I live in Shanghai and have been using "Birds of East Asia" for about a month. Despite its imperfections, especially as regards its treatment of China, Mark Brazil's opus should be on the bookshelf of every birder in eastern China. For many of us, "East Asia" will supplant MacKinnon's "Birds of China" as the book we turn to first for eastern Chinese birds.
The species accounts in "East Asia" are long and detailed, and the paintings are not just big and beautiful but also accurate. The accuracy of the paintings may be the biggest advantage of "East Asia" over MacKinnon. I photographed a zitting cisticola last year and mistook it for a Japanese swamp warbler, in part because the painting in MacKinnon of the cisticola is inaccurate. The zitting cisticola in "East Asia" looks just like the bird in my photo.
In the prefatory material, Brazil says that "East Asia" originally was going to cover the Japanese archipelago and Korean Peninsula only. Brazil's earlier plan is evident in the book. Eastern China (except for Manchuria) is a bit of an afterthought. Brazil includes all of Northeast China then hugs the Chinese coast to Fujian before turning east to Taiwan. "East Asia" also covers all of Japan, all of Korea, and all of Russia east of about 116 degrees east longitude.
Brazil may have had good reasons for not including the inland Chinese provinces, such as Jiangxi (which would have allowed him to include Courtois's laughingthrush). And it's true that few would agree that ALL of China lies in East Asia. So where do you draw the line? Farther west, I would say. (Suggestion: exclude the ornithologically complex provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, Gansu, Inner Mongolia west of 110 degrees east latitude, and all provinces west. Include everything else.)
After all, what could be more "East Asian" than, say, Hunan or Anhui? If you're standing on Mount Huang, the beloved mountain in Anhui, and someone asks you what region of the world you're in, don't you say, "East Asia"? Yet neither province gets coverage in a book called "Birds of East Asia."
Another mystery is why Brazil didn't stretch his coverage one more province south, to Guangdong, thereby taking in Hong Kong as well. Hong Kong has many English-speaking birders, many of whom might have made "East Asia" their No. 1 reference for their region. They're less likely to do that now. (And again, geographically speaking, excluding Hong Kong and Guangdong makes little sense, as those territories are commonly thought of as being in East Asia, as opposed to, say, Southeast Asia.)
Including more of the inland Chinese provinces would have given Brazil a better claim to have written a fully East Asian bird guide as well as THE field guide in English for eastern China. As it stands now, Brazil's book might better be called "Birds of Northeast Asia (Including Coastal China and Taiwan)."
That being said, birders in Taiwan, Northeast China, Korea, and Japan may find that Brazil has written THE bird guide for them. We birders along the southern Chinese coast will also find "East Asia" highly satisfactory.