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From the SoilBook

by Fei Xiaotong

Who uses, recommends or left From the Soil, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Matt Sheehan
Matt Sheehan is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
recommended

It's called From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. It's a book by a Chinese sociologist in the 30s and 40s guy named Faoong who was trained in the west, went back to China, applied kind of western sociological paradigms to studying Chinese villages and agriculture. And it's just one of the most insightful books about Chinese culture. So, I'd encourage people to to seek that one out. I read it every 3 or four years.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “The ‘But China!’ Dilemma Driving the A.I. Race” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-matt-sheehan.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-09-15·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

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