Exploring Must-Read Novels on BookTok

In 1969, a fifteen-year-old Xi Jinping read a Russian novel in a cave, and it explains more about modern China than any policy paper. The novel was Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done, the same book that radicalized Lenin. The hero, Rakhmetov, is a nobleman's son who sleeps on a bed of nails to forge his willpower. Xi was living in a cave dug into a cliff in northern Shaanxi, sleeping on a brick bed, legs covered in lice. He read about Rakhmetov and decided the Russian had identified some