I really liked the audiobook of “The Search for Modern China” by Jonathan Spence. It is a history of the past 400 years of Chinese history, with a strong emphasis on continuity and grand trends while still excellently covering individual personalities (such as Mao).

The book is a little older so stuff after about 1980 is barely in there, but the work is one of the go to books on modern China. Spence is an extra-super-elite China expert, holding a “Sterling Professorship” at Yale.

Stephen Platt's Imperial Twilight and Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom are both books with an audiobook format that are highly recommended – check out the booklist for mini-reviews of those by flairs.

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.