I am not sure about the bargain part. It is a window in the roots of Chinese society and mainly its relation to rural communities and villages (from a sociology perspective). I would recommend it to anyone trying to understand a society based on its people and not its politicians. Also anyone from a rural small town in the US or any other country, I think will enjoy it.

Your comment reminded me of this book:

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, which I read many years ago, as a teenager or young adult.

I was quite moved by it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_S._Buck

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth

Excerpt:

[ The Good Earth is a historical fiction novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in a 20th-century Chinese village in Anhwei. It is the first book in her House of Earth trilogy, continued in Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of American missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. ]

It is only today that I got to know, due to googling for the links, that she won both the Pulitzer prize and the Nobel prize for Literature, partly for that book.

Any key takeaways that apply to 2024?

Depends on whether it's a brutally honest, historically accurate assessment or simply imaginative propaganda.

As could be said for any recounting of history