TRUE COLORS OF CHINA is an informative, even-handed, and culturally rich one-book introduction that will provide the reader with a deeper understanding of China's history, culture, society, and contemporary development.

“Neither polemic nor apology, True Colors of China is a searching and deeply informed exploration of a nation and people too often misunderstood. The world-renowned sociologist Yu Xie blends memoir, history, and social analysis, inviting readers to come face-to-face with a country shaped by aspiration and money, state power and family life, cultural tradition and breathtaking transformation. This book compels us to see China as a complex, evolving society whose trajectory will shape the global order for generations to come.” Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted and Poverty, by America

China is deeply complex—politically fraught, uneven, history-oriented, far-seeing and vast. It cannot be reduced to headlines about Hong Kong, Taiwan, or trade wars, nor can it be fully understood through simplistic references to Communist authoritarianism or Confucian culture. Professor Yu Xie's book is not an attempt to defend, condemn, or simplify China. Instead, his aim is both more modest and more demanding: to develop new tools for understanding China on its own terms, situating it securely within its historical and cultural contexts, explaining its contradictions, achievements, and failures. Set aside your preconceived ideas and step into China’s alternative universe—come to see China not as an abstraction or a threat or an enigma, but as a living, real, and ever-evolving society.

Professor Yu Xie in many ways himself embodies the history of modern China. Born during the Great Chinese Famine, that he survived that ill-timed infancy is itself miraculous, and his family was forced during the Cultural Revolution to relocate into rural poverty, and faced degradation, but the death of Mao and the revival of the Gaokao national entrance exam meant Yu was lucky enough to be the one boy in a hundred in his county to qualify for university, in Shanghai, from where he embarked on an international academic career that has seen him teach and research in both China and America, founding research institutes in Peking and Princeton alike, and becoming world-renowned for the most systematic longitudinal data collection ever undertaken in the superpower. And it is what that rich resource has uncovered that powers the revelatory expert analysis of this book, which uses a powerful, clear and compelling three-colour structure to convey the characteristics of Chinese difference and to correct long-standing Western misapprehensions.

“I believe this book is badly needed and would be sure to reach a broad audience. Yu Xie’s deep knowledge of the two cultures he explains makes him the ideal person to explain the two nations to one another. The writing is fresh and highly accessible.” Richard E. Nisbett, author of The Geography of Thought