New Books in Chinese Studies

Wang Yi, Hannah Nation ed., "Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement" (IVP Academic, 2022)

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this important body of theology, key writings from the Chinese house church movement have been compiled, translated, and made accessible to English...

Zev Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025)

03 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chin...

Minxin Pei, "The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China" (Harvard UP, 2024)

01 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Rising prosperity was supposed to bring democracy to China, yet the Communist Party’s political monopoly endures. How? Minxin Pei looks to the surve...

Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn, "Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective" (CIUS Press, 2016)

28 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this volume, leading specialists examine the affinities and differences between the pan-Soviet famine of 1931–1933, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the ...

Tie Ning, Annelise Finegan trans., "My Sister's Red Shirt" (Sinoist Books, 2025)

25 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Growing up in a glittering new decade of possibility, Anran is radically different to her sister. Outspoken and idealistic, she relishes in challengin...

Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance" (Princeton UP, 2025)

22 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025)....

Vivian Kong, "Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910–45" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

22 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean to be British? To answer this, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910–45 (Cambridge UP, 2023) by Dr. Vivian...

John Man, "Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict" (Oneworld Publications, 2025)

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from ...

Chris Horton, "Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival" (MacMillan, 2025)

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Chris Horton is a freelance journalist who has been based in Taiwan since 2015, before many Western publications had any dedicated presence on the is...

Chinese in Qatar

18 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Sara Hillman, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Engli...

Joseph Torigian, "The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping" (Stanford UP, 2025)

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Often I will find in a chronology or a biography, you know, official materials, evidence that because I have other evidence, it’s meaningful in a wa...

Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “...

NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre China's Psychological Power

04 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This podcast episode is hosted by Toomas Hanso International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) who is talking to Urmas Hõbepappel. Urmas is an...

Xing Hang, "The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan...

Chris Aslan, "Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia" (Icon Books, 2024)

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn’t the only textile ...

Jessica X. Zu, "Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2025)

28 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025) uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy i...

Luanjiao Hu, "Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications" (IAP, 2024)

25 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explore...

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong" (Brixton Ink, 2025)

24 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Given what has happened since – from a global pandemic to wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East – events in Hong Kong in 2019-20 can seem ...

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-com...

Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)

21 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the constructi...

Kai Shmushko, "Multiple Liminalities of Lay Buddhism in Contemporary China: Modalities, Material Culture, and Politics" (Leiden UP, 2024)

20 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the past decades, various forms of Buddhism have emerged in-between, above, and beyond conventional conceptions of religious and spiritual life in ...

Lines of Control: India’s Foreign Policy and China

19 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features journalist and analyst Aadil Brar discussing India's foreign ...

Qingfei Yin, "State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

18 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Departing from conventional studies of border hostility in inter-Asian relations, Yin Qingfei explores how two revolutionary states - China and Vietna...

Nicholas Borst, "The Bird and the Cage: China’s Economic Contradictions" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025)

17 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Chinese Communist Party’s complex and contradictory embrace of capitalism has played a pivotal role in shaping China’s economic reforms since ...

Guo Quan Seng, "Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia" (SAPP, 2023)

15 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (SAPP, 2023), Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of sett...

Cora Lingling Xu, "The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China" (SUNY Press, 2025)

08 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Can a student inherit time? What difference does time make to their educational journeys and outcomes? The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Sha...

Zev J. Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025)

03 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, in...

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, "The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform" (Yale UP, 2024)

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1968, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, asserting his control of China 15 years later, Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening up ...

Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

28 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World ...

Tadashi Ishikawa, "Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan" (Cambridge UP., 2024)

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Tadashi Ishikawa traces percep...

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, ...

Margherita Zanasi, "Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

21 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic...

Christof Lammer, "Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China" (Berghahn, 2024)

18 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On the podcast today I am joined by Christof Lammer, a social anthropologist based at the University of Klagenfurt and inherit fellow at Humboldt Un...

Frances Yaping Wang, "The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes" (Oxford UP, 2024)

08 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes? And why does this domestic mobilization sometimes fail to result in aggressive polic...

Xiaolu Ma, "Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930)" (Harvard UP, 2024)

07 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930) (Harvard Asia Center, 2024) offers the first detailed account of...

John Alekna, "Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society" (Stanford UP, 2024)

06 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscap...

Becky Yang Hsu, "The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community in China" (Columbia UP, 2024)

05 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This new edited volume...

Queering the Asian Diaspora

04 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever heard of the Chinese gay god, the Rabbit god? How did queer Chinese artists use this icon in reclaiming their own stories, while resisti...

Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

02 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global eco...

Tana Li, "A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

01 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we think of Vietnamese history, we tend to think of plucky peasant guerillas fighting for their independence against French colonial rule or Amer...

Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean,...

Robert J. Antony, "Outlaws of the Sea: Maritime Piracy in Modern China" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

27 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did you know Hong Kong used to be a hub for pirates? That factoid has long been part of the popular history for Hong Kong—and for Southern China bro...

Book Chat: "A Taiwanese Eco-Literature Reader" with Ian Rowen

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-lit...

Yingyao Wang, "Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State" (Columbia UP, 2024)

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a mar...

Zhiying Ma, "Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2025)

15 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on th...

Joseph A. Seeley, "Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria" (Cornell UP, 2024)

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime bo...

Michael J. Hatch, "Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790-1840" (Penn State UP, 2023)

13 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In early nineteenth-century China, a remarkable transformation took place in the art world: artists among China's educated elites began to use touch t...

Andrew G. Walder, "Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China's Southern Periphery" (Stanford UP, 2023)

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Guangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup confl...

Social Death by Debt: China's Lending Boom Reshapes Lives

07 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China's household debt has exploded from 11% of GDP in 2006 to over 62% today—a profound transformation in a traditionally savings-focused society. ...

Brendan A. Galipeau, "Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La" (U Washington Press, 2025)

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Aiming to explore the Sino-Tibetan border region, which is renamed “Shangri-La” by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibet...

Ting Guo, "Religion, Secularism, and Love As a Political Discourse in Modern China" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)

24 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is the meaning of love in modern Chinese politics? Why has 愛 ai (love) been a crucial political discourse for secular nationalism for generatio...

Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison, "Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order" (Cambria Press, 2024)

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Popular English-language discourse about Taiwan often contains tropes like how “Taiwan is the real China” or how Taiwan “split with China in 194...

Nordic Style on Chinese Social Media: Misinformation, Consumerism, and Digital Discourse

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How does social media shape perceptions of global cultural trends? On Chinese platforms like WeChat, the concept of Nordic Style (北欧风) has been ...

Susan Tate Ankeny, "American Flygirl" (Citadel Press, 2024)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1931, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend’s flight lesson. It changed her life. In le...

Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky, "Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the 'Ricci Maps'" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we think of the sixteenth-century arrival of European missionaries in East Asia, there is a tendency to imagine this meeting as a civilizational ...

Xian Wang, "Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs (U Michigan Press, 2025) takes readers on a journey th...

Glen L. Thompson, "Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China" (Eerdmans, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-spea...

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to...

Zai Liang. "From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States" (U California Press, 2023)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024...

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing sch...

Yujie Zhu, "China’s Heritage through History: Reconfigured Pasts" (Routledge, 2024)

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China’s Heritage through History employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary Ch...

Book Chat: The Life Story of Father Nguyễn, a Vietnamese Refugee Who Migrated to Taiwan, with Lin Shu-fen

26 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, introduces a book she co-edited with Dr Polina Ivanova (University of Bremen) titled Refugees and Asylum See...

Jing Xu, "'Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making mo...

Multilingual Crisis Communication

21 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Jia Li, Professor of Applied Sociolinguistics at Yunnan Universi...

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomad...

The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet

14 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Gerald Roche, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics,...

Sandy Ng, "Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The early twentieth century was a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese history, complete with new conflicts, new technologies, and — as Portray...

Sixiang Wang, "Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China" (Columbia UP, 2023)

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with Ming China, a relationship that was carefully cultivated and achieve...

Professional Chat – Working with the most marginalised people in Taiwan, AIDS/HIV and undocumented migrants, with Yi-Fan Feng

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host Lara Momesso interviews Yi-Fan Feng (馮一凡), the Deputy Chief Executive at Harmony Home Taiwan, to discuss the work that...

Peter Hessler, "Other Rivers: A Chinese Education" (Penguin, 2024)

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in pa...

Fionna S. Cunningham, "Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security" (Princeton UP, 2024)

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma ...

Aurelia Campbell, "What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming" (U Washington Press, 2020)

06 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden C...

Austin Dean, "China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937" (Cornell UP, 2020)

05 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using s...

Jie Li, "Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era" (Duke UP, 2020)

04 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories...

Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)

01 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 o...

Language Rights in a Changing China

31 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Alexandra Grey about Dr. Grey’s book entitled Language Right...

China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications

27 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of differe...

Enze Han, "The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2024)

26 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional i...

Academic Chat – From Academic Work to Social Impact: A Scholar’s Commitment to Raise Awareness on Migrant Experiences in Taiwan

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host Lara Momesso interviews Dr Isabelle Cockel, an academic based in the UK, to discuss the wider impact of her academic work. I...

Paul French, "Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced U.S.-born fiancee of King Edward VIII, they often...

Justin Tse, "Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific Rim" (U Notre Dame Press, 2024)

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Justin K.H. Tse captures the voices of Cantonese Protestant Christians from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong metropolitan areas as they ref...

Meanings of Identity of the Post-2000s Inland Tibet Class

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What identity does the post-2000s Inland Tibet Class (ITC) generation mean? How do Sinophone-Tibetan films articulate the expression of such identity?...

Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History

06 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What do we get if we combine stories about a merchant, an exile, an activist, a pop star, a doctor, and a president together into one book? Dr. Niki J...

Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World" (Viking, 2024)

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distrac...

Russell Thomas, "Tofu: A Culinary History" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. How...

Book Chat: Home & Queer Writing – "Ghost Town," with Kevin Chen

03 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Taiwanese Queer author, Kevin Chen, to talk about his LGBTQ novel, Ghost Town (Europa Editions, 2022) 鬼...

Ken Wilcox, "The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice" (John Wiley & Sons, 2024)

01 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Ba...

Samantha A. Vortherms, "Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China" (Stanford UP, 2024)

30 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The redistribution of political and economic rights is inherently unequal in autocratic societies. Autocrats routinely divide their populations into i...

Chris Berry et al., "Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

27 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (Edinburgh UP, 2024), edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri, and Ming-yeh T. Ra...

Talking Thai Politics: Why Thai Politics isn’t All About China

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How far does geopolitics relate to domestic political leanings? Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conse...

Peter Worthing, "General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

17 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China (Cambridge UP, 2016) is a revisionist study of the career of General He Yingqin, one of t...

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

16 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule o...

Meta-Practice (on Chinese Medicine)

11 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today I sit down with Volker Scheid, an interdisciplinary scholar and longtime practitioner of Chinese medicine. Together, we take an intellectual dee...

Why Can’t the US Compete with China in Infrastructure?

07 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a foc...

John Duffus, "Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)

07 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmo...

Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)

29 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital...

Eric Helleiner, "The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History" (Cornell UP, 2021)

29 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps m...

Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate Our Future

25 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why should we focus on Taiwan to understand the future risks facing the world? Professor Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the...

India Rising: Navigating the Second Cold War in South Asia from Nepal to the Maldives

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relati...

Tamara Jacka, "Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China" (Anu Press, 2023)

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on Chin...