New Books in Chinese Studies

Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874-1945 (University of California Press, 2018) by Paul D. Barclay unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of “long nineteenth century” global transformations. Superior firepower and large economic reserves ultimately enabled Japanese statesmen to discard mediators on the border and sideline a cohort of indigenous headmen who played both sides of the fence to maintain their chiefly status. Even with reluctant “allies” marginalized, however, the colonial state lacked sufficient resources to integrate Taiwan’s indigenes into its disciplinary apparatus. The colonial state therefore created the Indigenous Territory, which exists to this day as a legacy of Japanese imperialism, local initiatives, and the global commodification of culture. Outcasts of Empire is available as a free e-book via open access. Visit the University of California Press website to learn more. Paul D. Barclay is a Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. His research interests include Japan and China, Indigenous Studies, comparative colonialism, and visual studies. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. 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 August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese government refused to let Bytedance sell TikTok on national security grounds. As it turns out, the pandemic era platform for dance challenges is a Chinese government asset. As digital technologies and social media have evolved into organizing forces for the way in which we conduct our work and social lives, the business logic that undergirds these digital platforms has become clear: we are their product. We give these businesses information about everything--from where we live and work to what we like to do for entertainment, what we consume, where we travel, what we think politically, and with whom we are friends and acquaintances. We do this willingly, but often without a full understanding of how this information is stored or used, or what happens to it when it crosses international boundaries. As Aynne Kokas argues, both corporations and governments traffic much of this data without our consent--and sometimes illegally--for political and financial gain. In Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2022), Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fuelled China's technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives. Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy. 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 eight-legged essay (bagu wen) was the one genre of writing that dominated in late imperial China. As the primary mode of expression in which men were schooled, writing and reading shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) epitomized literary production in Ming-Qing China, and it was vitally important for every student, examination candidate, and examiner to master and know the genre intimately — but this genre hasn't yet been approached from a literary perspective. Alexander Des Forges' new book Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China (Harvard UP, 2021) does just that. Focusing on literary practice (the work of writing, reading, and commenting), this book explores how features such as literary voice, parallelism, subjectivity, and aesthetic originality were constructed in a genre not typically thought of as literature. Through careful reading, rich analysis, and the deft translation of eight-legged essays, Alex looks at prose aesthetics not as settled conclusions, but as features that prose writers developed, adhered to, and/or contested, all while they developed as a social class of literary producers. 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. She can be reached at [email protected]. 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 does the concept of ecological civilisation mean in practice? And how can we understand the relationship between grand visions, legal systems, green politics and development processes on the ground in contemporary China? In this episode we focus on China’s environmental ambitions and its increasingly central role in efforts towards global sustainability, as well as the importance placed upon sustainable development by the Chinese Communist Party, and by Xi Jinping himself. To unpack these issues and discuss the potentials of a greener China, Arve Hansen is joined by some of Norway’s leading experts on Chinese environmental politics and practice, Gørild Heggelund, Yong Zhou and Bjorn Leif Brauteseth. Bjorn Leif Brauteseth is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Gørild Heggelund is Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. Yong Zhou is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. Arve Hansen is a researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. 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. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts 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 Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important new light on the ways in which disability and disabled identities have been represented and negotiated over this time. She exposes the standards against which disabled people have been held as the Chinese state has grappled with expectations of what makes the 'ideal' Chinese citizen. From this, she proposes an exciting new theoretical framework for understanding disabled citizenship in different societies - 'para-citizenship'. A far more dynamic relationship of identity and belonging than previously imagined, her new reading synthesises the often troubling contradictions of citizenship for disabled people - the perils of bodily and mental difference and the potential for personal and group empowerment. Professor Sarah Dauncey is a China specialist with 30 years' experience in visiting and studying China. She joined the School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2016 at the University of Nottingham, having previously served as Deputy Head and Director of Teaching at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies. 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

How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford UP, 2020), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Her research highlights one of the ways in which modern authoritarians conceal their actions in order to maintain their popularity among ordinary citizens, a theme also explored in my earlier interview with Daniel Treisman about his book Spin Dictators. Author Lynette Ong is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, with a joint appointment at the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s Asian Institute. Her other books are The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012), She has published research articles in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Comparative Politics, China Quarterly, China Journal, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and other prominent journals. Here research has also been covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the South China Morning Post. 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 and 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

Alongside rapid socio-economic development, China has achieved remarkable gains in gender equality on metrics like health, education, and labor force participation. Yet, the glass ceiling phenomenon and the underrepresentation of women in management has worsened. Sisi Sung's The Economics of Gender in China (Routledge, 2022) develops a cross-disciplinary paradigm, with economics at its core, to better understand gender in China and women in management in the Chinese business context. In addition to its theoretical advancements, The Economics of Gender in China uses in-depth interviews with managers in China’s largest enterprises to form rich qualitative insights on women’s managerial experiences and career choices. The book also focuses on the enduring power of stereotypes that specify women’s roles in the family, organization, and society. The book's multi-disciplinary approach allows readers across disciplines with an interest in gender studies to find it useful as an introductory reference. Sisi Sung is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany, and a research fellow at Tsinghua University, China. This interview was conducted by Kelsi Caywood, a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Michigan, who researches comparative gender inequality in the United States and East Asia. Kelsi Caywood is a PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Michigan 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 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display. Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung’s lives and afterlives, Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck (U Hawaii Press, 2022) shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Elisabeth Kramer, The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, 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

As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'. In Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language (Zed Books, 2021), James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction. Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink. 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

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

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 When the Iron Bird Flies: China's Secret War in Tibet (Stanford University Press, 2022), Jianglin Li presents an untold story that reshapes our understanding of Chinese and Tibetan history. From 1956 to 1962, devastating military conflicts took place in China's southwestern and northwestern regions. Official records at the time scarcely made mention of the campaign, and in the years since only lukewarm acknowledgment of the violence has surfaced. When the Iron Bird Flies, by Jianglin Li, breaks this decades long silence to reveal for the first time a comprehensive and explosive picture of the six years that would prove definitive in modern Tibetan and Chinese history. The CCP referred to the campaign as "suppressing the Tibetan rebellion." It would lead to the 14th Dalai Lama's exile in India, as well as the Tibetan diaspora in 1959, though the battles lasted three additional years after these events. Featuring key figures in modern Chinese history, the battles waged in this period covered a vast geographical region. This book offers a portrait of chaos, deception, heroism, and massive loss. Beyond the significant death toll across the Tibetan regions, the war also destroyed most Tibetan monasteries in a concerted effort to eradicate local religion and scholarship. Despite being considered a military success, to this day, the operations in the agricultural regions remain unknown. As large numbers of Tibetans have self-immolated in recent years to protest Chinese occupation, Li shows that the largest number of cases occurred in the sites most heavily affected by this hidden war. She argues persuasively that the events described in this book will shed more light on our current moment, and will help us understand the unrelenting struggle of the Tibetan people for their freedom. 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

How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall. Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development. Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford 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

This podcast features Brian A. Wong, discussing his new book, The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That is Changing the World (Public Affairs, 2022). Brian joined Alibaba early, as its 52nd employee and first American employee, and worked for them for nearly twenty years. His book provides both insider insights and an analytical perspective on how Alibaba grew to become one of the most important companies in the global digital economy. This well-written and engaging book explains Alibaba’s unique organizational culture and how the Alibaba platform has helped spread economic opportunity beyond the elites in China’s big cities to the broader world of small and medium businesses throughout the country. Brian Wong’s Radii China is an independent media platform founded in 2017 dedicated to bridging the East and West by highlighting topics and issues that connect the world’s young, globally-minded citizens. Listeners interested in the development of the US-China relationship are encouraged to participate in the NCUSCR’s CHINA Town Hall, on November 17th, featuring a national webcast by former Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. Local partner events around the US, including one at the University of San Francisco, provide opportunities to discuss the topic further in person with other community members and local experts on China. In the interview, we also discuss Benjamin Ho’s book Why Trust Matters, featured on this show last year. Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and 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

In the strategy game Civilization VI, where players choose world leaders to be their avatar, Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, has one goal in mind: building wonders (like the Great Wall of China). His workers can build wonders faster and more cheaply, and he hates leaders that build more wonders than he does. That largely corresponds to how people in the West think of the First Emperor: powerful, responsible for unifying China, despotic–and focused on building great works like the Great Wall and the Terracotta. Civilization VI isn’t one of the many works detailed in Anthony Barbieri’s most recent book, The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China (University of Washington Press: 2022). But it does explore the many ways the life of Qin Shihuang has been represented in books, historical works, mythology, political narratives, movies, tv shows and, yes, video games. We welcome Anthony back to the show to talk about the First Emperor, and how different writers, politicians, and producers portrayed the different aspects of his life. Anthony J. Barbieri-Low is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara. His book Artisans in Early Imperial China won top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and International Convention of Asia Scholars. He is also the author of Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021), which was also the subject of an Asian Review of Books interview last year. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China. 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 Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham Hongwei Bao returns with a theory-driven, methodologically-diverse, empathetic, and insightful analysis of LGBTQ literature and visual culture in postsocialist China. A thorough introduction positions Bao as a participant observer and explores key concepts including “postsocialist metamorphosis,” defined as “the transformation of subjectivity, desire and sense of belonging in the postsocialist era” (4). After exploring the history of homosexuality’s (re-)emergence in China’s reform era by tracing public, intellectual discourse, Bao counters the misperception that Chinese gay and lesbian identities are the result of the influence of global (Western) gay culture. Instead, he identifies a variety of gender and sexual subjectivities unique to China’s postsocialist conditions and historical context. Each chapter then explores rich case studies from queer China, touching upon a wide variety of cultural production types. From poetry to papercutting art, from comrade (tongzhi)/gay literature to girls’ love fan fiction, from lesbian films to activist documentaries, and from a drag show in Shanghai to a public performance of a same-sex wedding in Beijing, Queer China provides unique analysis and insights and also acts as an archive of queer cultural production in postsocialist China. 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 [email protected]. 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 On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one’s place in society as well as one’s relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, and reputation. The Chinese were judged as a race obsessed with the fear of “losing (their) face,” and they constantly resorted to vain attempts to “save” it in the face of Western correction. “Lose face” may be an authentic Chinese expression but “save face” is different. “Save face” was actually a Western invention. Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (2017), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (HKUP, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001). 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

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

Does human existence have a meaning? If so, is that meaning found in the world outside of us, or is it something we bring to our experience? In Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (Bloomsbury, 2020) Leah Kalmanson shows how East Asian philosophies challenge the dichotomy implicit in the way this question is often framed. Her book investigates Korean Buddhist meditation, Confucian ritual practices, and Yijing divination. Along the way she argues that the speculative approaches implicit in these traditions, contrary to the views of many modern European philosophers, means that metaphysical theorizing need not be in opposition to cultivating practical techniques and taking subjectivity seriously. Taking the Korean Buddhist nun Kim Iryŏp as her center point, Kalmanson traces lines of historical influence backwards to Song-dynasty Ruist (or “Confucian”) thinkers such as Zhu Xi and considers conceptual connections outwards to modern existentialists such as Georges Bataille, all the while reflecting on one of philosophy’s big questions: just what does life mean, if anything? Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. 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 an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms to expose “ecologies of interpretation” in both nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholarship and Inner Asian monastic cultures. Although Faxian’s The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Foguoji) is a fifth-century CE travelogue about the Chinese Buddhist monk’s journey into Central and South Asia, it later became the subject of Europe’s first study of “Buddhist Asia” in the nineteenth century in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Relation des Royaumes Bouddhiques, which was then translated from French into Mongolian by the Buryat scholar Dorji Banzarov, and then by the Mongolian monk Zava Damdin Lubsangdamdin from Mongolian into Tibetan. Tracing this fascinating history of trans-Eurasian circulation of knowledge production, King argues that “the circulatory history of Faxian’s Record is not simply about Buddhist Asia forged in Europe into other places that were not Europe,” rather, the story is organized “by a chain of site-specific and differing orientations to knowledge itself – of treatments for traces of the past, of methodology.” In six creatively organized chapters, King discusses first discusses how Faxian’s Record “orders time by means of space” in its early Chinese context, and then delves into the history of Orientalist Buddhist Studies showing how Abel-Rémusat’s “poaching” of Qing sources facilitated the disciplining of Buddhist Asia into an object of a transregional science. In Chapters 3 and 5, we see an inversion of the Orientalist gaze and learn about the reception and reinterpretation of Orientalist scholarship among the “Oriental” subjects themselves, who attempted to make sense of Buddhist history, geography, and Asia’s place and time in the world through Faxian’s Record, via Abel-Rémusat’s translation and scholarship. Here, King shows us that Abel-Rémusat’s science of Buddhist Asia was turned, or rather silenced, into chö-jung (history of the Dharma). Unlike models from world history and transcultural studies that tend to focus on movement, contact, and exchange, In the Forest of the Blind instead focuses innovatively on connected but place-bound interpreters who hardly knew of each other and “who began anew from the silence of analytical practices staged elsewhere.” As an example of an “anti-field history,” this book, in King’s words, attempts “not to look past the fetish of the subject, but to find the disciplinary implications of centerless, overlapping, and mutually incomprehensible relations of knowledge-power that are coproductive but unbeholden to any specific relation of force (such as colonizer/colonized).” The aim of the book, King explains, is “to imagine new disciplinary futures in Buddhist and Asian studies by implicating the disciplinary present in a more diverse, global, subversive, and dispersed disciplinary past that is more attentive to negative space and absence than to impact or influence.” Ending the book with a complete, annotated English translation of the Tibetan version of Faxian’s Record, which was translated from a Mongolian translation of the French translation of the Chinese original, In the Forest of the Blind provides the readers with rich notes about continuities and discrepancies across all four trans-Eurasian versions. Matthew King is an Associate Professor in Transnational Buddhism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. 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

For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the U.S.–China relationship? For the global economy and international security? In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Maria Adele Carrai from New York University Shanghai. Maria Adele Carrai is co-creator of a website called Mapping Global China. She recently co-edited “The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations” (Harvard University Press, 2022) with Jennifer Rudolph and Michzel Szonyi to offer essential insights into the many dimensions of the world’s most important bilateral relationship between the US and China. The voices included in The China Questions 2 recognize that the U.S.–China relationship has changed, and that the policy of engagement needs to change too. But they argue that zero-sum thinking is not the answer. Much that is good for one society is good for both—we are facing not another Cold War but rather a complex and contextually rooted mixture of conflict, competition, and cooperation that needs to be understood on its own terms. One unique feature of this book is that it even includes discussion of Chinese literature. In this episode, Maria Adele Carrai read a short passage from Xudong Zhang’s chapter, illuminating how Chinese writers, with “their freedom, irreverence, and subversiveness undermine the suffocating (self-)censorship, stifling conformism and the formulaic media coverage. Like a spinning gyro rotating on an invisible axis, their work points to an aesthetically determined North Star, constant and free-standing, all the while attentive to and capable of absorbing the sound and fury, sighs, and laughter around this single-minded movement (Zhang, page 393). 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 Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on 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

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict. In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress. Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost as well as a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press: 2018). You can follow Scott on Twitter at @water_futures. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China’s Next Act. 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

Today I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity. Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of 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

Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in English in 2020, in Jeremy’s translation. Jeremy, in addition to having translated more than 20 books from Chinese, is also a novelist and a playwright currently based in New York City. This conversation roams from cryptozoology to Confucius, from the market for World Literature to the patriarchal structure of language. Yan reads from the “Sacrificial Beasts” chapter of her novel, and Jeremy envies the brevity and compression of her Chinese before reading his own English translation. Throughout this warmhearted conversation, Yan and Jeremy insist upon particularity: upon the specificity of language, even in translation, and the distinctiveness of identity, even in a globalized world. We learn more about Yan’s decision to write in English, and Jeremy’s cat chimes in with an answer to our signature question about untranslatability! Tune in and keep a look out for Yan’s English-language debut, Elsewhere, a collection of stories, due out in 2023. Mentions: -Yiyun Li -Liu Xiaobo -Jhumpa Lahiri -Confucius -Strange Beasts of China -Tilted Axis Press -State of Emergency -Yu char kway -Wittgenstein Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Most Hong Kong residents nowadays only have to worry about a wandering boar or an aggressive monkey in their day-to-day lives. But for much of its history, those living in the British colony were worried about a very different form of wildlife: the South China tiger. Not that their British overlords always believed them, as John Saeki notes in his book The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats that Stalked Britain's Chinese Colony (Blacksmith Books: 2022). Police officers, civil servants and journalists often dismissed sightings as a case of mistaken identity by confused locals—until authorities saw tigers with their own eyes, in which case it became a much more serious problem. In this interview, John and I talk about the tiger, and its many sightings—rumored and confirmed—in the now-lost rural communities of Hong Kong. John Saeki runs the graphics desk in the Hong Kong office of the international newswire Agence France-Presse. He spends his working days writing, designing and editing maps, charts and information graphics on world news. He is also the author of the novel The Tiger Hunters of Tai O (Blacksmith Books: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. 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 episode, Carlos Rojas shares with us his experience as a translator. He has translated several renowned authors in the Chinese-speaking world, including Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, and Ng Kim Chew, into English. Among the literary translations, Carlos has translated ten books written by Yan Lianke, including novels, short stories, novellas, and essay collections. The books include Lenin’s Kisses (2012), The Four Books (2015), Marrow (2016), The Explosion Chronicles: A Novel (2017), The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas (2017), The Day the Sun Died (2018), Three Brothers: Memories of My Family (2020), the most recent Hard Like Water (2021) and Discovering Fiction (2022), and the forthcoming Heart Sutra (2023). Yan Lianke is one of the most famous and prolific authors in China. He is the winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Franz Kafka Prize and a two-time finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He teaches at Renmin University in Beijing and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian and Portuguese. Carlos Rojas is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on modern Chinese literature and culture, as well as gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. 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

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war, to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. In The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön: A Woman of Power and Privilege (U Washington Press, 2022), Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biography written by the nun's disciple Gyurmé Ösel, to consider how privilege influences individual authority, how authoritative Buddhist women have negotiated their position in gendered contexts, and how the lives of historical Buddhist women are (and are not) memorialized by their communities. Mingyur Peldrön's story challenges the dominant paradigms of women in religious life and adds nuance to our ideas about the history of gendered engagement in religious institutions. Her example serves as a means for better understanding of how gender can be both masked and asserted in the search for authority—operations that have wider implications for religious and political developments in eighteenth-century Tibet. In its engagement with Tibetan history, this study also illuminates the relationships between the Geluk and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism from the eighteenth century, to the nonsectarian developments of the nineteenth century. The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön is available for free open-access download here. Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, politics, and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley. 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 episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful” place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Juliane Noth’s Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Paintings, coming very soon from the Harvard University Asia Center (2022), tracks a relatively short but transformative period in ink painting that coincides with the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937. In the book, Noth considers how artists negotiated the continuing relevance and development of a form that came to be defined as guohua, or “national painting,” vis a vis the introduction of photography and new (print) technologies. She argues that their theoretical writings and painting practice, far from statically embracing “tradition,” brimmed with the tension between cosmopolitanism and cultural defense. The artists considered in the book reinterpreted Chinese art history in relation to Western developmental models and technologies while maintaining an active formal conversation with literati painting traditions. The emergence of what Noth theorizes as “transmedial” landscapes was also strongly intertwined with state rail and road infrastructure projects and the development of a modern travel industry. Join us in our discussion to hear more of the nuance and complexity with which Prof. Noth analyzes this transformative period in Chinese visual culture. 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

What explains the uneven meatification of diets in three of Asia’s core ‘emerging economies’? How and why is meat consumption changing today, and what role have American fast-food chains played? To discuss these questions and more, Helene Ramnæs, coordinator for the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, is joined by Marius Korsnes, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Arve Hansen. Asian diets include considerably more meat now than in the recent past, but meat is a contested issue. China and Vietnam have experienced some of the world’s most dramatic meat booms but vegetarianism increases and concerns for unsafe production methods and negative health effects have made people cautious about the meat they eat. While India defies global meat trends, contemporary India is not as vegetarian as it claims, and a large beef sector exists in an uneasy relationship with Modi’s hindu-nationalist regime. Marius Korsnes specialises in Science and Technology Studies at the Department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His work focuses on sustainable consumption and production and he is PI of the ERC project: “A Middle Way? Probing Sufficiency through Meat and Milk in China” Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist working on social movements and the political economy of development in India. In addition to working and teaching at the University of Oslo, he also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Arve Hansen. Arve Hansen is a human geographer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, teaching and researching consumption and sustainability, and with a particular interest in meat and meat avoidance. He also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Kenneth Bo Nielsen. Karen Lykke Syse and Arve Hansen: Changing Meat Cultures Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals 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

What is the oral tradition of Chinese storytelling about and what is the connection to the great Chinese novels? How to translate a Chinese classic such as the famed and defamed “Jin Ping Mei”? And how to handle the dilemma of steering one’s boat between enormous amounts of scholarship on the novel without drowning, and keeping up the tempo of translation day after day? NIAS senior researcher Vibeke Børdahl joined NIAS Press Student Assistant, Julia Heinle, to discuss her upcoming publications “Jin Ping Mei i vers og prosa”, I-X (Vandkunsten, 2011-2022) and “Jin Ping Mei – A Wild Horse in Chinese Literature” (ed. by Vibeke Børdahl and Lintao Qi) (NIAS Press 2022). Dr. Vibeke Børdahl is a senior researcher at NIAS and is generally recognized as one of the most accomplished scholars in the study of Chinese oral literature. As well as doing much research on the interplay of oral and written traditions in Chinese popular literature and performance culture, over the past decade she has translated the full work of Jin Ping Mei into Danish. The publication is celebrated with a symposium 26-28 October supported by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Carlsberg Academy and NIAS. Find the NIAS Press book here. Translation editions by Vandkunsten are here. 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

Suyoung Son’s book Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2018) examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation. Combining approaches from various disciplines, such as history of the book, literary criticism, and bibliographical and textual studies, Suyoung Son reconstructs the publishing practices of two seventeenth-century literati-cum-publishers, Zhang Chao in Yangzhou and Wang Zhuo in Hangzhou, and explores the ramifications of these practices on eighteenth-century censorship campaigns in Qing China and Chosŏn Korea. By giving due weight to the writers as active agents in increasing the influence of print, this book underscores the contingent nature of print’s effect and its role in establishing the textual authority that the literati community, commercial book market, and imperial authorities competed to claim in late imperial China. Suyoung Son is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. She is a literary and cultural historian of early modern China (1500-1900). Aliki Semertzi is a PhD Candidate in International Law, at the Geneva Graduate Institute. 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 Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational projects that deployed various discursive and non-discursive practices aimed at creating ideologically homogeneous and modern places. Xining or Ziling is the capital of Qinghai (Tib. mtsho sngon) province and it is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau and home to over 200, 000 Tibetans. Dr. Grant shows how specific processes complicate the rural/urban divide and allow for the emergence of a “regional modernity” where Tibetan urbanites develop tools for the “remediation of the Chinese Dream,” and subtly challenge and subvert the social and ethnic hierarchies promoted through urban development policies. Despite the idea of the city or Trungcher (grong 'khyer) as a place of moral decay and social disintegration, instead of rejecting and retreating from it, Tibetans view the city as a site of social and political possibility; where they can assert their social existence and cultural identity through creative forms of cultural expression and entrepreneurial endeavor. Palden Gyal is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Tibetan and Late Imperial Chinese history at Columbia 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

On June 16 2020, Indian and Chinese forces clashed high in the Himalayan mountains in Aksai Chin. Beijing and New Delhi both claim control over this remote region in a territorial dispute dating back decades. Sources differ on how many soldiers died in the skirmish, fought with fists and clubs rather than guns, with the potential dead ranging into the dozens. Looking back two years later, Galwan marked a clear turning point in relations between the two Asian countries, with India now taking a much harsher line towards China, joining the U.S., Australia and Japan in the so-called Quad Alliance, banning Chinese-affiliated apps like Alibaba and TikTok. Why has the border between China and India been disputed for so long? And what made the bloody clash at Galwan a watershed for New Delhi? Manoj Joshi in Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya (Hurst: 2022) explains where this dispute came from, how it sometimes sparked war, and the many failed attempts to find a negotiated solution. Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. He has been a journalist specializing on national and international politics and is a commentator and columnist on these issues. As a reporter, he has written extensively on issues relating to Siachen, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka and terrorism in Kashmir and Punjab. Today, Manoj and I talk about the border dispute, where it came from, and why both countries have been unable to reach a negotiated solution. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Understanding the India-China Border. 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

As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin's Press, 2022) explores how China’s Communist Party is harnessing new technologies in an effort to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors outline the most brutal and extreme applications of these technologies to the Uighur people of western China. They contrast this with the relatively benign-seeming applications to traffic control, crime, and public order in the prosperous Han Chinese heartland, where a little loss of privacy can feel like a small price to pay. They also make clear that these developments are not isolated to China. They show how America faces similar tradeoffs between using the benefits these tools can bring for crime fighting and other goals, against the risks of losing privacy and potentially making our criminal justice system even less fair. They examine the role of US companies in selling crucial elements of the technology package to Chinese firms and government agencies and challenge their defense that they had no way of knowing how or where these technologies would be used. And they examine China’s export of surveillance technologies to other countries around the world. This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about how the digitization of the economy and our lives can benefit us or be turned against us. Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin are award-winning journalists with the Wall Street Journal. The book grows out of years of reporting on these developments within China, as well as an extensive investigation into the roots of these trends and their connections around the world. Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance 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

How did Chinese tourism grow from almost non-existent to being the largest outbound travel source market in the world over a couple of decades? Is the word “weaponization” a fair description of how Beijing uses tourism strategically in their foreign policy? And will the Chinese tourists ever travel internationally again after several years of pandemic? In this episode, Philip Kyhl is joined by Dr. Matias Thuen Jørgensen to discuss his and co-author Anders Ellemann Kristensen’s contribution to the recently published book Chinese Outbound Tourist Behaviour (Routledge, 2022). The chapter explores the evolution of the Chinese outbound tourism industry, the behaviour of Chinese tourists abroad and how the industry is continuously affected by regulations and policy-making. Dr. Matias Thuen Jørgensen is Associate Professor and head of the Centre for Tourism Research (cftr.ruc.dk) at Roskilde University, Denmark. Matias aims to publish research that introduces novel conceptual and theoretical ideas and perspectives, but also resonate in practice. His research interests include tourism development, distribution, sustainability, entrepreneurship and experience. Empirically, his work has focused on the Chinese market and destinations in the Nordics. His work has been published in journals such as Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, Tourist Studies and International Journal of Tourism Research. You can contact Matias directly for a free copy of the specific chapter in the book on [email protected] Philip Kyhl is the assistant Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen. Philip has worked with Chinese Outbound tourism for more than a decade and experienced the rise and development of the Chinese tourism industry from several years living and working in China and later as an advisor for European companies. 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-a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill purportedly meant to revive U.S. dominance in research and development. “We used to rank number one in the world in research and development; now we rank number nine,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “China was number eight decades ago; now they are number two.” And a recent study from Japan’s science ministry reported that China now leads the world not just in quantity of scientific research, but in quality too. The success of the U.S.--and perhaps China, into the future–is due to the “research university”, an academic institution that offers professors the freedom to study and research, and students the freedom to learn, leading to high-quality academic output. Those universities are the subject of Professor William Kirby’s Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press, 2022). In this interview, Professor Kirby and I talk about the research university: Humboldt, Harvard, Berkeley, Tsinghua, Nanjing, and the University of Hong Kong. We also discuss what it means for China, and Chinese institutions, to play a bigger role in world academia. How might that change things? William C. Kirby is Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration and T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University, as well as Chair of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. His many books include Can China Lead? Reaching the Limits of Power and Growth (Harvard Business Review Press: 2014) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empires of Ideas. Follow on Facebook or 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

Unfortunately, one takeaway for readers of this book should be the difficulty that not only outside analysts but even party insiders face when trying to understand elite politics in Leninist regimes. Sinologists have always struggled to see inside the “black box,” and the track record is not strong. Yet getting history right is immensely important, as the past is one of the few places that allow us to understand structural features that might persist. – Joseph Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion (2022) The political successions in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, respectively, are often explained as triumphs of inner‑party democracy, leading to a victory of “reformers” over “conservatives” or “radicals.” In traditional thinking, Leninist institutions provide competitors a mechanism for debating policy and making promises, stipulate rules for leadership selection, and prevent the military and secret police from playing a coercive role. Here, Joseph Torigian argues that the post-cult of personality power struggles in history’s two greatest Leninist regimes were instead shaped by the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence. Mining newly discovered material from Russia and China, Torigian challenges the established historiography and suggests a new way of thinking about the nature of power in authoritarian regimes. Professor Torigian’s insightful and accessible journal articles with hyperlinks and book recommendations from this interview for listeners interested in exploring related concepts and ideas: Open Access Global Studies Quarterly article ‘A New Case for the Study of individual Events in Political Science’ as mentioned regarding influence of historical institutionalism in his approach; Open Access Journal of Cold War Studies article which serves as a sequel to his book – ‘You Don’t Know Khrushchev Well: The Ouster of the Soviet Leader as a Challenge to Recent Scholarship on Authoritarian Politics’; Robert Caro’s Working : Researching, Interviewing, Writing; David Halloway’s Stalin and The Bomb; Chinese University of Hong Kong’s 中华人民共和国史 (Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guoshi) Theda Skopol’s States and Social Revolutions – A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China which is required reading for students in his masters-level class on China and Russia. See also Joseph’s illuminating ‘War on the Rocks’ post-doc blog post of January 2017 in which, among other things, he correctly anticipates the PRC’s top leadership succession as non-event. Joseph Torigian is assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington D.C. His research focuses on the study of the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy. His research agenda draws upon comparative politics, historical institutionalism and international relations with a focus on relevant questions about the long-term political trajectories of both China and Russia. Keith Krueger lectures part-time in the Sydney Business School at Shanghai 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

Today Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California Press in 2022. Continent in Dust offers a political anthropological account of strange weather. It is an ethnography of China’s meteorological contemporary - the transformed weather patterns whose formations and fallouts have accompanied decades of breakneck economic development. Focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere and society, Jerry Zee’s research is beautifully articulated taking the reader on a journey from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspace in Beijing, and beyond. Timely and original, Continent in Dust considers contemporary China as a weather system to reconsider how we can better understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air. 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 Asia-Pacific becomes the central stage of the US-China rivalry, Vietnam has emerged as one of the key countries to watch. While Vietnam has positioned itself as a critical player in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy, and Hanoi’s distrust of China has grown in response to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, the Vietnam-China relationship transcends mere geopolitical binaries. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Nguyen Khac Giang discusses Vietnam and China’s complex relationship, reflecting on the intimate ideological links, economic dependency, and security concerns that link the two countries. He discusses some of the key strategic challenges faced by Vietnam, how they can be negotiated, and whether it is possible for Hanoi to leverage relations with both China and the United States to minimise the potential geo-political risks associated with great power competition. About Nguyen Khac Giang: Nguyen Khac Giang is a research fellow at Vietnam Centre for Economic and Strategic Studies (VESS). Giang is currently a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he compares the Vietnamese and Chinese political developments. His academic work appears in, among others, the Asian Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Constitutional Political Economy, and the Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies. Giang is a frequent commentator on Vietnamese affairs and writes extensively for major Vietnamese and English news outlets such as the Saigon Times, The Diplomat, VnExpress, and the East Asia Forum. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. 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

Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different 'other' that somehow exists outside the 'real' world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the potential to impact on the 'normal' functioning of things. This core assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised, and separate 'other', ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the world. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Ivan Franceschini from Australian National University and Nicholas Loubere from Lund University. Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere’s 2022 book Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press), seeks to illuminate the ways in which China and the Chinese people form an integral part of the global capitalist system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. 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 Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on 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

Money does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press: 2022) In Madagascar, loggers, flush with cash from the rosewood trade, don’t quite know how to react to their newfound largesse, sometimes demanding less money for their wares out of confusion. Rumors abound of how loggers make their money. There’s no way that simple wood could garner so much profit, people say, so observers think they must be trading something else–like human bones. Annah’s book studies globalization, the rise of China, and global environmental politics through trade in one commodity: Madagascar rosewood, used in furniture. In this interview, Annah and I talk about this important material–the commodity, the cultural product, and the conservation target–in China and Madagascar. Annah Lake Zhu is Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, a veteran of the United Nations Environment Programme in Geneva, and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar. Her work has been published in Science, Geoforum, and Political Geography. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Rosewood. 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 Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World (U Toronto Press, 2021), Fiona Moore explores the different ways in which Taiwanese expatriates in London and Toronto, along with professionals living in Taipei, use their shared Taiwanese identities to construct and maintain global and local networks. Based on a three-year-long ethnographic study that incorporates interviews with people from diverse backgrounds, generations, and histories, this book explores what their different experiences tell us about migration in “tolerant” and “hostile” regimes. Global Taiwanese considers the implications in leveraging their Taiwanese ethnic identity for both business and personal purposes. As people become increasingly mobile, ethnic identity becomes more important as a means of negotiating transnational encounters; however, at the same time, the opportunities it offers are rooted in local cultural practices, requiring professionals and other migrants to develop complex social strategies that link and cross the global and local levels. With rich ethnographic detail, this book contributes to the understanding of the migrant experience and how it varies from location to location, how migration more generally changes in response to wider socioeconomic factors, and, finally, of the specific case of Taiwan and how the distinctive nature of its diaspora emerges through wider discourses of Chineseness and pan-Asian identity. Fiona Moore is a professor in the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway University of London. 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

The twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regimes are highly specific, but their implications, especially about the malleability of food as an object of moralization, are far reaching. The first chapter in Good Foods, by Francesca Bray, examines the construction of rice as a symbol of self in Japan and Malaysia. Jia-Chen Fu’s contribution looks at the “goodness” of soymilk in China. Izumi Nakayama’s work is about the emergence of breastmilk as a “good food” in Meiji-period Japan. Finally, Michael Liu writes about Chinese experimentation with nutrition during WWII. David Arnold’s chapter on moral foods―especially rice―in India during the period of British colonial rule begins the second section on “bad” and even “dangerous” foods. The other three chapters in this section address bad foods in South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, respectively. Tae-Ho Kim looks at discourses on rice, barley, and wheat in modern South Korea. Tatsuya Mitsuda writes on the creation of badness around sweet confections in Japan. Finally, Robert Peckham examines bad foods in the context of British colonial public health programs in Hong Kong. In the final section, Lawrence Zhang shows how changing visions of the health and morality of tea track with geopolitical, cultural, and scientific developments in the modern relations between East Asia and the West. Angela Ki Che Leung’s looks at the modern reinterpretation of vegetarianism in China. Volker Scheid also looks at China, specifically at the reconstitution of traditional Chinese medicinal knowledge and practice. Finally, Hilary Smith’s chapter tackles the moral meanings that accrued to milk in modern China. Each of these chapters shares the volume’s overall interest in both the moral regimes of food in the context of modern nation-building and the bodies and lives of consumers. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. 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

Today I spoke to anthropologist William Mathews about his new book, Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination (Berghahn Books, 2021). This book explores how humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. Mathews explains the role that cognition plays in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of 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

Roselyn Hsueh’s Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2022) presents a new framework for understanding how developing countries integrate into the global economy. Examining the labor-intensive textile sector and the capital-intensive telecommunications sector in China, India, and Russia, Hsueh shows how differences in the way elites perceive the strategic value of a sector can lead to dramatically different patterns of governance. Author Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, where she co-directs the Certificate in Political Economy. She is also the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization and scholarly articles and book chapters on states and markets, comparative regulation and governance, and development and globalization. She is a frequent commentator on international politics, finance and trade, and comparative economic development. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His own research focus is the political economy of governance 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

Sometimes the oldest texts are the most influential. The Great Learning likely first appeared in the Confucian Book of Rites around 2,000 years ago, and its impact can still be seen in the Chinese education system today. Harvard professor Peter Bol discusses this short text’s long history. Peter Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is the author of Neo-Confucianism in History and "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies