New Books in Chinese Studies
Episodes
Yi-Lin Chiang, "Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We understand very little about how elite individuals and families operate in everyday life to maintain their privileged statuses, as many of these st...
Jason Chang et al., "The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom" (PM Press, 2022)
09 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom (PM Press, 2022) tells a true story of mutiny on the high seas in which four hundred indentured Chinese ...
Nile Green, "How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding" (Yale UP, 2023)
08 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spre...
Marco Caboara, "Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735" (Brill, 2022)
06 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every West...
Xin Zhang, "The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China" (Harvard UP, 2023)
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Fiona Sze-Lorrain, "Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories" (Scribner, 2023)
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories (Scribner: 2023) jumps from character to character, location to location, time period to time period. Two coo...
Mongol Nomadism, Mongol Identity, and the Fall of the Mongol Empire
25 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas...
Lena Henningsen, "Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)
25 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of sho...
Academic Chat: "Detention" and Other Horror Videogames: Avatars, Memory and Trauma
24 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Yue Du, "State and Family in China" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the official ideology by which Qing China was governed. In ...
Peter Thilly, "The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Opium is an awkward commodity. For the West, it’s a reminder of some of the shadier and best forgotten parts of its history. For China (and a few ot...
Xin Fan, "World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
07 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nationalism is pervasive in China today. Yet nationalism is not entrenched in China's intellectual tradition. Over the course of the twentieth century...
Xiaomei Chen, "Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023)
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Xiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of...
Brantly Womack, "Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. In th...
Book Chat: "The Suspended Island: Taiwan and the Balance of the World" (LUISS UP, 2022)
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Stefano Pelaggi, Adjunct Professor at Sapienza University in Rome. The two discuss Dr Pelaggi’...
Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, "Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
24 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge UP, 2022), assistant professor of history at Missouri St...
Sagang Sechen, "The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty" (Columbia UP, 2023)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Buddhist cosmological history of the universe, history of Chinggis Khan, history of China, and history of the Mongols — The Precious Summary, writt...
Thomas Chen, "Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film" (Columbia UP, 2022)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Ignatius Suglo discusses the book Made in Censorsh...
Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabar...
Daniel A. Bell, "The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University" (Princeton UP, 2023)
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet I serve as dean of a large faculty of political science...
Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan, "Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader" (Springer, 2023)
16 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Ca...
Peter Thilly, "The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
14 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the opium trade — but not through the relativ...
Theodor Tudoroiu and Anna Kuteleva, "China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions" (Springer, 2023)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Using a multidisciplinary approach and case studies based on fieldwork in nine countries scattered across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, ...
China's Green Consensus: A Discussion with Virginie Arantes
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How has China’s one-party system dealt with the country’s growing environmental issues? And what implications does its green turn have on people’...
James M. Zimmerman, "The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China" (PublicAffairs, 2023)
11 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 sh...
Stephen Roach, "Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives" (Yale UP, 2022)
06 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Denial is a classic symptom of codependency ... Lacking a sense of self, codependent partners tend to be hypersensitive to criticism or negative feedb...
Andrew Small, "No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West" (Melville House, 2022)
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022). Winston Churchill fam...
Jay Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U ...
What Can China's Identity Politics Tell Us About Affirmative Action?
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Yan Sun, Professor of Chinese politics at Queens College and the Gradua...
Maura Dykstra, "Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State" (Harvard UP, 2022)
30 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Uncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura ...
Robert J. Antony, "Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China's Hidden Past" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
26 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China's Hidden Past (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), the author Robert ...
Nicole Constable, "Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations" (U California Press, 2022)
23 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passp...
Sylvia Ang, "Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The question of who is Chinese and how Chineseness as an identity is constituted has been a recurring question, particularly in the context of the ext...
Cao Yin, "Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942-45" (Oxford UP, 2022)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China's war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, ...
Li-Chun Hsiao, "The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan" (Lexington Books, 2022)
18 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to b...
Di Luo, "Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945" (Brill, 2022)
16 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 (Brill, 2022) focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-st...
Lachlan McNamee, "Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop" (Princeton UP, 2023)
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 State...
Sinobabble: A Podcast about Modern Chinese History
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I got to chat with Dr. Edi Obiakpani-Reid about Sinobabble, her podcast series on 20th century Chinese history. In this series she offers an informe...
Tim Simpson, "Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet. Betting on...
Mercedes Valmisa, "Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action" (Oxford UP, 2021)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative...
Ching Keng, "Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
25 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Ching Keng about his book Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2022). Y...
Weijian Shan, "Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China" (Wiley, 2023)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign compa...
Gordon Barrett, "China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the early decades of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China remained far outside mainstream international science — right? Gordon B...
Juwen Zhang, "Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation" (Lexington Books, 2022)
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation (Lexington Books, 2022) is the newest monograph from Professor Juwen Zhang of Willamette Co...
Erin Raffety, "Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster C...
China's Century? Why America's Edge Will Endure
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Much has been made of the rise of China's economy, and some fear that China will surpass the United States as the world's largest economy in the comin...
From China's Lost Generation to American Private Equity Professor
19 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, B...
Chris Alden and Alvaro Mendez, "China and Latin America: Development, Agency and Geopolitics" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
19 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
China's role as an economic powerhouse in Latin America is reshaping a region on the cusp of development and change. Since the turn of the century, bi...
Ian Rowen, "One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism" (Cornell UP, 2023)
17 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as ...
Academic Chat: Reflecting on Hu Tai-li’s Indigenous Ethnographic Work in Taiwan
17 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, our host, Niki Alsford, invites Prof Scott Simon, the Chair of Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa, to share his thoughts and ...
Book Chat: "Human Glitches" (2020)
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short ...
Book Chat: "Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 S...
Film Chat: Vietnamese Refugee Camps in Penghu
14 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews the Taiwanese movie director Asio Liu on his most recent movie project on the Vietnamese refugee c...
Book Chat: Comics in Taiwan
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developme...
Ke Li, "Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end...
Book Chat: Queering the Anthropocene in Taiwan Sci-Fi
12 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we have the pleasure to have Mr Chi Ta-wei, a renowned Taiwanese writer, talk about his acclaimed LGBTQ+ novel, The Membranes. Chi re...
Film Chat: Queer, Sci-Fi and the Family
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Maja Korbecka, a PhD candidate at Freie Universitat Berlin. We chatted about five East Asian film...
Book Chat: "Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
10 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For this instalment, we had the pleasure of hosting Teri Silvio, who works as Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. We chatte...
Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one o...
Book Chat: Oceanic Writing
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The in...
Film Chat: "Whale Island" (2020)
08 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the film director, Huang Chia-chu about his making of the eco-film, Whale Is...
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the project...
Martin K. Dimitrov, "Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China" (Oxford UP, 2023)
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Fear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in suc...
Book Chat: "Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digi...
Book Chat: "The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang, author of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Id...
Birth Rates and the Future of Social Movements: A Discussion with Jack Goldstone
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, ...
Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Chris Gondek interviews author John Palfrey about how diversity and free expression can coexist on a modern campus. Safe spaces, trig...
Chien-Wen Kung, "Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s" (Cornell UP, 2022)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Ch...
Aram Hur, "Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Especially within the last decade, the word "nationalism" often evokes images of bombastic demagogues and democratic backsliding. But does nationalism...
Seiji Shirane, "Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945" (Cornell UP, 2022)
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrat...
Joshua Kurlantzick, "Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World" (Oxford UP, 2022)
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How is China trying to influence media across Asia and indeed globally? Why has this ambitious project achieved rather mixed results so far? And how ...
Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, "Taiwanese Literature as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Owing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed th...
Pete Millwood, "Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger;...
Ying Zhu, "Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market" (New Press, 2022)
18 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With her book Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market (New Press, 2022), media scholar Ying Zhu explores the 100+ ...
Challenging the Malayan Nationhood: Imaginations and Activism by the Peranakan Chinese
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Are there viable alternatives to the ethnocentric model of nation-state in post-colonial societies? How did the Peranakan, a non-Malay community, imag...
Brian Lander, "The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire" (Yale UP, 2022)
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 eco...
Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho, "Material Contradictions in Mao's China" (U Washington Press, 2022)
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, publish...
The Geopolitics of Microchips: China, the EU, and the US
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What would happen if microchips suddenly disappeared from our world? From phones to cars, medical equipment to heating units, they are crucial for the...
Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Iza Ding, "The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
03 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance i...
Matthew Galway, "The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949-1979" (Cornell UP, 2022)
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin, and how do they change once they do? The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism...
Benedict Rogers, "The China Nexus: Thirty Years in and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny" (Optimum Publishing, 2022)
28 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 ye...
Myanmar Jewellers in China
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
China re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the My...
Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018)
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobil...
Hung-Yok Ip, "Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence" ( Lexington Books, 2022)
09 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hung-Yok Ip's Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence ( Lexington Books, 2022) examines Mohism as a movement in early China, fo...
Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical ...
Magnus Fiskesjö, "Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2021)
01 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade t...
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s societ...
Daniel Barish, "Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912" (Columbia UP, 2022)
27 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries al...
Buddhist Medicine in Tibet: A Discussion with Bill McGrath
26 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I sit down with my friend Bill McGrath, a historian of Tibetan Buddhism and medicine. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in th...
Wendi L. Adamek, "Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan" (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021)
23 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nu...
Annuska Derks et al. "Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands" (NIAS Press, 2022)
23 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade im...
John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, internati...
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy ...
Jeremy L. Wallace, "Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China" (Oxford UP, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)
17 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been...
Jingjing Li, "Comparing Husserl's Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
17 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Comparing Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism by Jingjing Li (Bloomsbury, 2022)...
Sean Metzger, "The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization" (Indiana UP, 2020)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical f...
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolutio...
Michael X. Wang, "Lost in the Long March" (Overlook Press, 2022)
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under ...