Books recommended by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2020 (source). It includes both fiction and nonfiction, including Marxist and liberal political theory.
Marxist-Leninist classics
- The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)
- Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Vladimir Lenin)
- Das Kapital (Karl Marx)
- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Karl Marx)
- Anti-Dühring (Friedrich Engels)
- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Karl Marx)
- Critique of the Gotha Program (Karl Marx)
- Materialism and Empirio-criticism (Vladimir Lenin)
- Selected Works of Mao Zedong
Philosophy and law
- The Origin and Goal of History (Karl Jaspers)
- The Republic (Plato)
- One-Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse)
- World Order (Henry Kissinger)
- The Social Contract (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
- Utopia (Thomas More)
- The City of the Sun (Tommaso Campanella)
- Two Treatises of Government (John Locke)
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel)
- The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu)
Chinese classics
- The Great Learning (Zengzi)
- The Spring and Autumn Annals (Confucius)
- The Book of Songs (Confucius)
- The Book of Rites
- The Guanzi
- The Analects of Confucius
- Mencius
- Xunzi
- Zuo Zhuan
- Stories to Enlighten the World (Feng Menglong)
History
- Selections from Records of the Historian (Sima Qian)
- Chronicles of the Han Dynasty
- History of Modern Europe
Economy
- Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman)
- The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
- An Essay on the Principle of Population (Thomas Malthus)
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty)
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (John Keynes)
- Theory of Economic Development
- Economic Growth of Nations
Chinese contemporary literature
- Ordinary World (Lu Yao)
- Plot Against
- The Message
Foreign classics
- How the Steel Was Tempered (Nikolai Ostrovsky)
- A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)
- And Quiet Flows the Don (Mikhail Sholokhov)
- War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Shakespeare's plays
- Macbeth
- Hamlet
- Othello
- King Lear
- Romeo and Juliet
- Twelfth Night
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
Others
- Faust
- The Sea Wolf (Jack London)
- Ninety-Three (Victor Hugo)
- Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
- The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
- Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
- A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
- The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
- The Federalist Papers