Books recommended by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2020. It includes both fiction and nonfiction, including Marxist and liberal political theory. It was published in English (source) and Chinese (source) with some slight differences.
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
- 大学- The Great Learning (Zengzi)
- 诗经 - The Book of Songs (Confucius)
- 礼记 - The Book of Rites
- 管子 - The Guanzi
- 论语 - The Analects of Confucius
- 孟子 - Mencius
- 荀子 - Xunzi
- 左传 - Zuo Zhuan
English only
- 春秋 - Spring and Autumn Annals (Confucius)
- 古今小说 - Stories to Enlighten the World (Feng Menglong)
Chinese version only
- 老子 - Tao Te Ching (Laozi)
- 中唐 - Doctrine of the Mean (Zisi)
- 尚书 - Book of Documents
- 周易 - I Ching
- 国语 - Discourses of the States
- 庄子 - Zhuangzi
- 晏子春秋 - Spring and Autumn Annals (Master Yan)
- 吕氏春秋 - Spring and Autumn Annals (Lü Buwei)
History
- 史记 - Selections from Records of the Historian (Sima Qian)
- 汉书 - 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
- 平凡的世界 - 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