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Notes -
For the events of the Mao era, Frank Dikötter's People's Trilogy will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. I haven't read his more recent book covering the last half century, although I think the focus there is more on the economic side of things. It's hard to find unbiased accounts of the 1989 protests and events since then in English, so your best bet might be to supplement whichever interchangeable mainstream source you choose to consult with something like Carl Zha's Silk and Steel podcast (unfortunately most of his newer stuff is paywalled), which will give you the opposite perspective, and split the difference. I tend to get my own information on these things secondhand from older relatives who are plugged in to the Chinese language media ecosystem.
The main item you left out of your list was the extreme covid lockdowns and subsequent CCP crackdown on anti-lockdown protestors in 2022. This is the proximate cause of the current wave of emigration that has sent hundreds of thousands of their citizens fleeing to Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and the US in the last 3 years. Dan Wang's 2023 letter gives a good rundown of this. There's also the ever-present persecution of religious adherents, though the Falun Gong diaspora take it a bit far with overblown claims of mass executions of prisoners to harvest their organs (though feel free to investigate this yourself). Most of the rest is bog-standard developing country stuff that isn't China-specific e.g. air pollution from factories causing illness, infrastructure projects built too fast that occasionally collapse, lax safety standards in food and consumer products, and so on.
I don't know about general world history books, as that seems a bit too broad of a topic for a single volume that isn't a college textbook, but for pre-modern China, Mote's Imperial China is in the running for best history book I've ever read. For Korea, I have a few books on my list, but haven't gotten around to them yet, so can't give an informed recommendation.
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