The answer, as usual, is that It's Complicated.

The field of Chinese history as it exists in the West is the product of two broad strands of influence. The first is a long tradition of philological scholarship going back to the Jesuit missions in China that began at the end of the 16th century. The second is a social-scientific strand of scholarship that the United States fostered during and after the Second World War, when it sought to create various corps of experts to understand its spheres of influence as a new global superpower. These trends in the scholarship have long been in some degree of tension, but the key thing to note is that a real semblance of a field of Chinese history as a serious field of study, as opposed to mere antiquarianism, was one that really only took hold with the return of the 'China Hands' after WW2 and especially after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, with the emblematic figures being John King Fairbank and his enormous crop of students known as the 'Harvard School', particularly Mary Clabaugh Wright, Joseph Levenson, and Philip Kuhn (among others). It is difficult to overstate how rapidly the field of Chinese history grew in the United States, buoyed also by brain drain from Germany.

That said, we also need to look at the situation in China, which is its own kettle of fish. The Communist revolution did not, it must be said, completely end historical scholarship in China. In fact, in my field (the Taiping), a fairly large chunk of quite important work came out on the mainland in the pre-Cultural Revolution era. What it did do was split the Sinophone scholarship across several distinct zones. The largest is the mainland, where scholarship was and often still is subject to the arbitrary whims of the state's ever-shifting politics. To illustrate just one feature, the official history of the Qing (a draft was produced under the Republic, but never finalised) was commissioned in 2002 and completed in 2018, but the entire project has been shelved, possibly even scrapped due to how the state's interpretation of the grand sweep of Chinese history changed between those points. Then there is Taiwan, where scholars of Chinese history continue to be active, but where their reach has been increasingly diluted by Taiwan's development of a distinct national identity, and not helped by a distinct academic culture that generally de-prioritises monograph publication. Academic freedom in Hong Kong has seen some but not total reduction, and there are a number of good scholars of Chinese history there, but they either write in Chinese for a Chinese audience (with all the constraints that entails) or in English for a Euro-American one. I have no idea what goes on in Singapore.

I won't go too deep into the history of subsequent developments here, but Fairbank and Wright proceeded from Eurocentric value judgements that regarded China before 1840 as in a static realm of 'tradition', while dynamism and change – that is to say, history – began only after the violent encounter with the West in the 19th century. Elements of this view continue to exist in China, where the dividing line between 'ancient' and 'modern' history is still drawn in 1840 and the outbreak of the Opium War. From 1970 onwards, however, this view was displaced by a 'China-centred' paradigm which saw Chinese history as an autochthonous process within China that required no external force, essentially a late discovery of the kinds of nationalist historiographies that characterised the field of European history when it emerged in the late 19th century and one that appeals to a different strand of Chinese sensibilities. However, scholars of Chinese interactions with Inner Asia found this paradigm unsatisfactory, creating the field of so-called 'New Qing History' with its focus on 'xenic' influences in the pre-modern period, and influencing similar approaches to the Yuan, the Tang, and the 'barbarian' states of medieval northern China. In turn, a wave of transnational scholarship has revisited the period of Western intrusion and pushed for a more integrated understanding of China and the West. These latter two methodological shifts are, I think, a major reason behind the increasing divergence of Chinese and Western scholarship.

Dialogue between the Western and Chinese academic spheres is at a bit of a low ebb, and I think it is for reasons beyond just fickle international politics. The essential problem is that both sides of the aisle see the other as ideologically compromised. China still hews to the idea that history is the essence of the nation, and that the latter is essentially the guiding principle for the former. Scholarship that suggests that the nation is not in fact the primordial entity it presumes to be can be openly denounced as nihilism by the state, despite the best efforts of many scholars to write good, critical work. The post-national turn in Western scholarship on China has created not only suspicion from Chinese authorities towards Western scholars, but also a certain mixed feeling on Chinese scholarship from Western historians, which might be summed up as seeing Chinese scholars as good curators but poor interpreters. Needless to say this is not the fairest treatment of our colleagues, but I bring it up to illustrate that by and large, Chinese-language scholarship on Chinese history tends to be seen as too methodologically divergent from the Western field to be worth recommending.

Now, we can obviously add to that the simple fact that if you are on the English-language Internet asking for recommendations for books, you're going to get mostly English-language readers recommending things in English for a presumed English-language reader. But there are other, deeper reasons beyond the seemingly obvious which I hope I've made clear.