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 in the UK.
One of Mason's top ten books on China, as told to the Guardian:
Read about the other books on the list.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.
--Marshal Zeringue