New Books in Chinese Studies
Episodes
Through the Lens of Taiwan: Film, History, and Identity
30 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast episode is hosted by Mart Tšernjuk, the Taiwan Coordinator at the University of Tartu Asia who is talking to Prof. Robert Chen, a leadin...
Ker Gibbs, "The Fragile Dragon: Trade, Trump, and China's Vulnerabilities" (Earnshaw Books, 2026)
25 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Fragile Dragon offers a unique exploration of China's rapid transformation and its evolving commercial relationship with the West. Drawing on the ...
Mujun Zhou, "The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
24 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In a society undergoing rapid transformation, how do people engage in debates around a foreign concept and in doing so, pursue contested political fut...
Qi Ai, "Feng Xiaogang's New Year Films: Industry, Regulation, Humour and Authorship" (Routledge, 2025)
20 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Feng Xiaogang's New Year Films: Industry, Regulation, Humour and Authorship (Routledge, 2025) offers not only an in-depth study of Feng Xiaogang as a...
The Shawshank Redemption in China: An Interview with Matti Lehtonen
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can an entirely foreign cast perform the American “The Shawshank Redemption” in the Chinese language across China? In this episode of the Nord...
Daniel A. Bell, "Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future" (Princeton UP, 2026)
15 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel A. Bell joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, a...
Donald Sassoon, "Revolutions: A New History" (Verso Books, 2025)
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Revolutions: A New History (Verso Books, 2025) is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in ter...
Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic with Mia Bennett
11 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires a...
Ruth Mandujano López, "Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914" (U Hong Kong Press, 2025)
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How did the movement of people, goods, and ships reshape connections between Latin America and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuri...
Ho-fung Hung, "The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
"The contempt and naive idealization of China are two sides of the same coin. The latter cannot be an antidote to the former." So argues Ho-Fung Hung...
Avner Greif et al., "Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000" (Princeton UP, 2025)
02 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Indu...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Everything You Wanted to Know about China*: * But Were Afraid to Ask" (Brixton Ink, 2025)
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does Xi Jinping share with Mao Zedong? Why is Confucius still central to a communist state? What really happened in Tiananmen Square—and why is...
Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Food
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese f...
Zheng Liu, "Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China" (Columbia UP, 2026)
28 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, self-proclaimed “independent bookstores” have arisen across China. In the West, such retailers represent an alternative to corp...
Nellie Chu, "Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou" (Duke UP, 2026)
28 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou (Duke UP, 2026), the cultural anthropologist Nellie Chu tells the story o...
James Lin, "The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan" (U California Press, 2025)
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received...
Gods and the State: Environmental Change in the Blang Mountains, China
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountain...
Christopher Munn, "Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2025)
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Who bore the burdens of empire? Christopher Munn's Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2025) explores ho...
Yanshuo Zhang, "Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
14 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain un...
Cheng Li, "Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2025)
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid incr...
Cheng Li, "Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2025)
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid incr...
Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)
08 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese? China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its ...
Rian Thum, "Islamic China: An Asian History" (Harvard UP, 2025)
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not...
Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018)
01 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused...
Ray Yep, "Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024), Ray Yep explores the latest available archival mater...
Bin Chen, "Hui Muslims in the Shaping of Modern China: Education, Frontier Politics, and Nation-State" (Routledge, 2025)
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Chen examines the Chinese Nationalist government's distinctive support for private Muslim teachers schools between the 1920s and 1940s, and explores t...
Ruixue Jia et al., "The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China" (Harvard UP, 2025)
15 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (Harvard UP, 2025), provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes col...
Competing Visions for International Order
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Di...
Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley et al. eds., "Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media" (Routledge, 2025)
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Studying Chinese media has never been a stable intellectual enterprise. As Professor Yuezhi Zhao once observed, it often resembles aiming at a target ...
Yi-Ling Liu, "The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet" (Knopf, 2026)
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the internet–even one behind the Great Firewall–would bring about a more open China. As P...
Hang Tu, "Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past" (Harvard UP, 2025)
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (H...
Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, "Governing Digital China" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Camb...
China’s Climate and Air Quality Governance and EU-China Cooperation
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to the global challenges posed by climate change and environmental issues, China has been presented both as a source of problems and a p...
Ning Leng, "Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China" (Cambridge, 2025)
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge, 2025), Ning Leng shows how Chinese officia...
Gregory T. Chin and Kevin P. Gallagher, "China and the Global Economic Order" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs...
Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
01 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are com...
Gaoheng Zhang, "Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities" (Fordham UP, 2025)
31 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities (Fordham UP, 2025) by Dr. Gaoheng Zhang designs a novel analytical framework to a...
Jenny Banh, "Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
25 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the attempt to transplant ...
Cross-Border Intimacies: Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration Between China and Taiwan
23 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Transnational marriage migration is among the many features of cross-border mobility that characterise the globalised world. This is also the case in ...
Di Wu et. al, eds., "China As Context: Anthropology, Post-globalisation and the Neglect of China" (Manchester UP, 2025)
16 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A provocative collaborative project, China as Context challenges the marginalization of Chinese-grounded ideas in academia, arguing that neglecting ...
Alvin K. Wong, "Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone" (Duke UP, 2025)
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How do we compare across languages, media, and histories, all without flattening differences? And what might Hong Kong teach us about doing comparison...
Dylan Loh, "China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy" (Stanford UP, 2025)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How has China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed itself into one of the most assertive diplomatic actors on the global stage? What explains t...
Thomas J. Mazanec, "Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China" (Cornell UP, 2024)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of m...
Shuchen Xiang, "Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2023)
04 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastr...
Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power" (Yale UP, 2024)
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the...
Thomas David DuBois, "China in Seven Banquets: A Flavourful History" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
28 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of New Books Network, Laura Goldberg speaks with Thomas David DuBois, Professor at Beijing Normal University, about his book China in...
Suvi Rautio, "The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade" (Springer Nature, 2024)
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, anthropologist Professor Anru Lee is joining NBN as a guest host to interview me, Suvi Rautio, on my new book, The Invention of Tradition in ...
Weila Gong, "Implementing a Low-Carbon Future: Climate Leadership in Chinese Cities" (Oxford UP, 2025)
24 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode explores what China’s subnational climate experiments tell us about the possibilities and limits of climate leadership in an era of int...
Joseph Torigian, "The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping" (Stanford UP, 2025)
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Xi Zhongxun’s career spanned the entirety of China’s modern history. Born just two years after the 1911revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty,...
Yan-ho Lai, "Legal Resistance Under Authoritarianism: The Struggle for the Rule of Law in Hong Kong" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I spoke with Senior Fellow at the Centre for Asian Law, University of Georgetown, Dr Yan-ho Lai (Eric) about his book, Legal Resistance under...
Yasmin Cho, "Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet" (Cornell UP, 2025)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Budd...
Liang Qichao, "Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World" (Penguin Classics, 2023)
13 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023) brings together a newly translated selection of pre-...
Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2025)
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and ...
Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible? Yanqiu Zheng’s In Sear...
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the convent...
Jennifer Yip, "Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
15 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in Chi...
Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2021)
08 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the c...
13.4 - Zumretay Arkin
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven were in conversation with Zumretay Arkin, discussing the Uyghur genocide in East Turkestan. Zumretay ...
Strings of Identity: The Horse-Head Fiddle and Mongolian Identity in China (with Ying Song)
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we trace how the horse-head fiddle has evolved in the People’s Republic of China — from a traditional steppe instrument to a cult...
Mark L. Clifford, "The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic" (Free Press, 2024)
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The extraordinary life story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai, a leading Hong Kong democracy activist fighting for freedom of speech who be...
AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising Journalism in Global China’s Algorithmic Age: A conversation with Dr. Joanne Kuai
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, ex...
Taru Salmenkari, "Global Ideas, Local Adaptations: Chinese Activism and the Will to Make Civil Society" (Edward Elgar, 2025)
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring the boundaries, fringes, and inner workings of civil society, Taru Salmenkari investigates local forms of political agency in China in light...
Jesse Rodenbiker, "Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Based on two years of extensive fieldwork, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (Cornell UP, 2023) exami...
Mia Yinxing Liu, "Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era" (U Hawai’i Press, 2019)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of...
Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot: ...
In Search of Green China: Ma Tianjie on Pan Yue and the CCP’s “Ecological Civilization"
18 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A former journalist and environmental campaigner named Pan Yue rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, championing the concept of “ec...
Michelle Wang, "The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What can a map do, beyond showing us where things are? Michelle Wang's new book, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (U Chicago Press, 2...
Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, "A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911" (Brill, 2025)
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911 is an encyclopaedic reference work doc...
Joshua Eisenman and David H. Shinn, "China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement" (Columbia UP, 2023)
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased ...
Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rif...
Xiaobo Lü, "Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China's Republican Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
05 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How and why did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power in the 1940s at the expense of its Nationalist (KMT) rival? In his new book, Domination and...
Rivals in a Tight Embrace Russia, China, and the Central Asian Chessboard
28 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast episode by Alevtina Solovyeva traces Central Asia as the enduring crossroads “between empires,” where caravan routes outlast the bord...
Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was origin...
Yu Zhang, "Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth ofte...
Christopher Joby, "Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices" (Brill, 2025)
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do new ideas and beliefs take root when they cross cultural and linguistic borders? In seventeenth-century Taiwan, both Dutch and Spanish missiona...
Sarah McLaughlin, "Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
07 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes inf...
Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020)
31 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’...
The end of aid? US, China, and the future of development
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In early 2025, headlines announced that the Trump administration would move to dramatically slash USAID—the United States’ flagship development ag...
Dan Wang, "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future" (Norton, 2025)
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, and previously a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. B...
Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks, "Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China" (Oxford UP, 2025)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of e...
Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors w...
Chile’s Growing Interests in China
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chile holds the distinction of being the first South American nation to forge diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China, as well as the firs...
Isabella M. Weber, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate" (Routledge, 2021)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholes...
Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into e...
Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproduc...
Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (Liverpool UP, 2024)
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding ...
Professional Chat: Home, Migrant Workers, and Decent Work in Supply Chains, with Bonny Ling
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Better Innovations, to talk about Taiwan as a home for migrant workers, and decent work in supply chains. After a brief overview of key risks in this ...
Toby Lincoln, "An Urban History of China" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despit...
David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025)
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating th...
Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying the...
The Nomadic Origin of the State
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as periph...
Scott Pearce, "Northern Wei (386-534): A New Form of Empire in East Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023)
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Emerging from collapse of the Han empire, the founders of Northern Wei had come south from the grasslands of Inner Asia to conquer the rich farmlands ...
Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022)
26 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a tho...
Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao" (Pantheon, 2017)
26 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017), was called "a masterpiece of observation and empath...
Ketian Zhang, "China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over pe...
Cara Wallis, "Social Media and Ordinary Life: Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China" (NYU Press, 2025)
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life (NYU Pres...
Lanlan Kuang, "Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China's New Cosmopolitan Heritage" (Indiana UP, 2024)
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can art shape historical memory and national identity? And how can cultural heritage and historical references be used to enact a vision of a nati...
Seeing China’s Belt and Road with Ed Schatz and Rachel Silvey
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
EPISODE SUMMARY: What becomes visible when you shift the lens away from Beijing to how China’s Belt and Road projects unfold on the ground? Seeing...
Nan Z. Da, "The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear" (Princeton UP, 2025)
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters' professions of love, but portions it ou...
Chinese Conceptualisation of the Rule of Law – a Conversation with Dr. Martin Lavicka
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does the 'rule of law' really mean in China? How does it shape the country’s politics, both at home and on the world stage? And why should it m...