Hello there! The best thing you could do is check out our book list's section on Chinese history as it contains both general works and more period/subject specific books. Hopefully that gives you a good starting point.

History books are going to give you a wildly different idea of what to expect than what you will see. I lived in and taught English in China (and Taiwan and Thailand) and have traveled through a number of other countries and China was by far the least interested in its own culture and history of any of the places I've been. Raw commercialism coupled with a startling disregard for the environment, other people's comfort or safety and a certain amount of pig headed nationalism was the norm. There are lots of people in China and lots of exceptions to this, but that was the norm. My default description for the generic "What was it like in China?!" question is "Like a goblin camp in Lord of the Rings." Google "convenience pants" for one key feature that surprises a lot of new white folks in the Middle Kingdom.

On the plus side nowhere else have I been invited into so many people's homes. Work is extremely easy to find there and these days quite profitable. Contracts don't mean anything however, just because they're signed doesn't been negotiations end.

By far the most accurate book for what life as an expat is like in modern China that I've seen is this one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1770460799/. Eerily accurate to my experience. I would suggest you read that and spend any other spare time working hard on your language skills -- in many countries English is more than enough to have a normal social life and access even to the local culture but China is not one of those.

If you are specificity interested in Chinese culture (as I was) let me warn you right now that the best place to get that is definitely Taiwan where Mao didn't have a chance to kill intellectuals, musicians, dancers, artists and to set fire to museums, and where decades of "culture is from the peasants" propaganda hasn't caused an overall disregard for the achievements of Chinese high culture. Hong Kong is the other stronghold of actual unbroken Chinese culture but HK has always been first and foremost about trade and money and cultural concerns never took the front seat there.