Paul Mason is the BBC's Newsnight economics editor. He is the author of Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2008), Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2010) and, this year, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. His first novel, Rare Earth, has also just been published.

Buy Rare Earth by Paul Mason

"If you're trying to understand China the language issues are secondary. The real problem is this is a country ruled through the suppression of historical memory. The Communists' legitimacy rests on the claim that only stultifying bureaucracy and patriarchy can keep it together; that it is "not ready" for democracy; indeed that it was never ready.

"But delve into Chinese literature, and history, and a more much more complex picture emerges. After the May Fourth 1919 protests, the intelligentsia embraced modernity and fought for it. The early 20th century produced the Chinese Dickens and a whole legion of Orwells. The late 20th century produced a generation of novelists whose sufferings during the Cultural Revolution pushed them towards everything from magic realism to cyberpunk.

"What follows are 10 books that influenced me in the writing of Rare Earth: five must-read Chinese novels, five western-authored non-fiction books worth reading."

1. The Real Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (translated by Julia Lovell)

Between 1911 and 1927 China had a democratic revolution, then an abortive workers' revolution. In the process came a cultural revolution, of which novelist Lu Xun was the central figure. His fictional character Ah Q entered popular culture of China as a symbol of bureaucratic stupidity, self regard and obsession with hierarchy. Today, China is once again run by men of Ah Q's calibre, and Lu is out of favour.

2. Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan

This is Mo's masterpiece: China's 20th century told symbolically through the story of one man, from birth to maturity; an adult who cannot wean himself from his mother's milk, assailed by wave upon wave of misfortune, poverty, war, imprisonment and finally release into the grubby capitalism of the 1990s. Mo Yan's China is a world of magic, sexual exploitation, ignorance and senseless violence.

3. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

This fictionalised memoir of a journey down the Yangtse River was acclaimed as a landmark in Chinese literature when he won the Nobel prize in 2000. It's a novel of introspection and loneliness. Gao's plays have been banned from performance after the authorities condemned his drama about the Tiananmen Square massacre as "a fabrication" on the grounds that he had not been there at the time.

4. The Plum in the Golden Vase (translated by David Tod Roy)

This classical novel has spent much of the time since 1610 on the banned list, as pornographic. For once, the censors may have a point. It's a novel of manners, set amongst noblemen and concubines, which makes Fanny Hill look Presbyterian and the artefacts available in Anne Summers look distinctly unimaginative. You can trace the influence right through to modern Chinese fiction …

5. Wang in Love and Bondage by Xiaobo Wang

… for example. Wang, who died in 1997, and was modern China's Genet. Haunted by his suffering during the Cultural Revolution, Wang's fiction is, well, strange: gay sadomasochism, casual satire against the state, surreal sex. When his character Wang, and paramour Chen, write a confession of their secret love affair, Wang admits his lover "looked like a koala bear. She admitted she was very excited that night and really felt like a koala bear." So it goes.

6. The Penguin History of Modern China by Jonathan Fenby

Jonathan Fenby's scholarly volume manages to escape the biggest pitfall of contemporary history writing about China, which is anachronism. Too many studies see the modern, stagnant polity and deferential culture as simply the return of normality in China, after an interruption that began on May Fourth 1919 and ended with the death of Mao. Fenby tells it as a story of modernity and democracy - attempted and defeated.

7. Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 by Philip Cunningham

This memoir of the 1989 student rebellion captures the senseless beauty of the rebellion from close up: Cunningham was a foreign student freelancing for the BBC, who knew many of the protesters and witnessed the main events. As events spiral out of control, his prose becomes filmic, poetic, disturbed.

8. Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour by Hsiao-Hung Pai

Investigative journalist Hsiao-Hung documents the lives of Chinese migrant workers in the UK, prey to a vivid, near surreal panoply of gangsters, traffickers, pimps and middlemen whose defining feature is that they appear to be invisible to the British authorities. She explains the push factor too: writing with brutal honesty about conditions for Chinese workers in the PRC, and the criminal networks all too ready to offer the solution of semi-slavery in Europe.

9. Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience by Charles A Laughlin

In the 1930s, China seemed headed for democracy, national liberation and modernity. On the periphery of Chinese communism and liberalism a strong tradition of reportage journalism developed, represented above all by Mao Dun, the Chinese Orwell. By the time Orwell got to Wigan Pier, dozens of Chinese writers had already journeyed to the depths of industrial squalor. Their work is intelligently explained and translated here by Yale professor Charles Laughlin.

10. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 by Emily Honig

A sidelong glimpse into the lost world of inter-war Shanghai. While Hollywood stars and jazz legends cavorted on the neon-lit river-front, the largely female factory workforce did something their great grand-daughters are still not able to: formed unions, marched out on strike and, temporarily, seized power. This (1986) study is part of a canon of Chinese social history rediscovered by western scholars.