The False Dragon - Paperback

In 1944, twelve-year-old Song Li watches Japanese soldiers tear through his village along the Xiang River -- the first of many losses that will follow him through eight decades of upheaval.

The False Dragon follows three generations of one Chinese family as they survive war, revolution, and the relentless machinery of the Chinese Communist Party. From the chaos of the Japanese invasion and the desperate flight to Taiwan, through Mao's Great Famine and the brutal fever of the Cultural Revolution, to a granddaughter who comes face-to-face with the surveillance state and detention camps of Xi Jinping's Xinjiang -- this is a family's fight to survive a country that keeps reinventing new ways to devour its own people.

Spanning Song Li's China, his daughter's China, and his granddaughter's China, the novel asks the same dangerous question in every generation: how do you stay human when the state demands you betray everyone you love?

Drawing on the author's decade of working and teaching inside the CCP, and inspired by the work of Jung Chang, The False Dragon is an unflinching, deeply researched epic about the cost of power, the persistence of family, and the long shadow cast by a regime that calls itself a dragon but isn't worthy of the name.

For readers of Wild Swans and Pachinko, and anyone who wants to understand the human price of Communist China's last eighty years.