The Good Earth is widely considered one of the best novels abut China ever written in English. There are several sequels but they are not nearly as good. Chinese people don't know much about China. Once you start speaking the language you start finding out all their dirty little secrets.
Lots of Chinese people don't speak Chinese very well. Many times I know their culture better than they do. Ask people the story of Qixi and they only have a vague surface level understanding. What were Jiang Zemin's main accomplishments? Just read the dang book, it's a fast read and it won awards all over the place. It's out of copyright so you can find it on all the usual ebook sites like archive.org and such.