Looking back helps us to look forwards. For China, as with other nations and states, understanding its history is essential to decoding its future. Yet China is notable for its selective memory and sudden historical breaks. Xi Jinping himself has quoted a Qing scholar saying that “To destroy a country, you must first destroy its history.” He was warning about ‘historical nihilism,’ relating in part to the Party’s own past, but the line could equally apply to China’s collective acts of self-forgetting. The quote is used as an epigraph in our top pick this month, a reported history of the Cultural Revolution that digs into questions about historical memory. On the shortlist are other works that fuse past and present, from China’s Communist Revolution and regime resilience to a history of its political left, as well as studies from the nation’s edges, on Taiwan and Lhasa. As ever, there is a glut of fascinating new China books to bury one’s nose in, and later in the s