Top 10 China Tech Books to Read in 2025

Top 10 China Tech Books to Read in 2025 (Unranked, A–Z) Scope. Titles published in 2025 (or late 2024) by Chinese authors or Chinese diaspora, selected for general readers on technology, industry, and societal impact—not step-by-step toolbooks or exam manuals.

How we picked. We used an editorial rubric across five dimensions (unranked):

• Relevance (30%): China tech, AI/compute, industrial upgrade, frontier science
• Originality (20%): novel framing, first-hand insight, fresh synthesis
• Rigor (20%): evidence, clarity of argument, credibility of sources
• Readability (20%): narrative strength, accessibility to non-specialists
• Public impact (10%): discussion value, cross-domain relevance

Active Evolution 2: The Road to Disruptive Tech Evolution A wide-angle tour of frontier technologies—brain–computer interfaces, large models, humanoid robots, synthetic biology, organoids, and longevity medicine—framed as a single “active evolution” narrative. The value isn’t technical instruction; it’s a systems-level map of what’s converging, what’s still speculative, and why the next decade’s breakthroughs are likely to be interdisciplinary.

AI Civilization: Prehistory Instead of treating AI as a post-2010 deep learning story, this book argues that “AI civilization” has a longer prehistory—through institutions, data regimes, infrastructure, and shifts in how societies formalize knowledge. It’s a readable historical lens that helps explain why today’s AI competition is also about organization, energy, and governance—not only algorithms.

Artificial General Intelligence: Reconstructing Cognition, Education, and Life A cognition-first read of AGI: less “what models can do,” more “how humans learn, teach, and adapt when intelligence becomes ambient.” The book’s strength is its cross-disciplinary stance—psychology, education, and philosophy—useful for readers thinking about how AI reshapes institutions and human capability, not just product features.

Computing Power Hegemony: Foundations and Breakthroughs of New-Quality Productivity Compute is no longer a background variable; it is the strategic substrate of AI and industrial upgrading. This book packages the compute story for general readers: infrastructure, supply chains, and why “new-quality productivity” increasingly depends on accelerators, data centers, and deployment ecosystems. It’s more industry-forward than research-forward.

Deep Exploration: Decoding DeepSeek and the Future of AI A China-centered narrative of large-model competition using DeepSeek as the focal point: technical logic, cost structure, open vs. closed strategy, and what China’s ecosystem optimizes for. The book is best read as an “industry decoding” title rather than a model tutorial—useful for readers who want to understand incentives, moats, and where scaling pressure really lands.

Humans Are Scarier Than AI A sharp, provocative read that flips the usual fear: the real risk is not AI as an alien agent, but humans amplifying their own incentives through AI. It’s written for broad readership—fast, witty, and designed to trigger debate about responsibility, governance, and “who gets to decide” as models permeate daily life.

Steering the Future: The AI Wave and China’s Development A macro-level account of how AI is framed and reported as a national development driver: industry enablement, social adoption, regulatory challenges, and public narratives. It’s not a research monograph; it’s closer to a curated “state-of-play” perspective—useful for readers who want a wide-angle picture of AI diffusion across sectors in China.

The Boundaries of Artificial Intelligence A “limits-first” AI book: what AI can’t do (or can’t do well) and why those constraints matter. Instead of focusing on surface capabilities, it examines cognition, task formalization, energy constraints, and the gap between optimization on single metrics and broader intelligence. This is one of the better picks if you want a sober counterweight to hype.

The Hangzhou Code: How the “Six Little Dragons” Took Off A city-as-an-innovation-system narrative: how industrial structure, policy design, culture, and talent flows interact to produce repeatable tech success. The book reads as an ecosystem case study rather than a single-company biography—useful for readers tracking “why here, why now” questions about China’s innovation geography.

The Worlds I See A first-person account from one of the most influential figures in modern AI, spanning immigration, academic life, ImageNet-era breakthroughs, and the ethical tensions of AI deployment. It’s readable, personal, and historically informative—ideal for readers who want the human story behind the field’s institutional and scientific turning points.