm the bestseller rankings in China when, to my American eye, it feels like the most high-school-curriculum-core book in the whole world. But there it is, the #2 Best Translated Fiction Book in all of China, proving beyond a doubt that feminist literature rules the market right now.
Rapid fire: the rest of the lists
The top poetry book in China this year was Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. Good.
Working-class narratives by amateur writers have been a huge trend in Chinese writing for the last year or two, but they’re hardly anywhere to be found on these Douban lists, besides the memoir Delivery Driver 《跑外卖》 by Wang Wan 王晚 (#7 in “Society and Reportage”) and the migrant worker poetry collection Gulping the Spring Air 《大口呼吸春天》 (#10 in Poetry).
Strong Japanese showing across the board, with an absolute Japanese stranglehold on the Suspense category, obviously.
Books translated from English dominate in the “Science,” “Art and Design,” and “Film and Drama” categories (17/30 books). But they’re almost completely missing from the literature lists. This is clearly a huge shift from twenty years ago, as in the “20th Anniversary of First Publication” section, a whopping 7 out of the 10 novels are translations from English. #1 on that list? A Song of Ice and Fire.
Overall, in a year when I read more Chinese literature that I liked than ever before, these lists leave me a little cold. I feel vindicated by the readers currently piling into Douban and Wechat comment sections to complain that they’ve never heard of any of the books that won, and especially by the Xiaohongshu user who posted:
I choked when I saw the 2025 best books of the year list. What kind of a book blogger am I! There are so many I didn’t know about—I had never even heard of them! That’s it for me, my career is over~
Some people are speculating that reading culture is just too siloed now for any list of books to grab more than a sliver of attention, which I suppose is true, in China just like everywhere else. But more than that, I think there just weren’t any books that truly grabbed the popular imagination this year. I’m not giving up. As long as there’s so much good fiction out there, it’ll get the recognition it deserves someday. Maybe next year.
Thanks for reading. This post might set me back a bit, but I’m still going to keep plowing through books for my upcoming round-up of the Best Chinese Short Fiction of 2025, and I may even put out a special author feature post before then. Keep your eyes peeled, and enjoy the holidays.
The selection process for these lists is notoriously opaque, but it’s rooted in user readership and reviews, with a certain amount of editorial curation from among the most popular titles. So the lists aren’t a pure reflection of mass taste, like the perpetually disappointing Goodreads Choice Awards—but neither is popular opinion totally thrown to the wayside, like in the also perpetually disappointing Mao Dun Literature Prize.
I wouldn’t quite count the nonfiction book by Yoshii Shinobu 吉井忍, who, while Japanese, writes her books in Chinese.
Except myself! I think Mo Yin’s Her Life 《她的生活》 is great!
And in fact I will name them, in an end-of-year round-up post coming... sometime. I’ll try to get it up before New Year’s, but writing these things takes a lot of reading, y’all.