New Books in Chinese Studies (New Books Network)

In Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949 (Cornell UP, 2021), Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country. The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state. Bee Lehman is a history librarian at Boston College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Ian M. Miller’s book Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020) offers a transformation of our understanding of China’s early modern environmental history. Using a wide range of archival materials, including tax, deed, and timber market records, Miller presents a picture of China’s forestry regime, something that, while not centralized—as in European states—was highly effective. Though China never adopted a forest bureau system, Miller shows how China managed, through fiscal policies alone, to engender a remarkably productive commerce in timber and other forest products. Revising the narrative of deforestation, this history of China’s distinct form of forest oversight is sure to be a must-read for anyone interested in the history of China, or environmental history more broadly. Though this is a sweeping book—beginning in China’s early empires and stretching through the Song, Yuan, and Ming to end in the nineteenth century—it is also filled with a number of much more local case studies. With chapters on forest deeds, fleet construction, and the logging of the last old-growth forests for palace construction, this book not only tells a story that will have wide impacts for the field, but manages to create an intimate look at what China’s forest management system looked like to those trying to operate and profit from it. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

As the predominantly Muslim Chinese who claim ancestry from Persian and Arabic-speaking regions in Central Asia and the Middle East, the Hui people in China have received relatively little attention in anthropology. According to the 2010 census, the Hui are the largest Muslim group in China and its third largest ethnic minority with a total population of 10.6 million. Due to their extensive geographic distribution and long-term acculturation by the atheist Han majority, the question of Hui identity is rarely raised in humanities and social sciences both in China and abroad. This book examines Hui iden­tity in the rural area of Ningxia Hui Auto­no­mous Region, while taking account of China’s rapid modernization and industrialization in the twenty-first century. Speci­fi­cally, it focuses on the massive internal migra­tion of rural popu­la­tions, which has been playing an essen­tial role in the socioe­co­nomic life of Chinese peasants in the past few decades. Based on field data collected between 2011 and 2013 among the Jahriyya Hui, Wang seeks to clarify the impacts of migra­tion on the Hui’s ethno­re­li­gious iden­tity by inves­ti­ga­ting three key issues: the Hui’s purity concept, fasting and their belief in the after­world. In rela­tion to these refe­rence points, reli­gious rituals, inclu­ding comme­mo­ra­tion cere­mo­nies and the Ramadan fast as well as their chan­ging forms and values, are illu­s­t­rated and analyzed. Muslim Chinese - the Hui in Rural Ningxia (de Gruyter, 2019) shows that Islam conti­nues to play a crucial part in drawing boun­da­ries and main­tai­ning iden­tity for the Hui both before and after migra­tion. However, popu­la­tion move­ments in Ningxia are resul­ting in increased inter­ac­tions between Hui and Han popu­la­tions as well as between Hui from diverse “menhuan” (Sufi paths). Conse­qu­ently, the Hui’s unique “menhuan” aware­ness is being weakened and their purity concept subjected to many queries, doubts, ambi­gui­ties, and tensions. Xiaoming Wang currently works as a librarian in the East Asia Department of the Berlin State Library. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Free University of Berlin. Her research interests include the anthropology of Islam, identity and migration, power structure, and rural transformation. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China (Rutgers UP, 2022) traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making. Erin Raffety is a research fellow at the Center for Theological Inquiry, an empirical research consultant at Princeton Theological Seminary, and an associate research scholar at Princeton Seminary's Institute for Youth Ministry. Raffety researches and writes on disability, congregational ministry, and church leadership and is an advocate for disabled people. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (U Chicago Press, 2022), ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan. Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present. Meredith Schweig is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on narrative, gender, and cultural politics in post-authoritarian Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Harvard UP, 2023), Dr. Xin Zhang tells the story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang. On July 21, 1842, numerous women in the southeastern Chinese city of Zhenjiang chose to end their lives rather than succumb to invading British soldiers. These events, occurring during the First Opium War (1839-42), exemplify the various ways in which global changes encroached upon local Chinese communities in the nineteenth century. Previous historical accounts have primarily depicted this encounter as a European challenge to a submissive China, while others sought to uncover the nation's "authentic" history through native sources. In contrast, this book presents a groundbreaking approach to modern Chinese history, focusing on the intricate negotiations between local societies and global transformations. This unique "glocal" perspective is developed through three case studies that explore warfare, commerce, and technology in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By avoiding a narrow European or Chinese standpoint, these case studies meticulously illustrate how wider processes of modern imperialism, economic integration, and technological progress reconfigured the fabric of everyday life. The book vividly portrays the experiences of ordinary Chinese individuals as they grapple with forces that reshaped the entire world. Terrified residents of towns resort to self-destruction to evade British soldiers, unscrupulous brokers exploit prostitutes to facilitate their business dealings, and small-scale merchants embrace steam-powered ships for the first time to transport their goods to market. Ultimately, this book reveals how the forces of globalization in the 1800s were filtered through local idiosyncrasies, with no single region of the world serving as an ultimate "core," including Europe. It challenges the notion of a centralized world and proves that not only is the world flat, but it lacks a defined center. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China’s urban landscapes are full of radically different architectural styles which memorialise different eras in the country’s political past, from the remains of imperial palaces or city walls, to Republican-era shophouses, early-PRC medium-rise apartments, and soaring glass buildings of twenty-first-century vintage. But lodged – both temporally and physically – between these latter two are constructions from a time that is only now beginning to receive more attention, namely the early reform period of the 1970s-90s. This is exactly the timespan covered in Cole Roskam’s excellent new book Designing Reform: Architecture in the People's Republic of China, 1970-1992 (Yale UP, 2021) which shows that architecture had a key place in the emerging political, social and cultural developments of China’s pivotal post-Mao years. Examining stylistic, institutional, sociological and aesthetic aspects to Chinese architecture and its cross-border entanglements, this is a book which – as we transition deeper into Xi Jinping’s ‘new era’ – has much to say about an intriguing and occluded period of recent history which is not just Chinese but truly global. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

For this instalment, we had the pleasure of hosting Teri Silvio, who works as Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. We chatted about Teri’s recently published book, Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019), her previous work and current projects. To find out more about performance and animation, a Taiwan-centered mode of animation (ang-a), cute gods and designer toys, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

When we think of Vietnamese history, we tend to think of plucky peasant guerillas fighting for their independence against French colonial rule or American imperialism - or even mighty China.  In her new book, A Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2024), Li Tana challenges this powerful stereotype by recasting Vietnam as a maritime state with a long history of dynamic commercial relations with the outside world, from China, to Southeast Asia, to India, and the Middle East. The book aims to escape from the rigid nationalist historiography that has long characterized history writing on Vietnam and develop a new way of thinking about Vietnam’s history that emphasizes its outward, commercial relations. It also revisits the old question of whether we should view Vietnam as an East Asian country, oriented towards China, or a Southeast Asian country, characterized by a cosmopolitanism and historical openness to maritime trade and the outside world. This is a provocative and important book which challenges powerful ideas about the way we understand Vietnam’s history and place in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

For two centuries, the Xiongnu people–a vast nomadic empire that covered modern-day Siberia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang—were one of the Han Dynasty’s fiercest rivals. They raided the wealthy and prosperous Chinese, and even forced the Han to treat them as equals—much to the chagrin of those in the imperial court. There’s not much known about the Xiongnu: Even their name is in Chinese, which literally translates to “"fierce slave", which is unlikely to be what the actual people called themselves. But writer and historian Scott Crawford set himself the challenge of writing about the over two-centuries of politics, alliances and conflict between Han China and the Xiongnu empire, in his book The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD: The Struggle of China and a Steppe Empire Told Through Its Key Figures (Pen & Sword, 2023). In this interview, Scott and I talk about the Xiongnu people, the threat they presented to Han China, political shenanigans at the imperial court, and just how far geographically the conflict expanded. Scott is a novelist and historian. He wrote the historical novel Silk Road Centurion (Camphor Press, 2023) and numerous articles and works of fiction exploring relations between China and its steppe neighbors. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Han-Xiongnu War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In the early 1990s, Mongolia began a transition from socialism to a market democracy. In the process, the country became more than ever dependent on international mining revenue. Nearly thirty years later, many of Mongolia's poor and rural feel that, rather than share in the prosperity the transition was supposed to spread, they have been forgotten. Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands (UCL Press, 2023) analyzes this period of change from the viewpoint of the rural township of Magtaal on the Chinese border. After the end of socialism, the population of this resource-rich area found itself without employment or state institutions yet surrounded by lush nature and mere kilometers from the voracious Chinese market. A two-tiered resource-extractive political-economic system developed. At the same time as large-scale, formal, legally sanctioned conglomerates arrived to extract oil and other resources, local residents grew increasingly dependent on the Chinese-funded informal, illegal cross-border wildlife trade. More than a story about rampant capitalist extraction in the resource frontier, this book intimately details the complex inner worlds, moral ambiguities, and emergent collective politics constructed by individuals who feel caught in political-economic shifts that are largely outside of their control. Hedwig Amelia Waters is a Horizon Europe European Research Area Postdoctoral Fellow at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this account of the rapid erosion of liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and civil and political rights in Hong Kong, Mark L. Clifford's latest book provides an historically in-depth, vivid political analysis of the rapidly changing situation in Hong Kong. When the British ceased its period of colonial rule in 1997, and Hong Kong was returned to the governance of the People's Republic of China, then Chinese Communist Party Leader, Deng Xiaoping promised that Hong Kong would maintain its way of life for the next 50 years. This way of life, the rule of law, and independent judiciary, a democratically elected government, and the sorts of human rights which shape societies in liberal democracies worldwide, were also guaranteed in Hong Kong's mini-constitution - The Basic Law. However, less than halfway through this "One Country, Two Systems" experiment, Hong Kongers rights and freedoms, and its rule of law and the values which have come to form the basis of a unique Hong Konger identity have been crushed. Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals about its plans to End Freedom Everywhere (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is hard to put down; It is not just the way that Clifford brings to life the characters and pivotal moments in the rising tide of oppression, but also the implications of the situation in Hong Kong for the rest of the world act as a profound warning. This book is unique for its on the ground analysis and the insight it provides in framing Hong Kong as the geopolitical nexus between libertarian values of the West and Communist China's political system.   Mark L. Clifford is the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. A Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, he lived in Asia from 1987 until 2021. Previously, Clifford was executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), and publisher and editor-in-chief of The Standard (Hong Kong). He held senior editorial positions at BusinessWeek and the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Seoul. He has won numerous academic, book, and journalism awards. He was also on the board of directors of Next Digital; the company that published the pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, before it was forced to shutdown in June 2021.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What skills and strategies enable civil society to be effective under authoritarian rule? Dr. Runya Qiaoan, assistant professor and senior researcher at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, explores this question in her book Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State (Routledge, 2021). The book highlights the ways NGOs and activists navigate the constraints of China's authoritarian system through both cooperation and subtle resistance. Qiaoan emphasizes the concept "cultural resonance", showing how civil society aligns its goals with culturally accepted values to subtly advocate for social change. The episode is hosted by Dr. Linas Didvalis, Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University and its Centre for Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past.  In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford UP, 2024), John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and politics were heard and felt. Scrutinizing the flow of news can reveal much about society and politics--illustrating who has power and why, and uncovering the connections between different regions, peoples, and social classes. Taking an innovative, holistic view of information practices, Alekna weaves together both rural and urban history to tell the story of rise of mass society through the lens of communication techniques and technology, showing how the news revolution fundamentally reordered the political geography of China. John Alekna is Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Peking University. His research focuses on information, technology, and the emergence of modernity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Asia. Wider interests include the global history of science, Chinese intellectual history, and the history of empire. The episode is hosted by Ailin Zhou, PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California - Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The host of this episode, Adina Zemanek, interviewed Chee-Hann Wu, who obtained her PhD in Drama and Theatre from the University of California, Irvine and UC San Diego. They talked about the following themes: horror videogames in Taiwan and historical trauma; the potential roles of such games for local and international audiences, and thus for Taiwan's cultural diplomacy; traditional puppetry and avatars; and recent state support for local game production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How does revolution literature help to engage Mongolia’s nomadic population with the utopia of a “new society” promised by the Mongolian People’s Revolution Party? In Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Simon Wickhamsmith explores the relationship between literature and politics in the period between the 1921 socialist revolution and the first Writers’ Congress in 1948. He argues that the literature of this time “helped to frame the ideology of socialism and the practice of the revolution for those Mongolians who had little understanding of what it could offer them.” Through discussing the works of Mongolian writers such as D. Natsagdorg, S. Buyannemeh, Ts. Damdinsüren, and D. Namdag, who wrote on education, health care, religion, and labor, the book reveals how these writers represented the new Mongolia and the difficulties that accompanied with it. Wickhamsmith reminds us that although the period between 1921-1948 saw a sustained literary development in Mongolia assisted in part through the financial and moral sponsorship of the Soviet Union, many writers also suffered from censorship and even torture and death. Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 is one of the first books of its kind to translate some of the works by these writers into English, including works of poetry, fiction, and drama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counter-space capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries.  In Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton UP, 2024), Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China’s existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to provide credible leverage against adversaries rapidly. Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into China’s military modernization trajectory as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China’s strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China’s strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies. Our guest today is Fiona S. Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Berry, Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies on American scapegoating, Chinese censorship and the sad story of Fang Fang's brave and influential COVID-19 memoir, Wuhan Diary. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

For decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics--until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up.  Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China (Oxford UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership. Political scientist Jeremy Wallace explains how that system worked and analyzes how the problems that accumulated in its blind spots led Xi Jinping to take drastic action. Xi's neopolitical turn--aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, reassertion of party authority, and personalization of power--is an attempt fix the problems of the prior system, as well as a hedge against an inability to do so. The book argues that while of course dictators stay in power through coercion and cooptation, they also do so by convincing their populations and themselves of their right to rule. Quantification is one tool in this persuasive arsenal, but it comes with its own perils. Jeremy Wallace is an associate professor of Government at Cornell University, who studies authoritarianism with a focus on China, cities, statistics, and climate change. His academic research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the China Quarterly, International Organization, and other prominent journals. His popular writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times, and Foreign Policy. His first book was Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China. This episode is co-hosted by Lizzi C. Lee, an MIT-trained economist who is currently working as a reporter and host in Chinese for the New York-based independent media outlet Wall Street TV and in English for ChinaEdge, which is part of the English language media company The China Project. Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China. He is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Peter Harmsen's book Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate, 2015) describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At its height it involved nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers while sucking in three million civilians as unwilling spectators and victims. It turned what had been a Japanese adventure in China into a general war between the two oldest and proudest civilizations of the Far East. Ultimately, it led to Pearl Harbor and to seven decades of tumultuous history in Asia. The Battle of Shanghai was a pivotal event that helped define and shape the modern world. Actors from a variety of nations were present in Shanghai during the three fateful autumn months when the battle raged. The rich cast included China's ascetic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Japanese adversary, General Matsui Iwane, who wanted Asia to rise from disunity, but ultimately pushed it toward its deadliest conflict ever. Claire Chennault, later of "Flying Tiger" fame, was among the figures emerging in the course of the campaign, as was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In an ironic twist, Alexander von Falkenhausen, a stern German veteran of the Great War, abandoned his role as a mere advisor to the Chinese army and led it into battle against the Japanese invaders. In its sheer scale, the struggle for China's largest city was a sinister forewarning of what was in store for the rest of mankind only a few years hence. It demonstrated how technology had given rise to new forms of warfare, or had made old forms even more lethal. Amphibious landings, tank assaults, aerial dogfights and most importantly, urban combat, all happened in Shanghai in 1937. It was a dress rehearsal for World War II--or perhaps more correctly it was the inaugural act in the war--the first major battle in the global conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lachlan McNamee traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers. Dr. McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, Dr. McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands. Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The discussion explores the driving forces behind Chinese infrastructure investment, while addressing the crucial question of why American and European initiatives such as Global Gateway and the Program for Global Infrastructure and Investment struggle to compete with the BRI. We discuss dynamics of public and private finance, the role of public-private partnerships, and the challenges private investors face. Importantly, this episode reveals the U.S. Development Finance Corporation’s increasing reliance on private capital, and the decline of the construction sector in the U.S. economy. This comprehensive view shows how different financing and development models shape the global infrastructure landscape, how infrastructure development has evolved into its current state, and novel fields of competition, such as undersea Internet cables. Hameiri and Jones are co-authors of Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China's Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Dr. Hameiri is Professor in the School of Political Science and International Relation at The University of Queensland. A political economist with diverse research interests, traversing the fields of security, development and aid, governance, political geography and international relations, he is interested in understanding the evolving nature of statehood and political agency under conditions of globalisation. His books include International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University, 2017), Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Regulating Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and he is a co-editor for the fourth edition of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Poliltics and Uneven Development Under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). X: @ShaharHameiri. Dr. Jones is Professor in International Politics at the Queen Mary University of London. Lee specialises in political economy and international relations, focusing on the politics of intervention, security, and governance, with a particular interest in social conflict and the transformation of states. Much of his work focuses on Southeast Asia and China. Lee regularly advises the British and other governments and civil society organisations and has often appeared in the national and international media. A fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he also sits on the board of Palgrave’s series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy, and the ESRC’s peer review college. For further information see www.leejones.tk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024) is a fascinating study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. This book takes as its core subject matter six court cases from Qing China that involve people who moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth. Focusing on this movement, Matthew H. Sommer looks at the transgender paradigms and literary tropes through which gender-transing was understood, ultimately revealing how acts of gender-crossing and gender boundaries were perceived. This book is an effortless blend of social, legal, and cultural history, and it is filled with captivating legal cases involving forgery and impersonation, fox-spirit mediums, midwives, and those living on the margins of late imperial China. This is definitely a must-read for those interested in Chinese history and gender history, as well as any scholars who need inspiration for what can be done with interesting sources that don't quite fit in existing projects.  To find out more about Matthew Sommer’s work, head to his website, or you can listen to his previous appearance on the New Books Network here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman Mao It was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterprise, its state-controlled economy would fall by the wayside, that free markets would inevitably lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s growth over the past four decades has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West. Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao argue that China’s economic success is based on—not in spite of—the continuing influence of Communist leader Mao Zedong. They illustrate how Mao’s ideological principles, mass campaigns, and socialist institutions have enduringly influenced Chinese entrepreneurs’ business strategies and the management of their ventures. Grounded in case studies and quantitative analyses, this book shows that while private enterprise is the engine of China’s growth, Chinese companies see no contradictions between commercial drive and a dedication to Maoist ideology. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Greater interest in what is happening in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang in recent years has generated a proportional need for context, and especially insights into the politics and policies being enacted there and how these interface with local perspectives. For this reason and many others, David Tobin’s Securing China's Northwest Frontier: (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a vital contribution to our understanding of the PRC state-building and narrative-creation efforts which justify projects like the region’s vast network of detention camps. More than this, the book also delves into the lives of ordinary residents of Urumqi, the region’s capital, and how they respond to state efforts to craft a hegemonic vision of Chinese state- and nationhood. Moving smoothly from the promotion and performance of discourses of ethnic unity, to discussion of how Xinjiang’s Uyghur population is officially constructed simultaneously as integral to a process of ethnic “fusion” and irreconcilably “Other”, the book draws on textual analysis and fieldwork in the region to reveal a textured picture of a place and populations under immense stress. Urumqi residents of different backgrounds, Tobin shows, have differential abilities to voice alternative views of what identity and security mean, which in turn cut to the very heart of what “China” means and represents for its own citizens and, perhaps, for those beyond its borders too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China today attracts one of the largest foreign student populations in the world. In 1975, though, very few foreign students were allowed to study in then-isolated China, especially Western students. But, Dr. Peter Peverelli was a part of a small cohort of students who studied in Beijing Language Institute at the tail end of the turbulent Cultural Revolution. In One Turbulent Year - China 1975 (Boekscout, 2013), Dr. Peverelli writes on his experiences in Beijing as one of the first Western students allowed to study in China through a special exchange agreement between the Chinese and Dutch governments. Despite their student status, Dr. Peverelli and his classmates had VIP status and were seen as essentially diplomats. He even attended the state funeral for Zhou Enlai, one of the most important political figures in China during the past century. One Turbulent Year chronicles daily life under incredible and rare circumstances, as these Western European college students were interacting not just with Chinese locals, but also with their Eastern Bloc and "Third World" counterparts at the height of the Cold War. These were still universities students, they coveted holiday breaks, took leisurely bike rides around the city between classes, and still had parties and drank beer, but it was just under the backdrop of this critical juncture in Chinese history. Dr. Peverelli joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can also read his blog or follow him on Twitter at @SItheorist for more details and updates on his book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that she had an easy out for any boring conversation: For the rest of my life, when I am ‘stalled’ conversationally, it would be a wonderful thing to fall back on: ‘Oh, I must tell you about the time I was captured by Chinese bandits.’ Aldrich was one of many foreign grandees traveling on a 1923 Beijing-bound train from Shanghai, captured by the Shandong Provisional Army, a ragtag group of bandits who hoped the American, British, and European hostages might force China’s government and its many warlords to accede to its demands. The hostage situation is the subject of The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China (PublicAffairs, 2023), from James M. Zimmerman, who studies the frantic efforts by diplomats, China’s government and, at times, the hostages and bandits themselves in avoiding a bloody outcome. In this interview, James and I talk about what became known as the “Lincheng Incident,” and how this hostage situation and potential diplomatic disaster may have changed the course of Chinese history. James M. Zimmerman is a Beijing-based lawyer who has lived and worked in China for over 25 years. He is among China's leading foreign lawyers, and is the author of the China Law Deskbook, published by the American Bar Association, and is frequently featured as a political commentator on US-China relations in various print and broadcast media around the globe. He is the former four-term Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Joshua Neves’ Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, 2020) examines the interplay of contemporary Chinese media practices with urban space, locating his analysis in political and postcolonial theory. His interdisciplinary approach, as noted in our interview, works to move past the traditional boundaries of Chinese studies and to understand the concatenation of Chinese piratical and official media practices in relation to modes of mediated citizenship as it exists across postcolonial urban spaces. Neves considers urban space in terms of planning and ruin, explores theatrical and televisual screen practices in situ in Chinese cities, and asks us to consider piracy not merely in terms of copied objects like DVDs, but rather in terms of technological intimacies and infrastructures. The book is richly illustrated, complementing Neves analytical argument with evidence of his urban methodology—an ambulatory, photographic mapping of the Beijing which allows us to accompany the scholar through his text. I hope you enjoy our conversation and excuse the faux pas with which I inadvertently opened the podcast! Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential examples of national or nationalist literature—even though they also problematize the imagined boundedness and homogeneity of nation and national literature at its core. Through the theoretical lens of literary territorialization, Miya Xie's Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia (Harvard UP, 2023) reconceptualizes modern Manchuria as a critical site for making and unmaking national literatures in East Asia. Xie ventures into hitherto uncharted territory by comparing East Asian literatures in three different languages and analyzing their close connections in the transnational frontier. By revealing how writers of different nationalities constantly enlisted transnational elements within a nation-centered body of literature, Territorializing Manchuria uncovers a history of literary co-formation at the very site of division and may offer insights for future reconciliation in the region. Miya Qiong Xie is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative East Asian Literature at Dartmouth College. Her research involves modern Chinese, Korean and Japanese literatures. Broadly, she is interested in how people from the margins – geographical or metaphorical – gain power, find identity, and establish connections through transcultural negotiation and co-formation. Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) by Torsten Weber examines how Asianism became a key concept in mainstream political discourse between China and Japan and how it was used both domestically and internationally in the contest for political hegemony. It argues that, from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, this contest changed Chinese and Japanese perceptions of ‘Asia’, from a concept that was foreign-referential, foreign-imposed, peripheral, and mostly negative and denied (in Japan) or largely ignored (in China) to one that was self-referential, self-defined, central, and widely affirmed and embraced.  As an ism, Asianism elevated ‘Asia’ as a geographical concept with culturalist-racialist implications to the status of a full-blown political principle and encouraged its proposal and discussion vis-à-vis other political doctrines of the time, such as nationalism, internationalism, and imperialism. By the mid-1920s, a great variety of conceptions of Asianism had emerged in the transnational discourse between Japan and China. Terminologically and conceptually, they not only paved the way for the appropriation of ‘Asia’ discourse by Japanese imperialism from the early 1930s onwards but also facilitated the embrace of Sino-centric conceptions of Asianism by Chinese politicians and collaborators. Dr. Torsten Weber is a historian of modern and contemporary East Asia specializing in the history of Japanese-Chinese relations and interactions. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo’s conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo’s “logic of convergence,” on which opposites are brought together, Tan unpacks Guo’s hermeneutic approach to the Zhuangzi and his use of self-realization (zide) as a tool to bring about political transformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Why do so many contemporary Chinese artists use porcelain in their work? How do artists make sense of the legacy that porcelain has in China, and how do they use it to transmit ideas about China, Chinese art, and Chinese culture? In New Export China: Translations across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), Alex Burchmore explores the place of ceramics in the work of four artists: Liu Jianhua, Ai Weiwei, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho. By unpacking the history of porcelain production and export in China, the way artists make use of the unique features of ceramics, and the global reception of ceramics, Burchmore effectively demonstrates why understanding ceramics is central to understanding Chinese contemporary art. Filled with wonderfully nuanced readings of artworks and equally beautiful images, this book is sure to be of interest to readers looking to learn more about contemporary art and porcelain, and anyone looking to think about phrases like "Chinese art" and "mass production" in new ways.  Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (Harvard UP, 2021) is a study of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China—and arguably of the entire traditional era. In a set of interconnected essays, Jack W. Chen offers new readings of the Shishuo xinyu that draw upon social network analysis, performance studies, theories of ritual and mourning, and concepts of gossip and reputation to illuminate how the anecdotes of the collection imagine and represent a political and cultural elite. Whereas most accounts of the Shishuo have taken a historical approach, Chen argues that the work should be understood in literary terms. At its center, Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance is an extended meditation on the very nature of the anecdote form, both what the anecdote affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments. Although each of the chapters may be read separately as an essay in its own right, when taken together, they present a comprehensive account of the Shishuo in all of its literary complexity. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations.  Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity.  Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution's unrealized dreams and staggering losses. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights. Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms. Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

This week, RBI Director John Torpey talked with William Hurst, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University, about the origins of the protests in China, how they differ from those in 1989, and the possibilities of regime change. Hurst delves into the mobilization and contentious politics of China and its local-central interplay, where protesters act as rational actors who use different strategies of bargaining and signaling. Moreover, Hurst addresses the implications of Xi Jinping's consolidation of power for the economic model of China and the prospects of change in the near future. Finally, Hurst discusses the outlawing of extramarital and same-gender sex in Indonesia and the role of religion in politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over time. From the earliest historically recorded systems of segmentary lineage to the incorporation first into local fiefdoms and then into the Chinese state (of both Nationalist and Communist governments), Tibetan pastoralists have maintained their way of life, complemented by interactions with “the outside world.” In Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations Among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet (Springer, 2018), Gillian Tan, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University, identifies and analyzes the changes undergone by Tibetan pastoralist society in recent years, the sources of these changes, and the effects produced on Tibetan pastoralists, their lifeways, religious practices, and social structures. Drawing on long-term fieldwork that underscores an ethnography of local nomadic pastoralists, international development organizations, and Chinese government policies, Gillian argues that careful analysis and comparison of the different epistemologies and norms about “change” are vital to any critical appraisal of developments - often contested - on the grasslands of Eastern Tibet. Rapid changes brought about by an intensification of interactions with the outside world call into question the sustained viability of a nomadic way of life, particularly as pastoralists themselves sell their herds and settle into towns. Pastures of Change probes how we can more clearly understand these changes by looking specifically at one particular area of high-altitude grasslands in the Tibetan Plateau. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How did the first newspaper in Macau come into being? What was the first foreign language newspaper on Chinese soil about? How was the dynamic between the Chinese and Portuguese press in the former Portuguese colony and now China’s Special Administrative Region? Hugo Pinto speaks about A Abelha da China (A Bee from China), the first newspaper in Macau, operated from September 1822 to August 1823. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Hugo Pinto speaks about the book project on A Abelha da China to commemorate it 200th anniversary. Co-edited with Duarte Drumond Braga, the book A Abelha da China nos seus 200 Anos. Casos, Personagens e Confrontos na Experiência Liberal de Macau (The China Bee in its 200 Years. Cases, Characters and Confrontations in the Liberal Experience of Macau) was published by the Scientific and Cultural Center of Macau in 2022. Reflecting the complete historical background of its time, A Abelha da China would be taken up by other political agents. However, its legacy of insubordination would eventually live on. A newspaper that served as an official bulletin, and also as an arena for political confrontation, did not neglect a cultural and even literary dimension, as it carried within itself the mission of instructing its readers and denouncing the absolutist tyranny that, later, in reflux, would take over the newspaper itself. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical, and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Similar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku.  Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, where he is also the Chair of Taiwan studies. Truly Human is the result of nearly two decades of field research and interactions among the Sediq and Truku; the book provides a deep yet accessible dive into matters such as hunting practices, belief systems, electoral politics, historical narratives, and how Taiwan's geopolitical status may affect the island's indigenous communities.  As Taiwan becomes ever-more-prominent in international headlines, Truly Human helps readers draw parallels with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, and learn about a dimension of Taiwanese and Austronesian society that often gets lost in discussions centered on conflict. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What is “binary nationalism” and what has it got to do with free-style skiing? The explosive popularity of Eileen Gu’s is an excellent case for understanding the common Chinese mindset. In this conversation, Professor Julie Yu-Wen Chen is joined by Professor Jiang Chang to discuss the wide popularity of freestyle skier Eileen Gu during and after the 2022 Winter Olympics. Jiang Chang will share his unique insight into Gu’s rise to a new kind of poster child in China, while at the same time, he cautions us to be mindful of the invisible hand (i.e., Chinese propaganda) in shaping Gu’s popularity. For most Chinese people, the primary framework for their perception and interpretation of the world is what Chang terms “binary nationalism.” It is nationalism, but it is very simple and is intended to be simple. In that framework, the US is the default opposite of China. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing rise of a kind of “hero-worshiping” social atmosphere since Xi Jinping rose to power in China, where common people tend to resent elites but look up to those whom they know they could never ever surpass in status. This weird contradiction somehow paves the way for Gu’s popularity: She grew up in the US but chose to play for China in the Winter Olympics. Besides excelling in sports, she performs well educationally (which many Chinese people consider criteria for judging a person’s success in life), and she is beautiful by appearance. Gu has achieved so much that most Chinese people “heroize” her. Prof. Jiang Chang is a visiting professor of Chinese studies at the University of Helsinki. Chang is a famous media scholar and observer. He is widely published in English, Chinese, and French on topics that include journalism and propaganda, digital media cultures, and digital feminism in contemporary China. His representative works are published in leading journals such as International Journal of Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Journal of Contemporary China. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is professor of Chinese studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of the Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on the University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicine, and the body. We talk about their life-long practice of qigong, the limits of academic critique, and the integration of divergent epistemologies in studying Chinese anatomy. Along the way, we discuss Lan’s new book, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Lan’s relationship to Islam, and how to cultivate wonder through academic study. Remember, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes. Please enjoy!  Resources mentioned in the episode: Lan’s website Lan Li, “The Vital Other: Integrsative Medicine and India” (2012) Lan Li, “Acupuntura e Moxabustão” (2023) Lan Li and Pierce Salguero, Jivaka Project Philadelphia (2015-2020) Pierce’s 2020 blogs on Metamodernism and Polyperspectivalism Lan Li, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (2025) Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is "reading for the details" fundamentally different from "reading for the plot"? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become "telling" as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form. Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao’s book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of "the unseen," which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms. Jiwei Xiao is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures (Chinese) at Fairfield University. She is a scholar of comparative literature and Chinese cinema. Her wide-ranging publications have appeared in New Left Review, New York Review of Books, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, MCLC, and Journal of Contemporary China. Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (Routledge, 2022) is her first book. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men.  These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they've lost in the shifting global economy around them. Ranging from multimillionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the US, Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China's global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does this reshape Chinese women's perception of Western masculinity? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals the shifting relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders. Dr. Monica Liu is a sociologist whose teaching and research interests include gender, globalization, family, immigration, race/ethnicity, Asia and Asian America, digital technology/media, and qualitative methods. She has explored the phenomenon of global internet dating and cross-border marriage between women from China and men from English-speaking Western countries. She is currently working on a new project that examines institutional racism against Asian women leaders in higher education. Born and raised in China, Dr. Liu immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eight. Before joining the University of St. Thomas, she taught at Colgate University and Carleton College. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

"In this tango palace everything was swaying rhythmically to and fro, bodies of men and women, beams of colored light, brilliant wine glasses, red and green liquids, slender fingers, pomegranate-colored lips, and feverish eyes. Tables and chairs, together with the crowd of people, cast their reflections on the center of the shiny floor. Everyone was under a powerful magical spell and lost in this enchanted palace."  Enigmatic, mesmerizing, and frenetic, Urban Scenes (Cambria, 2023) takes readers into the dazzling world of Shanghai in the 1920s. This collection of short fiction by Liu Na’ou (1905–1940) — a Taiwanese-born modernist writer — contains stories that take place in cinemas, art studios, and nightclubs. Touching on issues of modernity, social change, and shifting ideas of love, romance, and beauty, these tantalizing stories are accompanied by a thoughtful Introduction and helpful notes by the translators, Yaohua Shi and Judith Amory.  This collection is sure to appeal to those interested in modernist literature and Sinophone fiction, as well as anyone who is looking for stories that feature perplexing narrators to analyze with their students. Interested readers should also check out the other titles in the Cambria Sinophone Translation Series.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Chinese science fiction has been booming lately through the translation of books like Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, but where did the current surge come from? In Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), Nathaniel Isaacson introduces the genre’s origins in China and tracks its development from roughly 1904 to 1934. During that period, China’s final dynasty, the Qing, came to an end amid European nations’ increasing control of China, the Republic of China was established, and Japan conquered Manchuria while the Chinese Communist Party was established and grew into a major political-cultural force. Isaacson connects these political shifts to the establishment of science fiction in China through key works by authors like Lu Xun, Wu Jianren, and Lao She. In so doing, he shows how Chinese science fiction is connected to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, depicting authors’ struggles to subvert Orientalist attitudes toward China. Isaacson traces how Orientalism and its attendant colonialist projects were intertwined with Western scientific knowledge in such a way as to make science fiction a fruitful medium for cultural debates over China’s role in the world. Nathaniel Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the history of Chinese science and science fiction, Chinese cinema, cultural studies, and literary translation. Nathaniel has published articles and translations in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, Osiris, Science Fiction Studies, Renditions, Pathlight, and Chinese Literature Today. His book, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017), examines the emergence of sf in late Qing China. His current book project, Moving the People: the Aesthetics of Mass Transit in Modern China, examines narratives of development as a theme in modern Chinese literary and visual culture primarily through the figure of the train. Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. She writes about Japanese media and is currently completing Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, a book about contemporary media and Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Mozina’s Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice (U Hawaii Press, 2021) weaves together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, inviting readers into the religious world of Daoist practice in today’s south China by exploring one particular ritual called the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin, as practiced in central Hunan province. Performed as the first public ritual by a Daoist apprentice at his own ordination, the Banner Rite seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious martial deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. A lot is at stake. If the apprentice cannot successfully summon the deity in front of his village community and the pantheon of gods in attendance, he would not be able to be ordained that day and would risk losing the confidence of villagers who might hire him in the future. Through a close reading of the ritual in its social and historical contexts, Mozina shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. Knotting the Banner will be of interest to students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion and will also appeal to historians of religion and anthropologists, especially those working on ritual. Noelle Giuffrida is a professor and curator of Asian art at the School of Art and the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University. Her research focuses on Chinese art, particularly the history of collecting and exhibiting premodern works in American museums after World War II and the visual culture of Daoism in late imperial China. Her teaching and curatorial experience extend broadly both temporally—from Neolithic to contemporary—and cross-culturally to China, Korea, and Japan, as well as to South and Southeast Asia. Her book Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee’s Collecting of Chinese Art in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018) uses American curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008) as a lens through which to investigate the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art. Email her at ngiuffrida@bsu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959? In Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China (Columbia University Press 2021), Nicole Willock discovers through the stories and writings of the “Three Polymaths” (Tib. mkhas pa mi gsum) of socialist China that contrary to common assumptions, Tibetan Buddhist leaders active in the People’s Republic of China were not mere political “collaborators.” Willocks reveals in the book that the three Buddhist polymaths, Tséten Zhabdrung (1910 – 1985), Mugé Samten (1914 – 1993), and Dungkar Rinpoché (1927 – 1997) alternately safeguarded, taught, adapted, celebrated, and discarded religious epistemes, practices, and institutions in a post-Cultural Revolution PRC. The title of the “Three Polymaths” is often used to refer to Mar Shakyamuni, Yo Géjung, and Tsang Rabsel, who according to Tibetan Buddhist historiography, preserved the Buddhist monastic lineage from the tyrannical king Langdarma (d. 842) one millennium ago. Willock points out that since the early 1980s, the title of the “Three Polymaths” has been passed on to the twentieth-century Buddhist scholars Tséten Zhabdrung, Mugé Samten, and Dungkar Rinpoché, who became not only heroes to many Tibetans in China but also cultural icons symbolizing both the survival and the continuance of Tibetan culture in the post-Mao era. In Lineages of the Literary, Willock explores the Three Polymaths’ writings from a wide range of literary genres, including more traditional ones such as autobiographical life writing (Tib. byung ba brjod pa) and Buddhist poetry, as well as modern innovations such as encyclopedia entries (Tib. tshig mdzod) and academic essays (Tib. dpyad rtsom). Willock argues that the writings of the Three Polymaths highlight the way they adapt and disregard religious epistemes for the purposes of revitalizing Tibetan culture in their own fashion. Interestingly, the Three Polymaths’ writings do not engage explicitly with the social-political contexts of their lives. What is revealed instead, Willock argues, is how these three Tibetan Buddhist leaders acted as moral agents who strategically deployed Buddhist epistemes to impart varying visions of Tibetan culture in the post-Mao era. Taking Saba Mahmood’s idea of “moral agency,” Willock finds that “[T]he culturally specific disciplines and religious epistemes that [the Three Polymaths] accessed in their unique subject positions as male Géluk Buddhist elites allowed them, unlike many other leaders in post-Mao China, to cross state-imposed divides between secular and religious institutions that might otherwise have been impossible to bridge.” Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems. Brian Lander is assistant professor of history at Brown University and a fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The widely acclaimed films of Wong Kar-wai are characterized by their sumptuous yet complex visual and sonic style. This study of Wong’s filmmaking techniques uses a poetics approach to examine how form, music, narration, characterization, genre, and other artistic elements work together to produce certain effects on audiences. Bettinson argues that Wong’s films are permeated by an aesthetic of sensuousness and “disturbance” achieved through techniques such as narrative interruptions, facial masking, opaque cuts, and other complex strategies. The effect is to jolt the viewer out of complete aesthetic absorption. Each of the chapters focuses on a single aspect of Wong’s filmmaking. The book also discusses Wong’s influence on other filmmakers in Hong Kong and around the world. The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance (Hong Kong University Press, 2014) will appeal to all who are interested in authorship and aesthetics in film studies, to scholars in Asian studies, media and cultural studies, and to anyone with an interest in Hong Kong cinema in general, and Wong’s films in particular. Gary Bettinson is a senior lecturer in film studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is editor of Asian Cinema, Directory of World Cinema: China and author (with Richard Rushton) of What is Film Theory? An Introduction to Contemporary Debates. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is MA in Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples—the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths—all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world.  Professor Kenneth W. Harl’s newest book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2023) vividly re-creates the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever ready to learn from their more advanced neighbors. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) is a fascinating study of the transcultural underpinnings of Medieval East Asian Buddhist traditions with an emphasis on Shinra Myōjin, a deity integral to the institutional development of the Medieval Japanese Tendai faction, the Jimon. It demonstrates the linkage between continental Buddhist Culture and Buddhism in Medieval Japan through the intersectionality of various subjective and objective actors such as, traveling monks from Japan bound for China, merchants and other immigrants from the Korean peninsula, archetypal old man and pestilence deities, as medieval Japanese aristocrats and Shungendō practitioners in the theoretical space of the East Asian Mediterranean. For those interested in transcultural Buddhist studies, Tendai Buddhism, and the diffusion of Buddhism in East Asia, more broadly this interview with Sujung Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University, should be an enjoyable and insightful listen. Trevor McManis is a novice monk in a branch of the Vietnamese, Línjǐ school at Phước Sơn temple in Modesto, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have produced creative and thought-provoking works that have won growing critical recognition, showing Malaysia to be a laboratory for imaginative Chinese writing. Highlighting Mahua literature’s distinctive mode of evolution, Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that authors’ grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for—rather than a barrier to—aesthetic inventiveness. He foregrounds the historical links between Malaysia and other Chinese-speaking regions, tracing how Mahua writers engage in the “worlding” of modern Chinese literature by navigating interconnected literary spaces. Focusing on writers including Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, whose works craft signature literary languages, Chan examines narrative representations of multilingual social realities and authorial reflections on colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Delineating the inter-Asian “crossings” of Mahua literary production—physical journeys, interactions among social groups, and mindset shifts—from the 1930s to the 2000s, he contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature (Columbia UP, 2022) offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature. Cheow Thia Chan is assistant professor of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, Singapore and Malaysian Chinese Literature, Southeast Asian Chinese Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Urban Studies. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Every nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO’s role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a whole, the highly interdependent economies in Asia have exposed the speed with which pandemics can spread, as intensive regional travel and business connections have caused every area in the region to be hit hard. The migrant labor necessary to sustain globalized economies has been strained and the security of international workers is now more precarious than ever, as millions have been left stranded, seen their entry blocked, or have limited access to health services. Public Health in Asia During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Amsterdam UP, 2022) provides an accessible framework for understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia, with a specific emphasis on global governance in health and labor. This is an open-access book. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c). Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden) They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fiction fandom, and the powerful influence of Leo Tolstoy on Mr. Liu’s work, which leads to a consideration of realism and its relationship to science fiction. Science fiction is also compared and contrasted with myth, mathematics, and technology. Lastly, they consider translation, and the special capacity that science fiction has to emerge through the translation process relatively unscathed. This is a testament to science fiction’s taking as its subject the affairs of the whole human community–compared to the valuable but distinctly Chinese concerns of Mo Yan, or the distinctly Russian concerns of Tolstoy. Discussed in This Episode: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops“ Mo Yan, Red Sorghum Read the transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? Answer these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children.  Jing Xu skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs’ extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic interpretation, natural language processing, and machine-learning techniques. Through a lens of social cognition, Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge UP, 2024) unravels the complexities of children’s moral growth, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics. Writing through and about fieldnotes, the author connects the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously. This book is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students of anthropology and educational studies. Throughout the interview, the term “Chinese” is used in the broad sense of cultural heritage. Jing Xu is a research scientist at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Tsinghua University, China, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, and received postdoctoral training in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. She pursues interdisciplinary research, bringing together anthropological and psychological perspectives to study how humans become moral persons. She is the author of two monographs: The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford U Press, 2017) and “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge U Press, 2024). Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Liang Luo's book The Global White Snake (U Michigan Press, 2021) examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism. The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations. Huiying Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois at Chicago. She studies the history of travel in eighteenth-century China. She can be reached at hchen87 AT uic.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews the Taiwanese movie director Asio Liu on his most recent movie project on the Vietnamese refugee camps in Penghu. Many of us are familiar with the inexorable flow of Vietnamese boat people right after the end of the war in Vietnam. Though, very few know that some of the Vietnamese boat people landed in Penghu, in the Taiwan Strait, just off the west coast of Taiwan and they ended up living there until they were resettled. The Penghu refugee camps were destroyed at the beginning of the 2000s. By revealing the process of discovering the refugee camps in Penghu and connecting with the refugees who have been there, Asio discusses personal and collective aspects of a phenomenon that brings together global, regional and local issues and which has become the subject of a 20 year-long project. For those who are interested to know more about this issue, here you can find some links: Asio Liu asio.liu@gmail.com Instagram: The Chiangmei Refugee Archive (CRAA) Facebook: @澎湖難民營三部曲 Penghu Refugee Camps Trilogy at the Taiwan Strait Twitter: @CRAA_Chiangmei Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War (Columbia UP, 2023) recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world. Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents. Angelina Y. Chin is associate professor of history at Pomona College. She is the author of Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (2012). Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia UP, 2021) highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Please join Howard in conversation with Thomas Baudinette to learn more about this book's exciting theoretical interventions into the fields of trans studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Sinophone studies. Thomas Baudinette is Lecturer in International Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

After China officially “decriminalized” same-sex behavior in 1997, both the visibility and public acceptance of tongzhi, an inclusive identity term that refers to nonheterosexual and gender nonconforming identities in the People’s Republic of China, has improved. However, for all the positive change, there are few opportunities for political and civil rights advocacy under Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule. Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China (Temple UP, 2023) explores the nonconfrontational strategies the tongzhi movement uses in contemporary China. Caterina Fugazzola analyzes tongzhi organizers’ conceptualizations of, and approaches to, social change, explaining how they avoid the backlash that meets Western tactics, such as protests, confrontation, and language about individual freedoms. In contrast, the groups’ intentional use of community and family-oriented narratives, discourses, and understandings of sexual identity are more effective, especially in situations where direct political engagement is not possible. Providing on-the-ground stories that examine the social, cultural, and political constraints and opportunities, Words like Water emphasizes the value of discursive flexibility that allows activists to adapt to changing social and political conditions. Caterina Fugazzola is Assistant Senior Instructional Professor of Global Studies at the University of Chicago. Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Since the founding of the Communist Party in China just over a century ago there is much the country has achieved. But who does the heavy lifting in China? And who walks away with the spoils? Cadre Country: How China Became the Chinese Communist Party (NewSouth Books, 2022) places the spotlight on the nation’s 40 million cadres—the managers and government officials employed by the ruling Communist Party to protect its great enterprise – to show how the Communist Party operates in China and how the stories the party tells about itself are based on thin foundations. The book pays particular attention to the history, language, and culture of the Communist Party but maintains a relentless focus on what has become of China since the Global Financial Crisis and in particular since Xi Jinping came to power. The party is in the act of swallowing a liberalised society, a marketized economy, and a diverse country. This matters for everyone, because the way China’s government behaves at home frames its conduct abroad. John Fitzgerald is an historian of China and the Chinese diaspora. He headed the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy at Swinburne University after serving five years as China Representative of The Ford Foundation in Beijing (2008-13). From 2015 to 2017 he served as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His recent books include Cadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party (2022), Taking the Low Road: China’s Influence in Australia’s States and Territories (edited, 2022), and Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949 (edited with Hon-ming Yip, 2020). Earlier books include Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (2007), awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association, and Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (1997), awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney (BA 1976), Nanjing University (Language Cert 1977) and ANU (PhD 1983), and studied at UW Madison as a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow (1988). Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Using rare grassroots archives, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China (Stanford UP, 2022) dives deep into four true criminal cases during the political campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1953. The first casefile recounted a story of a Confucian scholar who found himself allied with bandits and secret society members. The second casefile was on an assassination of a Communist cadre by a farmer, who was condemned as a landlord and an evil tyrant by the Party. The third casefile was about how the two runaway landlords avoided prosecution of the Party-state by exploiting relative and religious networks in local community. The fourth casefile was on a hapless merchant who accused of a crime he did not commit. Read collectively, the book shows how the newly-established Party-state brought its power to village society. More importantly, the book persuasively demonstrates that the rural revolution could only be understood within its specific local context. In addition, the book also does a model work in showing the historians’ craft of critically reading, analyzing, and using archival documents.  Yi Ren is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What sequence of events led Hong Kong to lose its long-held status as a liberal enclave of China? What drove its population to rise up against its government and confront Beijing? And why did China’s rulers decide to effectively put an end to the freedoms guaranteed under the One-Country-Two-Systems arrangement by imposing in June 2020 a draconian National Security Law designed to eliminate any political opposition that has already led to hundreds of arrests? In Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship (Hurst, 2021), the prominent Hong Kong journalist and broadcaster Stephen Vines offers a blow-by-blow account of the 2019-2020 protest movement. The books details the emergence of an increasingly assertive and defiant Hong Kong political identity, the collapse of trust in the Beijing-anointed government, the PRC’s increasingly hands-on assertion of its sovereignty over the territory, and the deteriorating relationship between the West and an overly confident but inwardly insecure Chinese state. Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023). In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Dr. Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order. When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger. A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The study of religion in China has a long history across a number of interrelated disciplines. In recent years, scholars have been reassessing past scholarship and synthesizing it in new ways. The three-volume project “Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions” is one of the most exciting of these endeavors and establishes productive groundwork for future research. It includes three books: Stefania Travagnin, André Laliberté, Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions I: State of the Field and Disciplinary Approaches (De Gruyter, 2019); Stefania Travagnin, Gregory Scott, Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions II: Intellectual History of Key Concepts (De Gruyter, 2020); and Stefania Travagnin, Paul R. Katz, Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions III: Key Concepts in Practice (De Gruyter, 2019).  The contributions evaluate the current state of scholarship, discusses a variety of analytical approaches and theories about methodology, epistemology, and the ontology of the field. The three books display an interdisciplinary approach and offer debates that transcend national traditions. It engages with a variety of methodologies for the study of East Asian religions and promotes dialogues with Western and Chinese voices. In my conversation with Stefania Travagnin, Professor at SOAS and co-editor of all 3 volumes, we discuss the catalyst for the project, co-editing and organizing of a large interdisciplinary effort, how one can define Chinese religions, representative disciplinary approaches and themes of previous scholarship, Chinese keywords and categories for studying religion, the importance of regional or local contexts, diaspora communities and global China, religious interaction and cross-tradition approaches, and future directions to advance the field of Chinese religions. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What would happen if microchips suddenly disappeared from our world? From phones to cars, medical equipment to heating units, they are crucial for the safe and smooth functioning of much of society. While they may not actually disappear anytime soon, we have learned from the COVID pandemic about the real and potential consequences of an essential microchips shortage. Listen to Hermann Aubié, senior researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku in Finland, speak about the current state of the complex global microchips industry and attempts by governments to control its technology and supply-chain. Dr. Aubié focuses in particular on the United States' 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and October Export Rules, largely considered to target China's capacity to produce advanced microchips. Learn about responses by Taiwan, the largest producer of advanced microchips with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), as well as the position of the European Union, itself dealing with ongoing negotiations to finalize the EU Chips Act. Dr. Aubié speaks to Satoko Naito, also of the Centre for East Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China’s Heritage through History employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary China, it explores the role of practices and material forms of the past in shaping social transformation through knowledge production and transmission. The art of collecting, reproducing, and reinterpreting the past has been an enduring force shaping cultural identity and political legitimacy in China. Offering a unique, non-Western perspective on the history of heritage in China, Zhu considers who the key players have been in these ongoing processes of reconfigured pasts, what methods they have employed, and how these practices have shaped society at large. The book tackles these questions by delving into the transformation of practices related to heritage through examples such as the book collection at Tianyi Private Library, the reproduction of the Orchid Pavilion Preface calligraphy and its associated sites, and the dynamics of exchange within the Liulichang antique market. Zhu reveals how these practices, once reserved for elites, have become accessible to the broader public. These processes of transformation, embodied in various forms of reconfigured pasts, have given rise to modern approaches to preservation, digitisation, museums, and the burgeoning heritage tourism industry. China’s Heritage through History will be an invaluable resource for academics, students, and practitioners working in the fields of heritage, museum studies, and art history. Yujie Zhu is an associate professor at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University in Australia. He obtained his PhD in anthropology from Heidelberg University, Germany. His research focuses on the cultural politics of the past within diverse heritage and memory spaces. Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developments related to comics in Taiwan – the definition of “Taiwan comics”, their typology, and state promotion of this medium with the aim of building Taiwan’s soft power. To find out more about niche and mainstream comics, who reads them, how and for whom they are significant, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various potential socialist allies during the Cold War to dispel this impression. There is, moreover, another equally important case in which people linked to ‘China’ were involved in transnational affairs at this time – namely that of overseas Chinese populations throughout the world. And, as Taomo Zhou’s fascinating Indonesia-centred account shows, in Southeast Asia the Chinese outside China were intimately entangled in a vast among of what was going on at this time on the diplomatic and political level. Drawing on a trove of archival and fieldwork-derived material from multiple locations, Zhou’s Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) presents a rich account of the Indonesian-Chinese population’s involvement in regional and global affairs, mainly between the 1940s and the 1960s but also either side of this tumultuous window of time. As entertaining as it is rich in new insights, the book nimbly moves between China and different parts of Indonesia’s vast archipelago, in doing so painting a picture of the limitless diversity to migrant and diasporic experience and, in the process, helping us see apparently monolithic events like the Cold War in very human terms. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford, 2022) tells the stories of men and women who have lived and worked in China from before the Communist era to the present. Their experiences provide unique insights and deeply human perspectives on issues that have shaped US engagement with the PRC: politics, diplomacy, education, science, business, art, law, journalism, and human rights. Looming over their narratives is the quandary of whether divergent Chinese and Western worldviews could find common ground. Terry Lautz, former vice president of the Henry Luce Foundation, has chaired the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Lingnan Foundation, and the Yale-China Association. Dr. Lautz holds degrees from Harvard College and Stanford University and is the author of John Birch: A Life (Oxford, 2016). Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities.  In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls "biopolitical paternalism"--a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state's paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière witnessed the collapse of the Qing empire, the warlord's chaos that followed, the rise and fall of Japanese Manchukuo, and the emergence of communist China. Caubrière's incredible personal archive, on which Ji Li draws extensively, opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria's grassroots society and international players. His gripping accounts personalize the Catholic Church's expansion in East Asia and the interplay of missions and empire in local society. Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Nicole Elizabeth Barnes’s book, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945 (University of California Press, 2018), argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language. This book has won two major awards, William H. Welch Award by American Association for the History of Medicine in 2020, and Joan Kelly Memorial Prize by American Historical Association in 2019. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Linshan Jiang is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2020), Peter Lavelle offers a fascinating narrative history of natural resource development in China during the tumultuous 19th-century. Faced with an unprecedented confluence of natural disasters, wars, rebellions, foreign incursions and social problems, Qing Dynasty officials and elites looked to the natural world as a source of wealth, security and power. Lavelle grounds his narrative in the life and career of Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885), who was an avid student of geography and agricultural sciences, in addition to being one the leading statesmen of his generation. In efforts to rebuild livelihoods, relieve demographic pressures, secure government revenues and expand control over borderland regions, Zuo and his contemporaries harnessed long-standing traditions of knowledge and established new connections between China's borderlands and its eastern regions. What emerges from The Profits of Nature is a fresh and richly detailed chapter in late Qing history, written through the nexus of crisis, Qing colonialism and the environment. Zachary Lowell holds an MA in global studies from Humboldt-Universtität zu Berlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and how it interrelates with issues of human mobility. In this richly informative and captivating book, Park focuses on the movement of Koreans around the point where China, Russia and Korea converged from the mid-19th century onwards. Deftly moving between intimate migrant experiences and higher-level government activity, the author’s interweaving of the personal and the political gives us a newly grounded perspective on several large empire-states and how they came to understand sovereignty, population and loyalty in the 19th and 20th centuries. These understandings continued to reverberate in the decades that followed, and many remain with us in the present. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Qing Empire from a maritime perspective, Ronald C. Po argues that it is reductive to view China over this period exclusively as a continental power with little interest in the sea. With a coastline of almost 14,500 kilometers, the Qing was not a landlocked state. Although it came to be known as an inward-looking empire, Po suggests that the Qing was integrated into the maritime world through its naval development and customs institutionalization. In contrast to our orthodox perception, the Manchu court, in fact, deliberately engaged with the ocean politically, militarily, and even conceptually. The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge UP, 2018) offers a much broader picture of the Qing as an Asian giant responding flexibly to challenges and extensive interaction on all frontiers - both land and sea - in the long eighteenth century within the Indian Ocean World. Dr. Ronald C. Po is an Associate Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The co-host Mohammed al-Sudairi is the Head of Asian Studies at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He tweets @MohammedSudairi. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantation and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed the whole way by tourists, who have bought tickets for the privilege. The traditional wedding ceremonies are performed for the ethnic tourism industry in Lijiang, a World Heritage town in southwest China.  Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China (Amsterdam UP, 2018) examines how heritage interacts with social-cultural changes and how individuals perform and negotiate their identities through daily practices that include tourism, on the one hand, and the performance of ethnicity on the other. The wedding performances in Lijiang not only serve as a heritage 'product' but show how the heritage and tourism industry helps to shape people's values, dreams and expectations. This book also explores the rise of 'romantic consumerism' in contemporary China. Chinese dissatisfaction with the urban mundane leads to romanticized interests in practices and people deemed to be natural, ethnic, spiritual and aesthetic, and a search for tradition and authenticity. But what, exactly, are tradition and authenticity, and what happens to them when they are turned into performance? Yujie Zhu is a Lecturer at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. He is the co-editor of Politics of Scale and Sustainable Tourism Management at World Heritage Sites. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor. Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s–1998 (Harvard University Press, 2022) by John D. Wong and published by Harvard University Press. Hong Kong’s growth as a hub for commercial aviation was often unplanned, often the result of compromise–and yet wildly successful. The city was able to carve a niche for itself, in both the declining British empire and the wider world, while also having to deal with colonial bureaucracy, geopolitics, fierce competition and an entirely new Communist government across the border. In this interview, John and I talk about Hong Kong’s history with aviation, from its very start with flying boats and puddlejumpers right through to the jumbo jet era. John D. Wong is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. He is also the author of Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hong Kong Takes Flight. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Prof Dafydd Fell, Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The two discuss Prof Fell’s most recent book, “Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan” published by Routledge in 2021. In this engaging chat, Prof Fell shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on green parties in Taiwan, the relevance that alternative and small parties may have on the overall evolution of the political debate in Taiwan, and the results of the recent local elections in Taiwan. This podcast is for lovers of Taiwan politics and for anyone interested to know the role of small parties in the broader political process of many countries around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Among all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific priorities over the past 400 years. Ruth Rogaski’s extraordinary new book Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows how these acts of knowing have brought multiple Manchurias into existence as people, culture, nature and ecology have been entangled in diverse ways at different points in time. Today, perhaps befitting its status as a contested and layered borderland space, ‘Manchuria’ itself is a contested term, but this only makes Rogaski’s beautifully written multi-perspectival and multilingually-sourced history of this fascinating region all the more valuable. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Are we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works.  Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (Intellect Books, 2020) is an exploration of China’s cultural economy over the last twenty years, particularly through the lens of its creative hub of Shanghai. The research presented here raises questions about the nature of contemporary ‘creative’ capitalism and the universal claims of Western modernity, offering new ways of thinking about cultural policy in China. Taking a long-term historical perspective, Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu analyze the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests, and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within it. Further, the authors explore cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulate Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, Red Creative carefully situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In 1911, as China was beset with challenges, a new generation of scholars considered a new problem: what to do with former imperial borders? How could China’s frontiers be considered part of the new nation? In Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China’s Borderlands 1919–45 (UBC Press, 2022), Andres Rodriguez looks at how students, travellers, social scientists, anthropologists, and missionaries contemplated these problems as they took to the Sino-Tibetan frontier to do fieldwork. Focusing on the intimately human stories of these ‘frontier workers,’ Rodriguez examines how these scholars approached the frontier, created new knowledge, and redefined what both ‘frontier’ and ‘fieldwork’ meant. Frontier Fieldwork does a particularly beautiful job of exploring the complex identities of these fascinating fieldworkers, highlighting how some worked with the state, some pushed back, and some were only anthropologists by pure accident. It is sure to be of interest to historians, scholars of borderland studies, anthropologists, and those interested in a model for how you can write a history of empire-shaping events while keeping individuals at the center. Over the course of our conversation, Andres also mentioned: His article in Asian Ethnicity, “A ‘weak and small’ race in China’s southwest: Yi elites and the struggle for recognition in Republican China” The work of Gray Tuttle, in particular Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2005) Dane Kennedy’s book, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Harvard University Press, 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that–in theory–could return at any point. We’re joined by Michael J. Seth, who joins the show to talk about this development and his latest book, Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World (Tuttle, 2023). The book is about much more than just the war itself, as Seth looks at Korea’s pre- and post-war history, and how South Korea is unique in charting its own development while still, technically, in a state of war. Michael J. Seth is Professor of History at James Madison University. He has authored several books on Korean history including A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: 2010), A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic to the Nineteenth Century (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), and Education Fever: Politics, Society and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press: 2002). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Korea at War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present. Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China (University of California Press, 2020) is an important intervention contributing to cultural and medical anthropology and to the field of China studies. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton UP, 2023) provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule. The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and world economies buckled. Timothy Brook draws on the history of grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous years of a once-great dynasty. He explores how global trade networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid grain shortages and famine. By the early 1640s, as the subjects of the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime. A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between an empire and the climate that turned against it. Huijun Mai is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Citizenship is traditionally viewed as a legal status to be possessed. Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond: Relational Citizenship (Lexington, 2021) proposes the concept of relational citizenship to articulate the value-laden, interactive nature of belongingness. Hsin-I Cheng examines the role of relationality which produces and is a product of localized emotions. Cheng attends to particular histories and global trajectories embedded within uneven power relations. By focusing on Taiwan, a non-Western society with a tradition to adeptly attune to local experiences and those from various global influences, relational citizenship highlights the measures used to define and encourage interactions with newcomers. This book shows the multilayered communicative processes in which relations are gradually created, challenged, merged, disrupted, repaired, and solidified. Cheng further argues that this concept is not bound to nation-state geographic boundaries as relationality bleeds through national borders. Relational citizenship has the potential to move beyond the East vs. West epistemology to examine peoples’ lived realities wherein the sense of belonging is discursively accomplished, viscerally experienced, and publicly performed. Hsin-I Cheng is an associate professor in the Communication department at Santa Clara University. Her research and teaching interests focus on how multiple identities intersect and influence human interaction and relationships. She is the author of Culturing Interface: Identity, Communication, and Chinese Transnationalism (2008), and her work appears in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Women & Language. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Ye Shitao was a Taiwanese public intellectual who rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. His encyclopedic A History of Taiwan Literature was published in 1987, the same year that the island’s decades-long period of martial law came to an end. The book provides a thorough overview of the major themes and representative works of each stage in the development of Taiwanese literature from the days of the Qing Dynasty through the Japanese colonial period and the postwar era up to the 1980s. Each chapter of the book discusses the historical context necessary to understand the concerns and influences shared by writers in each period, and Ye comments on both major and less prominent writers. Rather than a critical study driven by a particular theoretical approach or a central argument, the book is structured as a comprehensive reference work designed to be inclusive and accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Thanks to the skillful translation work of Christopher Lupke (Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, University of Alberta) this valuable resource is now available in English for the first time. In addition to the main text, Lupke also includes voluminous footnotes contributed by two Japanese scholars who specialized in Ye Shitao’s work. Lupke’s introduction adds contextual information about Ye Shitao himself, and the translator’s epilogue traces developments in the literature of Taiwan from the time of the book’s publication in 1987 to the present. A History of Taiwan Literature (Cambria Press, 2020) is an important resource for anyone interested in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of East Asia. Steve Wills is Associate Professor of History at Nebraska Wesleyan University and one of the hosts of the New Books in East Asia series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late imperial China. By examining versatile trends within paintings in modern China, this book questions the extent to which historical relics have been used to represent the ethnic identity of modern Chinese art. In doing so, this book asks: did the antiquarian movements ultimately serve as a deliberate tool for re-writing Chinese art history in modern China?  In searching for the public meaning of inventive private collecting activity, Appropriating Antiquity in Modern Chinese Painting (Bloomsbury, 2023) draws on various modes of artistic creation to address how the use of antiquities in early 20th-century Chinese art both produced and reinforced the imaginative links between ancient civilization and modern lives in the late Qing dynasty. Further exploring how these social and cultural transformations were related to the artistic exchanges happening at the time between China, Japan and the West, the book successfully analyses how modernity was translated and appropriated at the turn of the 20th century, throughout Asia and further afield. Prof. Chia-Ling Yang is the Personal Chair of Chinese Art and Programme Director of PhD and MScR in History of Art at The University of Edinburgh.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

During the Qing dynasty in China, a wide variety of people participated in a lottery game named weixing (“surname guessing”), which had participants placing bets on the surnames of civil service examination candidates. A fiercely competitive process, those who passed the various levels of the civil service and military examinations could climb the social ladder and obtain status in their communities and be considered for important positions in the government and military. The results of these examinations were not only highly anticipated by the exam takers themselves but also–with the introduction of weixing–by an enthusiastic community of players who bet on the success of candidates with less common surnames. In this episode, En Li, assistant professor of modern East Asian history at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Betting on the Civil Service Exmaninations: The Lottery in Late Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2023), explores the fascinating history of this lottery game–from the longer history of games and betting in China and the origin of weixing to its regulation by the government to raise revenue and the spread of the game beyond China’s borders through Chinese diasporic communities to Southeast Asia and North America. The book considers the game from multiple perspectives–government officials, players, and lottery game runners. En Li thoughtfully reflects on the book and the process of producing it and points to the larger significance of both weixing and the civil service examinations in Chinese society and life and the risk, reward, and loss involved. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Just a decade ago, before COVID upended everything, tens of thousands of migrants from African countries traveled to China in search of economic opportunity. One 2012 estimate put the African population in Guangzhou alone at 100,000. When the British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa heard about this community, she decided to travel to Guangzhou and China to learn more. She met traders, drug dealers, surgeons, visa overstayers, former professional athletes, and many more trying to live, work and stay in China. Her travels are the subject of her new book Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China (Canongate, 2023). In this interview, we talk about her experiences in Guangzhou, the prejudice Africans immigrants faced in China—and the prejudices they brought with them—and what this migration says about “south-south” relations Noo Saro-Wiwa is a travel author and journalist. Born in Nigeria and raised in England, she writes for Condé Nast Traveller magazine, and has contributed book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian newspaper, The Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Soft Skull: 2012), was published to critical acclaim in 2012 and was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year in 2012. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Black Ghosts. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Based on longitudinal ethnographic work on migration between the United States and Taiwan, Time and Migration: How Long-Term Taiwanese Migrants Negotiate Later Life (Cornell UP, 2021) interrogates how long-term immigrants negotiate their needs as they grow older and how transnational migration shapes later-life transitions. Ken Chih-Yan Sun develops the concept of a “temporalities of migration” to examine the interaction between space, place, and time. He demonstrates how long-term settlement in the United States, coupled with changing homeland contexts, has inspired aging immigrants and returnees to rethink their sense of social belonging, remake intimate relations, and negotiate opportunities and constraints across borders. The interplay between migration and time shapes the ways aging migrant populations reassess and reconstruct relationships with their children, spouses, grandchildren, community members, and home, as well as host societies. Aging, Sun argues, is a global issue and must be reconsidered in a cross-border environment. Ken Chih-Yan Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Villanova University. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

With over 100 million followers, Buddhism in the People's Republic of China now fosters the largest community in the world of individuals who self-identify as Buddhists. Although Buddhism was harshly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution under the leadership of Mao Zedong, Buddhist communities around the country were able to revive their traditions in various ways since the 1980s.  In the post-Mao era, Buddhism in China has been able to become a more visible, social, and cultural phenomenon. The editors of Buddhism after Mao: Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions (U Hawaii Press, 2020), Ji Zhe, Gareth Fisher, and André Laliberté observes: "Numerous temples and monasteries have received official permission and even encouragement to rebuild and expand, and the party-state has directly engaged Buddhist groups in activities to promote social welfare, national unity, and the PRC's soft power." Despite Buddhism's current size and influence in the PRC, the editors argue, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Together with nine other scholars of modern and contemporary Buddhism in China, Buddhism After Mao attempts to fill this gap.  Ji, Fisher, and Laliberté point out that first of all, the rapid growth of Buddhism in the past few decades and its continued survival into the future has depended on the maintenance of a careful balance between varying interests and demands. This balance is achieved through negotiation, continuities, and reinventions, which also categorize the chapters of the book.  On the one hand, Buddhists have been negotiating with the post-Mao authoritarian and atheist state to maintain or expand legal spaces for Buddhist practices. On the other hand, Buddhists have been expected to rebuild or maintain continuities with the past to stay "legitimate" in both the state and society's eyes. However, through these processes of tension and negotiation, the contributors of the volume also observe innovations and inventions in Buddhist communities in contemporary China, which have emerged from both design and necessity on both discursive and practical levels.  Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Lena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of shouchaoben, or hand-written fiction, that entertained Chinese readers throughout the “long 1970s,” a period spanning the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in the late 70s and early 1980s. These manuscripts, copies of otherwise unavailable, often foreign, fiction and poetry, as well as original novels and poems, were “texts in motion.” They circulated throughout China together with their copiers and readers, youth sent-down during the Cultural Revolution, and often followed characters who were likewise moving, spies and scientists traveling within and beyond China.  Moreover, the text itself was just as unstable as its readers and characters were mobile: frequent copying resulted in the proliferation of multiple versions of any given narrative, thus troubling the clear-cut distinction between readers and authors. Henningsen’s careful survey of shouchaoben and related book forms, including “internal publications,” sketches out a lively and cosmopolitan reading culture. In the book, she shows that despite assumptions of cultural insularity and uniformity, paying attention to “reading acts” during the Cultural Revolution period shows that the “long 1970s” are not an abrupt, anomalous rupture in Chinese literary history, but a period that can be more fruitfully described in terms of continuities.  Please join me for a conversation with Lena Henningsen in exploring the rich archive of shouchaoben. Make sure to also visit ReadChina, to learn more about Henningsen's European Research Council grant funded research on Reading Acts in China and discover the resources her team has compiled here. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Today I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon draws on archives from three continents to argue that Overseas Chinese were key to this development, utilizing their global connections and diasporic links to procure much-needed money, supplies, and medical expertise. The remarkable expansion of care and education that they spurred saved more than four million lives and trained more than fifteen thousand medical personnel. Moreover, the introduction of military medicine shifted biomedicine out of elite, urban civilian institutions and laboratories and transformed it into an adaptive field-based practice for all. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort. Wayne Soon is an Associate Professor in the Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Soon is a historian of medicine as well as modern China and Taiwan, with an interest in how international ideas and practices of medicine, institutional building, and diaspora have shaped Chinese East Asia’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. He has published scholarly articles in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Twentieth Century China, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China’s communist revolution has an intricate relationship with gender and religion. In Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023), Xiaofei Kang moves the two themes to the center stage in the Chinese Revolution. It examines the Communist Party’s first anti-superstition campaign in its wartime headquarters of Yan’an, the holy land of the Maoist revolution. The book argues that religion was not a mere adversary for the revolution; it also served as a model with which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In its rise from rural backwaters to national dominance, the Party attacked “superstitions” that had supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted the same religious resources for its own political ends. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order. Furthermore, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new hegemonic vision of the Party-state endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution. The interplay of religion, gender, and revolution holds historical and contemporary significance of the Maoist legacy in contemporary China. It also offers insights into the transformative power of propaganda in global politics. Xiaofei Kang is Professor in the Department of Religion at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014). Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Albert Welter's book The Future of China's Past: Reflections on the Meaning of China's Rise (SUNY Press, 2023) examines how China's traditional culture is being reinvented and manipulated for political purposes. Like no time before in its recent history, and certainly at no time in the history of the People's Republic, China is being shaped in terms of its past, but which past--Confucianism, Legalism, Daoism, Buddhism--or combination of pasts is being held up as the model? Given its growing economic, political, and cultural significance, it is incumbent upon us to take China's rise seriously, yet perspectives involving modern and contemporary geopolitical and intrastate dynamics are insufficient, on their own, for understanding China's rise, and the same holds true for economic analyses, however pertinent. Instead, this book looks at current engagements with models of China's past, introducing the four traditional lenses of Chinese thought and reflecting on their potential relevance for China's--and the world's--future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How is sexuality experienced in contemporary China? What are the connections and tensions between China and the West in producing knowledges of sexuality? Dr Weiyi Hu notes that most of the seminal writings on sexuality are produced in the West, and that the definition of sexuality is largely theorised by Western scholars. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Dr. Weiyi Hu sketches an alternative approach that questions the unreflective reliance on Western understanding of sexuality, and to cut through a cluster of dualisms, such as East and West, in theorising Chinese sexuality. She combines Xiaomei Chen’s concept of the Chinese Occidentalism discourse and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to elucidate the connections and tensions between China and the West. Drawing on fieldwork, she argues that within contemporary Chinese culture the meaning of sexuality experienced in everyday life is charged with tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Weiyi Hu is a sessional facilitator at the University of Sydney, where she recently completed her doctorate in the social sciences. She is interested in the sociology of everyday life, sexuality, feminism, and familial relations in contemporary China. Born in Shanghai, she is fascinated by the complex ways that the Occident (West) is perceived, imagined, narrated, and experienced by Chinese peoples. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies