New Books in Chinese Studies

As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with agricultural policy, the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition. Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. For the past 20 years, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center; and a member of Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance. 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 book presents for the first time in English a complete translation of the Expository Commentary to the Daode jing, written by the Daoist monk Cheng Xuanying in the 7th century CE. This commentary is a quintessential text of Tang dynasty Daoist philosophy and of Chongxuanxue or Twofold Mystery teachings. Cheng Xuanying proposes a reading of the ancient Daode jing that aligns the text with Daoist practices and beliefs and integrates Buddhist concepts and techniques into the exegesis of the Daode jing. Building on the philosophical tradition of Xuanxue authors like Wang Bi, Cheng read the Daode jing in light of Daoist religion. Cheng presents Laozi, the presumed author of the Daode jing, as a bodhisattva-like sage and savior, who wrote the Daode jing to compassionately guide human beings to salvation. Salvation is interpreted as a metaphysical form of immortality, reached by overcoming the dichotomy of being and non-being, and thus also life and death. Cheng's philosophical outlook ties together the ancient text of the Daode jing and contemporary developments in Daoist thought which occurred under the influence of an intense interaction with Buddhist ideas. The commentary is a vivid testimony of the integration of Buddhist thought into an exegesis of the ancient classic of the Daode jing, and thereby also into Chinese philosophy. Friederike Assandri frames this new translation with an extensive introduction, providing crucial context for a new reading of the Daode jing. It includes a biography of Cheng Xuanying, a discussion of the historical and political context of Daoism in early medieval China in the capital Chang'an, and a discussion of Cheng's philosophy in relation to the interaction of Daoism and Buddhism. This commentary is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the history of Chinese philosophy, Daoist thought, and the reception of Buddhism in China. The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying: Daoism, Buddhism, and the Laozi in the Tang Dynasty, translated by Friederike Assandri (OUP, 2021) is a much-needed translation of a text that is not only an important milestone in the history of the interpretation of the Laozi Daodejing, but also a snapshot of a complex moment in China's intellectual history in the early Tang. Students of Chinese philosophy and intellectual history will really benefit from this text now being available in English, and for the detailed introduction which does a great job of contextualising the text and its author Cheng Xuanying. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He 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

The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It's a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world's political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world's most consequential and enigmatic borderlands. It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to "revive" their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to "Europe," building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil's Cathedral to woo tourists. Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border (Harvard UP, 2021) testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Author Silvia Lindtner unpacks how this promise of entrepreneurial life has influenced governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexist and racist violence and various forms of labor exploitation. Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is a writer and ethnographer. She is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She is also a PIP (Public Intellectual Program) Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Lindtner's research focuses on the cultures and politics of technology innovation, including the labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life, data-driven futures, and the promise of democratized agency. Drawing from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, she writes about China's shifting position in the global political economy of computing, supply chains, industrial and agricultural production, and science and technology policy. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Ian Johnson is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times; his work has also appeared in The New Yorker and National Geographic. He is an advising editor for the Journal of Asian Studies and teaches courses on religion in Beijing. He is the author of The Souls of China, Wild Grass, A Mosque in Munich, and The Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. He is based in Beijing and spoke to me from Berlin, Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

I am joined for my interview with Edward Tyerman by Ed Pulford, another host on our channel. Together, we discuss Edward’s new book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021). Internationalist Aesthetics examines how knowledge of China is produced in the early Soviet period through the aesthetic idiom of internationalism. Tyerman shows how artist intellectuals, especially Sergei Tretyakov, the book’s protagonist, make China affectively sensible for Russian audiences. Each chapter takes on a separate medium: travelogue, stage, film, and “bio-narrative,” to think through how Soviet aesthetes negotiate old and new forms to demystify China, a nation that even in the revolutionary environment of 1920s Russia, was still understood through recourse to orientalist tropes. The book ultimately spans a very short period, a slither of the 1920s, a moment of opportunity before the Guomindang’s persecution of the communists in China in 1927 and a moment of aesthetic possibility before the purges of the 1930s in Russia. Join us in our conversation about how a certain mode of “Chinese studies” emerges in the media aesthetics of this turbulent period. 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

Zhao Feiyan (45-1 BCE), the second empress appointed by Emperor Cheng of the Han dynasty (207 BCE-220 CE), was born in slavery and trained in the performing arts, a background that made her appointment as empress highly controversial. Subsequent persecution by her political enemies eventually led to her being forced to commit suicide. After her death, her reputation was marred by accusations of vicious scheming, murder of other consorts and their offspring, and relentless promiscuity, punctuated by bouts of extravagant shopping. The Empress in the Pepper Chamber: Zhao Feiyan in History and Fiction (University of Washington Press, 2021), the first book-length study of Zhao Feiyan and her literary legacy, includes a complete translation of The Scandalous Tale of Zhao Feiyan (Zhao Feiyan waizhuan), a Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) erotic novella that describes in great detail the decadent lifestyle enjoyed by imperial favorites in the harem of Emperor Cheng. This landmark text was crucial for establishing writings about palace women as the accepted forum for discussing sexual matters, including fetishism, obsession, jealousy, incompatibility in marriage, and so on. Using historical documentation, Olivia Milburn reconstructs the evolution of Zhao Feiyan's story and illuminates the broader context of palace life for women and the novella's social influence. There are surprisingly few books about empresses, and even fewer about the history of emotions in premodern China. This book delivers both while at the same providing really satisfying textual criticism on the source material and its legacy stretching across multiple dynasties, and giving us a great primary source in translation. A great piece of research for those engaging with gender history, literature, and explorations of where history and fiction meet and diverge. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. 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 story of how the Lisu of southwest China were evangelized one hundred years ago by the China Inland Mission is a familiar one in mission circles. The subsequent history of the Lisu church, however, is much less well known. Songs of the Lisu Hills: Practicing Christianity in Southwest China (Penn State University Press, 2020) brings this history up to date, recounting the unlikely story of how the Lisu maintained their faith through twenty-two years of government persecution and illuminating how Lisu Christians transformed the text-based religion brought by the missionaries into a faith centered around an embodied set of Christian practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, this volume documents the development of Lisu Christianity, both through larger social forces and through the stories of individual believers. It explores how the Lisu, most of whom remain subsistence farmers, have oriented their faith less around cognitive notions of belief and more around participation in a rhythm of shared Christian practices, such as line dancing, attending church and festivals, evangelizing, working in one another’s fields, and singing translated Western hymns. These embodied practices demonstrate how Christianity developed in the mountainous margins of the world’s largest atheist state. A much-needed expansion of the Lisu story into a complex study of the evolution of a world Christian community, this book will appeal to scholars working at the intersections of World Christianity, anthropology of religion, ethnography, Chinese Christianity, and mission studies. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History & Ecumenics, focusing on World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interest lies in Indonesia and the Muslim dominant regions of Southeast Asia, from the postcolonial approach to Christianity and the coexistence of various religions, including the study of Christianity and the Islamic faith in a Muslim dominant society that includes challenges of ethnic diversity. Briana Wong is Visiting Assistant Professor of World Christianity and Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Her interests include Christianity in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian History, Department of History, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA . His book “The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan” was publisehd by Cambridge University Press in 2021 and it won the 2021 Memory Studies Association’s First Book Award. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang his award-winning book. Yang’s book covers one of the least understood forced migrations in modern East Asia—the human exodus from China to Taiwan following the Nationalist collapse and Chinese Communist victory in 1949. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs, the book tells a very different story from conventional historiographies the Chinese civil war, Chinese revolution, and Cold War Taiwan. Underscoring the displaced population’s trauma of living in exile and their poignant “homecomings” four decades later, Yang presents a multiple-event trajectory of repeated traumatization with the recurring search for home, belonging, and identity. By portraying the Chinese civil war exiles in Taiwan both as traumatized subjects of displacement and overbearing colonizers to the local peoples, Yang’s work challenges the established notions of trauma, memory production, diaspora, and reconciliation. It speaks to the importance of subject position, boundary-crossing empathic unsettlements, and ethical responsibility of researching, narrating, and representing historical trauma. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Shakespeare’s plays enjoy a great deal of popularity across the world, yet most of us study Shakespeare's local productions and scholarship. Shakespeare & East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021) addresses this gap through a wide-ranging analysis of stage and film adaptations related to Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. The book builds on Alexa Alice Joubin’s already extensive publication record regarding the circulation of Shakespeare’s plays in East Asia. In particular, it expands on her previous book, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2009). Shakespeare & East Asia focuses on post-1950 adaptations that were produced in, distributed across, or associated with East Asia. Joubin offers a nuanced view of what it means to think about Shakespeare and East Asia by carefully considering the international circulation of various stagings and films. She identifies a quartet of characteristics that distinguish these adaptations: innovations in form, the use of Shakespeare for social critiques, the questioning of gender roles, and the development of global patterns of circulation. The varied body of Shakespearan adaptations she examines are alternately funny, dramatic, and thought-provoking, but never boring. Several of the works described in both the interview and the book are available online through the Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. She writes about Japanese media and is currently completing Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, a book about contemporary media and Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War--journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book's multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Authoritarian regimes have often been discussed in contrast to democratic governments and defined in terms of what they lack--namely, democratic features. Dr. Elina Sinkkonen highlights the need for a new method of conceptualizing authoritarian regimes on their own terms, by including variables like personalization, centralization, and state control over economic assets. Focusing on these factors allows for better quantification and understanding of how governments and regimes change. Dr. Sinkkonen discusses the example of Xi Jinping's China and explains the degrees to which technological innovations and the COVID pandemic have affected the CCP leadership. Elina Sinkkonen is a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and a specialist in authoritarian governance. Satoko Naito is a docent at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku. Read Dr. Sinkkonen's article "Dynamic dictators: improving the research agenda on autocratization and authoritarian resilience" in Democratization, mentioned in the episode (open access) 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

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking to Peggy Wang about her new book, The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art (Minnesota University Press, 2021). In the book, Wang asks readers to reconsider the term “global” and “world” in relation to the (often simplistically interpreted) artistic projects of some of the most famous Chinese artists of the postsocialist period. A meticulously researched chapter is devoted to: Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Peili, and Lin Tianmiao. In each case, Wang argues that their oeuvres are critical projects that are shaped by and comment upon artists’ and art critics’ self-understanding as Chinese actors in ambivalent relation to the newly accessible “Western art world.” The book’s theoretical claims will of course speak to scholars of art history as well as Chinese literature and culture. I would be remiss not to mention, however, how excited I am by the teaching potential of this text, both as a foundation from which to understand the complexity of contemporary Chinese art and a wonderful model for students just learning research methodologies. 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

How has digital communication technologies impacted the dynamics of political contention in China? What is the role of mobile technology in the country with the world’s largest number of mobile and internet users? Why is there little domestic resistance about surveillance and technology-related privacy risks in China during the pandemic? Jun Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, shares his book Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China (Oxford UP, 2020) with the Nordic Asia Podcast. In his talk with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jun Liu introduces his work on mobile communication and political activism based on first-hand in-depth interview and fieldwork data. He also draws on one of his latest papers to explain how China’s unprecedented measures to mobilise its diverse surveillance apparatus played a crucial part in the country’s containment of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Jun Liu’s research stands at the intersection of communication, technology, politics, and society, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political implications of digital communication. Drawing upon theories from communication, sociology, and political science, his research focuses on how digital technology interacts with socio-cultural forms and settings and generates new power dynamics in politics in specific cultural and institutional contexts such as authoritarian regimes like China. 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

The Thirties and Forties were some of the first instances of aerial bombardment of civilian populations—and an indication of their destructive power. We often point to the Nazi bombing in Guernica, Spain in 1937—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—as the first instance of what happens when “the bomber gets through”, to paraphrase then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. But just a few months later, across a continent, the world got a glimpse of what bombardment would look like in one of the world’s most built-up and international cities of the time: Shanghai, and “Bloody Saturday”: August 14th, 1937. Paul French’s Bloody Saturday: Shanghai's Darkest Day (Penguin Australia: 2018), recently republished by Penguin’s Southeast Asia arm, is a short telling of what happened on that fateful day. In this interview, Paul and I talk about what happened in Shanghai on August 14th, and what it tells us about the nature of the city, the foreigners that lived there, and how the rest of the Sino-Japanese War developed. Paul French was born in London, educated there and in Glasgow, and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (Penguin Group USA: 2012) was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. Both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai (Picador USA: 2018) are currently being developed for television. More can be found on Paul French’s blog China Rhyming. In our interview, we also mention another one of Paul’s works: Through the Looking Glass: China's Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong University Press: 2009) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bloody Saturday. 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

Controversy over the medicinal uses of wild animals in China has erupted around the ethics and efficacy of animal-based drugs, the devastating effect of animal farming on wildlife conservation, and the propensity of these practices to foster zoonotic diseases. In Mao's Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China (Duke UP, 2021), Liz P. Y. Chee – Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute and Lecturer at Tembusu College, both at the National University of Singapore – traces the history of the use of medicinal animals in modern China. While animal parts and tissue have been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, Chee demonstrates that the early Communist state expanded and systematized their production and use to compensate for drug shortages, generate foreign investment in high-end animal medicines, and facilitate an ideological shift toward legitimating folk medicines. Among other topics, Chee investigates the craze for chicken blood therapy during the Cultural Revolution, the origins of deer antler farming under Mao and bear bile farming under Deng, and the crucial influence of the Soviet Union and North Korea on Chinese zootherapies. In the process, Chee shows Chinese medicine to be a realm of change rather than a timeless tradition, a hopeful conclusion given current efforts to reform its use of animals. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Re-Orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding (U Regina Press, 2016) challenges the notion of the travel writer as imperialistic, while exploring the binary opposition of self/other. Featuring analyses of rarely studied writers on post-1949 China, including Jan Wong, Jock T. Wilson, Peter Hessler, Leslie T. Chang, Hill Gates, and Yi-Fu Tuan, Re-Orienting China demonstrates the transformative power of travel, as it changes our preconceived notions of home and abroad. Drawing on her own experience as a Chinese expat living in Canada, Leilei Chen embraces the possibility of productive cross-border relationships that are critical in today's globalized world. Leilei Chen is a literary translator, bilingual writer, instructor, and researcher. She published the Mandarin version of Steven Grosby's Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) with Nanjing’s Yilin Press in 2017 and Hong Kong’s Oxford University Press in 2020. She is the author of Re-orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-cultural Understanding (University of Regina Press, 2016). Her poetry and prose translations, and poetry and personal essays appear in literary anthologies such as Home: Stories Connecting Us All (Embracing Multicultural Community Development, 2017), Looking Back, Moving Forward (Mawenzi House, 2019), Beyond the Food Court: An Anthology of Literary Cuisines (Laberinto Press, 2020); as well as in journals and magazines in Canada and beyond. She teaches at the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and serves as Vice President (West Canada) of the Literary Translators Association of Canada. Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies department at the University of Alberta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Proposing the concept of transformance, a conscious and rigorous process of self-cultivation toward a reconceptualized body, Liang shows how theater practitioners of minoritized cultures adopt transformance as a strategy to counteract the embodied practices of ideological and economic hegemony. This book observes key Taiwanese contemporary theater practitioners at work in forging five reconceptualized bodies: the energized, the rhythmic, the ritualized, the joyous, and the (re)productive. By focusing on the development of transformance between the years of 2000–2008, a tumultuous political watershed in Taiwan’s history, the author succeeds in bridging postcolonialism and interculturalism in her conceptual framework. Ideal for scholars of Asian and postcolonial theater, Bodies and Transformance in Taiwanese Contemporary Theater shows how transformance, rather than performance, calibrates with far greater precision and acuity the state of the body and the culture that it seeks to create. Peilin Liang is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. She is the director of A Home on the Island, a transnational Practice as Research (PaR) project in applied theater. 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

It’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper, 2021), which traces the path of the Amur from its origins in Mongolia to its end-point in the Pacific Ocean. We also discuss what means to be a travel writer in today’s world—which has undergone a recent and rapid expansion, and even more recent and rapid collapse, of travel. Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first books were about the Middle Eas—Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. But later he was drawn to the lands which he says his generation was brought up to fear: the Soviet Union and Communist China. In 1982 he traveled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey described in Among the Russians (Ulverscroft: 1989). From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind The Wall: A Journey Through China (Random House: 1987), The Lost Heart of Asia (Random House: 1994), In Siberia (Penguin: 2000), Shadow of the Silk Road (Chatto & Windus: 2006) and To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto & Windus: 2011). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Amur River. 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

In Making the World Safe for Dictatorship (Oxford University Press, 2021) Dr. Alexander Dukalskis looks at the tactics that authoritarian states use for image management and the ways in which their strategies vary from one state to another, using both "promotional" tactics of persuasion and "obstructive" tactics of repression. Using a diverse array of data, including interviews, cross-national data on extraterritorial repression, examination of public relations filings with the United States government, analysis of authoritarian propaganda, media frequency analysis, and speeches and statements by authoritarian leaders, Dukalskis looks at the degree to which some authoritarian states succeed in using image management to enhance their internal and external security, and, in turn, to make their world safe for dictatorship. The book looks closely at three cases, China, North Korea, and Rwanda, to understand in more detail how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using combinations of promotional and obstructive tactics. Dukalskis also presents a new dataset--the Authoritarian Actions Abroad Database--that uses publicly available information to categorize nearly 1,200 instances in which authoritarian states repressed their critical exiles abroad, ranging from vague threats to confirmed assassinations. The database in freely available to researchers! Dr. Alexander Dukalskis is an associate professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. 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. Dr. Melcher also lived in Beijing, China for nearly 10 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Joseph W. Ho’s book Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021) offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space―tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States. Dr. Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Albion College and Center Associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. In addition to his current book, Dr. Ho is the coeditor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938. Linshan Jiang is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In Useful Bullshit: Consitutions in Chinese Politics and Society (Cornell University Press, 2022) Dr. Neil Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC primarily around the first draft constitution in 1954. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. Despite many considering the document "bullshit," successive PRC governments have promulgated it, amending the constitution, debating it at length, and even inaugurating a "Constitution Day." But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy? Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant explores all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late '50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era. Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens—police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups—have responded. 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. Dr. Melcher also lived in Beijing, China for nearly 10 years, and keeps an eye on China-Africa security issues. 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 Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949 (Cornell UP, 2021), Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country. The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state. Bee Lehman is a history librarian at Boston College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In Hong Kong’s Ice House Street, in the heart of the city’s Financial District, is Club Lusitano: one of the city’s premier social clubs, nestled at the top of an office tower. But the club’s roots stretch back over 150 years, when it was originally set up to serve the colony’s burgeoning Portuguese community–including many who hopped over the Pearl River Delta from the Portuguese colony of Macau. It can be hard to remember among the glistening casino lights of modern-day Macau, but the colony used to and still does host a sizable “Macanese” community: people of Portuguese or Portuguese-Chinese heritage. As Macau turned into a sleepy, somewhat rigid community in the nineteenth century, several Macanese made the jump to look for a better life elsewhere–including in Macau’s larger, British-run cousin, Hong Kong. Catherine Chan’s The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting (Amsterdam University Press: 2021) looks at the Macanese community in Hong Kong, and how they settled into life in the British colony. More of Chan’s articles on the subject can be found in the following academic articles: ‘Diverse Cosmopolitan Visions and Intellectual Passions: Macanese Publics in British Hong Kong,’ Modern Asian Studies 56, no. 1 (2022), 350-377. ‘Macau Martyr or Portuguese Traitor? The Macanese communities of Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai and the Portuguese Nation,’ Historical Research 93, no. 262 (2020), 754-768. ‘From Macanese Opium Traders to British Aristocrats: The Trans-imperial Migration of the Pereiras,’ Journal of Migration History 6, no. 2 (2020), 236-261. Historian Catherine Chan received her PhD from the University of Bristol and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. You can find more examples of her work at https://projectmacau.wordpress.com/. We're joined again by fellow NBN host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. The three of us will talk about Hong Kong’s Macanese: what brought them to Hong Kong, the lives they built for themselves, and the niche they filled in British-run Colonial Hong Kong. Amsterdam University Press has kindly offered listeners of the podcast a discount code! Go to the store page on the AUP website and input discount code CHAN_25 to receive a 25% discount on the book. This offer expires Feb. 28. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Macanese Diaspora. 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

As the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia and host the first annual gay pride in the Sinophone Pacific, Taiwan is a historic center of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. With this blazing path of activism, queer Taiwanese literature has also risen in prominence and there is a growing popular interest in stories about the transgression of gender and sexual norms. Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, queer authors have redefined Taiwan’s cultural scene, and throughout the 1990s many of their works have won the most prestigious literary awards and accolades. This anthology provides a deeper understanding of queer literary history in Taiwan. It includes a selection of short stories, previously untranslated, written by Taiwanese authors dating from 1975 to 2020. Readers are introduced to a wide range of themes: bisexuality, aging, mobility, diaspora, AIDS, indigeneity, recreational drug use, transgender identity, surrogacy, and many others. The diversity of literary tropes and styles canvased in this book reflects the profusion of gender and sexual configurations that has marked Taiwan’s complex history for the past half century. Queer Taiwanese Literature: A Reader (Cambria Press, 2021) is a timely and important resource for readers interested in Taiwan studies, queer literature, and global cultural studies. Howard Chiang is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. 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

Environmental protection and climate actions has embedded in China’s foreign policy and the Chinese government has recently pledged to make the Belt and Road Initiative “open, green, and clean”. How far is this an agenda designed primarily for international consumption? How do domestic interest groups respond to China’s environmental foreign relations? To what extent can they influence and shape China’s domestic and international environmental discourse? In this episode, Heidi Wang-Kaeding talks to Vorawan Wannalak about her recently published book China’s Environmental Foreign Policy (2021, Routledge), which explores China’s attempts to assert alternative norms – “Ecological Civilization” - in the global environmental governance and highlights the importance of domestic forces as a key factor that influence diverse and contradictory environmental behaviors of China at international levels. Over recent decades, China has moved from being a follower towards taking on a leadership role in global environmental governance. This book discusses this important development. It examines the key role of Chinese interest groups, showing how through various domestic dynamics they have influenced how China has approached issues such as climate change and the environment. Focusing on examples of multilateral environmental treaties, bilateral cooperation, and the proposition of alternative norms – the idea of China as an "ecological civilisation" – the book provides crucial insights on the evolution of China’s approach to international relations and engagement with global environmental governance, and contributes to the discussion of what kind of power China is poised to become. Dr. Heidi Wang-Kaeding is a lecturer in International Relations at Keele University and a co-founder of the Hong Kong Studies Association, based in the UK. Vorawan Wannalak is a PhD student at the University of Potsdam. She was a 2021 Virtual SUPRA Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.. You may also be interested in another Nordic Asia Podcast mentioned by Heidi, in which Mette Halskov Hansen discusses the concept of ecological civilization 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

Probably the most well-known Chinese philosopher around the world is Kongzi, typically called by his Latinized name, “Confucius.” And yet he did not write a single book. Rather, his students collected Kongzi’s life and teachings into the Analects, a text which has become immensely influential from ancient Confucian traditions up to the current day. In The Analects: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2021), Erin M. Cline argues that we should understand the Analects not only as a guide for living, or a philosophical set of sayings on ethics, but as a sacred text. She argues that this approach helps us reflect more critically about the categories like the sacred, and to appreciate the role of Kongzi as a personal exemplar in the text. Engaging closely with the text of the Analects as well as traditional commentaries and contemporary scholarship, Cline introduces the reader to the history of this text as well its major themes, such as ritual, filial piety, and the relationship between the ordinary and the sacred. By situating the Analects alongside works such as the Nichomachean Ethics and the Bible, her work investigates the text from both philosophical and religious perspectives, while reflecting on these categories themselves. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy 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 (and 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

The border between Russia and China is one of the world’s longest, spanning thousands of miles. It’s one of the few extended land borders between two great powers, subject to years of history, conflict and cooperation. Yet for such an important division, there are surprisingly few crossings, with not one passenger bridge in operation. On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border (Harvard University Press, 2021), by Caroline Humphrey and Franck Bille, is an in-depth study of this border. Looking at the divided island of Bolshoi Ussuriiskii and the border towns Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, On the Edge gives a picture of how people live, work and trade along this little-studied border. Franck Billé is Program Director at the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author and editor of three books about East Asia, including Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity. Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge, and founder of the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit. She is the author of several books about the anthropology of Inner Asia and recently edited and contributed to Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China–Russia Borderlands. We’re also joined by Yvonne Lau, who became interested in Russia and China’s long history and complex ties, and has been tracking developments along the Sino-Russian border ever since. In this interview, the three of us talk about, well, the border, and the people that live on either side of it. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On the Edge. 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

In Folk Literati, Contested Tradition, and Heritage in Contemporary China: Incense Is Kept Burning (Indiana UP, 2020), Ziying You explores the role of the "folk literati" in negotiating, defining, and maintaining local cultural heritage. Expanding on the idea of the elite literati―a widely studied pre-modern Chinese social group, influential in cultural production―the folk literati are defined as those who are skilled in classical Chinese, knowledgeable about local traditions, and capable of representing them in writing. The folk literati work to maintain cultural continuity, a concept that is expressed locally through the vernacular phrase: "incense is kept burning." You's research focuses on a few small villages in Hongtong County, Shanxi Province in contemporary China. Through a careful synthesis of oral interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, You presents the important role the folk literati play in reproducing local traditions and continuing stigmatized beliefs in a community context. She demonstrates how eight folk literati have reconstructed, shifted, and negotiated local worship traditions around the ancient sage-Kings Yao and Shun as well as Ehuang and Nüying, Yao's two daughters and Shun's two wives. You highlights how these individuals' conflictive relationships have shaped and reflected different local beliefs, myths, legends, and history in the course of tradition preservation. She concludes her study by placing these local traditions in the broader context of Chinese cultural policy and UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage program, documenting how national and international discourses impact actual traditions, and the conversations about them, on the ground. In this conversations, Ziying You talks with Dr Timothy Thurston. Tim is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines tradition, modernity, and cultural sustainability in Tibetan communities. Follow Tim on twitter @taoyinkui. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationships of the river's varied ecosystems--grasslands, riparian forests, wetlands, and deserts--and the ecological and cultural impacts of their policies. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend. This scale, detail, and clarity of this work was inspiring. Ruth Mostern's long-term environmental history of the Yellow River, is not the story of a single channel but of a series of landscapes and entanglements between the human and natural world. Replete with detailed explanations of physical geography and water management technologies, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Yale UP, 2021) succeeds not only in meticulously addressing the geographical and cultural heart of Chinese history, but also in speaking to our present moment through its recurring portrayal of the relationship between environmental awareness and political possibility. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He 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

“Kashmir” carries the burden of being known as one of the world’s biggest flashpoints. If a novel, TV show, or video game wants an easy international crisis, there’s a good chance Kashmir will be the crisis of choice. But while Kashmir is globally known, few understand the roots of the conflict—or what the people that live in Kashmir actually think. For those that do, Professor Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021) walks readers through the origins, developments, and potential future of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, going right to the present day with the Modi administration’s turning of the state into two Union territories. In this interview, we run through the history of Kashmir, and how we should think about recent developments in this part of the world. Sumantra Bose is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Kashmir conflict. He is the author of seven previous books including Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka (Harvard University Press: 2007) and Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press: 2018). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Kashmir at the Crossroads. 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

In 2021, a team of divers led by renowned maritime archaeologist Dr Michael Flecker and sponsored by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute surveyed two historic shipwrecks discovered in the Singapore Strait, working for several months to bring their submerged cargos to the surface. Chinese trade ceramics found in these cargos date their demise to the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries – pivotal moments in the history of the globe-spanning China Trade. The most intriguing aspect of this salvage operation, however, is the discovery in the remains of the older vessel of the most substantial cargo of Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white porcelain yet found in Southeast Asian waters. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Alex Burchmore argues that these discoveries provide valuable insights into the complex interactions between China and Southeast Asia, allowing us to reposition Southeast Asia at the centre of historic trade narratives. Through the international trade of Chinese ceramics, Dr Burchmore invites us to reimagine the past, rethinking traditional narratives of Chineseness across the region, as well as Australia’s identity in the Asia-Pacific. About Alex Burchmore: Dr Alex Burchmore is an art historian specialising in the study of Chinese and Southeast Asian art, past and present, with a particular focus on ceramics, trade and exchange, and the interweaving of the personal and material. Alex received his PhD from the Australian National University in 2019 and joined the University of Sydney’s Museum and Heritage Studies department in 2021. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), traces the extent to which artists within and beyond China have used porcelain to shape their personal, historical, and cultural identities, from the 1990s to the present. His recent publications include a study of the ‘material Chineseness’ of ink and porcelain in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art and a chapter dedicated to the ‘fugitive luxury’ of contemporary Chinese ceramics in The Allure of Matter: Materiality Across Chinese Art (University of Chicago Press, 2021). 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

In mid-November, Washington and Beijing mutually agreed to start granting journalist visas again, putting an end to months of reciprocal visa rejections and denials. A perhaps minor, yet still important, thawing among grander narratives of decoupling and worsening relations between the two countries. Cheng Li’s Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement (Brookings, 2021) plots out a new way to understand the U.S.-China relationship. Cheng Li’s book attempts to show the importance of the city of Shanghai to China’s economic and political development, and studies its population to show the continued value of engagement between Americans and Chinese. Readers can find an excerpt from Middle Class Shanghai on the Brookings website: Shanghai’s dynamic art scene. Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. We’re joined in this interview by Brian Wong. Brian is a Co-Founder of the Oxford Political Review, a columnist with the Hong Kong Economic Journal and a contributor to the Neican newsletter. The three of us talk about the city of Shanghai, its importance to China, and why looking at US-China relations through the prism of a single city might be a better way to understand the international system. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Middle Class Shanghai. 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

When did the Cold War in East Asia really begin? According to ADI-NIAS researcher Kuan-Jen Chen, the answer is 1945 – if we view the Cold War through a maritime lens. In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, KJ explains how he is using Japanese and Taiwanese sources to gain a more nuanced perspective on East Asian Cold War maritime history, which is far from a simple narrative of American naval dominance. KJ also discusses the relevance of the Cold War context to understanding recent geostrategic developments in the region, and why he is trying to put international historians into a more fruitful dialogue with scholars of international relations. Kuan-Jen Chen (https://kjchen.net/) is the Asian Dynamics Initiative-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He has published articles in various journals including Cold War History and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. KJ is currently completing a book based on his Cambridge PhD, entitled The Making of America’s Maritime Order in Cold War East Asia: Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security. KJ was recently jointly awarded Taiwan’s 2021 Openbook Award in Translation for his co-translation into Chinese of Barak Kushner’s Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice, Harvard 2015 (see NBN podcast 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, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts can be found here. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Duke University Press, 2018) by Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments” – a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones – to map the multiple historical geographies in which the Chinese homeland and diaspora emerge. Chan describes several distinct moments, including the lifting of the Qing emigration ban in 1893 and the legacy of indentured Chinese migration to the Americas, intellectual debates in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Chinese emigration in the South China Seas (Nanyang) and Southeast Asia constituted colonization and whether Confucianism should be the basis for a modern Chinese identity. She also looks at the intersection of gender, returns to China of displaced Chinese from Southeast Asia, and Communist campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Adopting a transnational frame, Chan narrates Chinese history through a reconceptualization of diaspora to show how mass migration helped establish China as a nation-state within a global system. Shelly Chan is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in modern China and the Chinese diaspora. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at 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

In Governing for Revolution: Social Transformation in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Dr. Megan Stewart argues that despite significant risks, some rebels undertake costly governance projects during wartime, to achieve transformational goals. Dr. Stewart explores the development of this model by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how its become a prototype ever since. Dr. Stewart uses different kinds of qualitative case studies as well as quantitative analysis to prove her theory, using archival data from six countries, primary rebel sources, and fieldwork. Miranda Melcher (Ph.D., Defense Studies, Kings College, London) studies post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with deep 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

Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings. – Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011) Influenced by Dani Rodrik’s research and teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Yeling Tan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and non-resident scholar at UCSD’s 21st Century China Center, has written a book that brings together her interest and expertise in China’s political economy: Disaggregrating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press, 2021). As you will hear, Professor Tan is interested in the dynamics of international and domestic politics with a focus on the tensions involving policy change within political economies. The development and the role of institutions especially with regard to China, given its political structure and economic governance, has provided just such an intriguing case for Tan who has been immersed in PRC-related study since graduate school. The book frames the story of China’s WTO entry and assesses its impact on the country’s complex and sprawling structures of economic governance with the kind of inspiration that makes well-written and researched economic history as compelling as it is empirically rigorous. Professor Tan’s analysis and argument fits within the interdisciplinary sphere most aptly described as political economy as she systematically ‘disaggregates’ China’s institutional response as a one-party state to the globalizing effects of WTO engagement. Her book draws upon a rich research literature including the post-Mao reform and opening period to frame her research questions before moving into her own theory, methods, and findings – a unique contribution to the field focused on external institutional influences on the political economy of China. As such, she moves us beyond the caricatured and monolithic simplifications underlying the bipartisan, ideologically driven interpretations reassessing the outcome of China’s WTO entry and subsequent trade policy. To liberally paraphrase a key source of her intellectual inspiration, Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox: acknowledging the role of public institutions and the various value preferences of nations to help shape well-performing markets will lead you, as with Tan’s story, to the start of an understanding of the relationship of markets and institutions with a radically different ending in the China context. Yeling Tan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in 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

The late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a period commonly referred to as the post-Mao cultural thaw, was a key transitional phase in the evolution of Chinese science fiction. This period served as a bridge between science-popularization science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and New Wave Chinese science fiction from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (University of Toronto Press, 2021) surveys the field of Chinese science fiction and its multimedia practice, analysing and assessing science fiction works by well-known writers such as Ye Yonglie, Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, and Xiao Jianheng, as well as the often-overlooked tech–science fiction writers of the post-Mao thaw. Exploring the socio-political and cultural dynamics of science-related Chinese literature during this period, Hua Li combines close readings of original Chinese literary texts with literary analysis informed by scholarship on science fiction as a genre, Chinese literary history, and media studies. Li argues that this science fiction of the post-Mao thaw began its rise as a type of government-backed literature, yet it often stirred up controversy and received pushback as a contentious and boundary-breaking genre. Topically structured and interdisciplinary in scope, Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw will appeal to both scholars and fans of science fiction. Hua Li is an associate professor at Montana State University. Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies department at the University of Alberta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (U Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length study devoted to the architectural projects of a single Chinese emperor. Focusing on the imperial palaces in Beijing, a Daoist architectural complex on Mount Wudang, and a Buddhist temple on the Sino-Tibetan frontier, Aurelia Campbell demonstrates how the siting, design, and use of Yongle’s palaces and temples helped cement his authority and legitimize his usurpation of power. Campbell offers insight into Yongle’s sense of empire—from the far-flung locations in which he built, to the distant regions from which he extracted construction materials, and to the use of tens of thousands of craftsmen and other laborers. Through his constructions, Yongle connected himself to the divine, interacted with his subjects, and extended imperial influence across space and time. Spanning issues of architectural design and construction technologies, this deft analysis reveals remarkable advancements in timber-frame construction and implements an art-historical approach to examine patronage, audience, and reception, situating the buildings within their larger historical and religious contexts. Noelle Giuffrida is a professor and curator of Asian art at the School of Art and the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University. Email: [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

Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin: Popular Culture, Masculinity, and Social Perceptions (Springer, 2021) explores how language ideologies have emerged for gangtaiqiang through a combination of indexical and ideological processes in televised media. Gangtaiqiang (Hong Kong-Taiwan accent), a socially recognizable form of mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin, has become a stereotype for many Chinese mainlanders who have little real-life interaction with Taiwanese people. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the author examines how Chinese millennials perceive gangtaiqiang by focusing on the following questions: 1) the role of televised media in the formation of language attitudes, and 2) how shifting gender ideologies are performed and embodied such attitudes. This book presents empirical evidence to argue that gangtaiqiang should, in fact, be conceptualized as a mediatized variety of Mandarin, rather than the actual speech of people in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The analyses in this book point to an emerging realignment among the Chinese towards gangtaiqiang, a variety traditionally associated with chic, urban television celebrities and young cosmopolitan types. In contrast to Beijing Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin is now perceived to be pretentious, babyish, and emasculated, mirroring the power dynamics between Taiwan and China. Chun-Yi Peng is an Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. His primary research interests are in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. 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

Several high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault have helped the #MeToo movement in China continue to make impacts on a society that is highly controlled and surveilled. Most recently, tennis star Peng Shuai’s saga has accused former top Chinese Communist Party leader, Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Although Peng did not say that she is part of the #MeToo movement, her speaking out has given fresh impetus to the campaign. Joining us to talk to Julie Chen about the #MeToo movement in China is Dusica Ristivojević, Kone Foundation Bold Initiatives Senior Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Dušica works in the areas of interdisciplinary Chinese studies, media studies, and international relations. Recently, she published a co-authored journal article on the #MeToo movement in China. See Jing Xiong and Dušica Ristivojević (2021) #MeToo in China: How do the Voiceless Rise Up in an Authoritarian State? in Politics & Gender. 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, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk 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 the sidelines of COP26, Nepali Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba met his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi as part of an effort to find a way to rebuild ties between Kathmandu and New Delhi--which had grown sour in the recent years, with a boundary dispute between the two as its low point. Around the same time, China trumpeted a donation of 1.6 million COVID vaccine doses to Nepal, as the country stays around a 30% vaccination rate. Discussions of Nepal often reduce it to a country sitting between two great powers—especially as relations between those two great powers worsen. Or, perhaps, as a strategically important country—but one whose history and people are rarely brought up. Amish Raj Mulmi’s All Roads Lead North: Nepal’s Turn to China (Context, 2021) published internationally by Hurst early next year, helps to fill in these critical details. Combining insights from centuries of history, to on-the-ground reporting along the China-Nepal border, Mulmi gives a full representation of Nepal’s long relationship with its neighbors. Helen Li, freelance writer and journalist, joins Amish and me for this interview. Helen was stranded in Nepal during the COVID pandemic, and saw firsthand the interconnected between Nepal, India and China. In this interview, Amish, Helen and I talk about Nepal and China: what connects their countries, their economies, and their peoples. We talk about historical links, Tibetan exiles, investment, and what India thinks about all this. Amish Raj Mulmi's writings have been published in The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South- east and The Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2018; and Al Jazeera; Roads & Kingdoms; Himal Southasian; India Today; The Kathmandu Post and The Record. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of All Roads Lead North. 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

China: Up Close and Personal is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Karl Gerth, Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of History at UC San Diego. This wide-ranging conversation covers the emerging American-style consumer culture of China which is revolutionizing the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese, how it has transformed its economy and lifestyle and has the potential to reshape the world. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He 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 this episode, I interview Shaoling Ma, professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS about her new book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021). In this fascinating book, Ma grapples with theoretical and historical questions of media and mediation in the late Qing. Calling on a diverse set of sources, including diplomatic records, science fiction novels, modern poetry, and telegraphic dispatches among many others, Ma’s examines “mediation in terms of the discursive interactions with physical devices and material processes of communication” (49). By reading the treatment of documents and labor in Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone against representations of the new, “stoney” lithographic practices of the Dianshizhai Pictorial, or showing how the Boxer crisis shaped understandings of telegraphy and transmission, The Stone and the Wireless enriches not only Chinese studies, but also speaks broadly to scholarship on media and technology. In her conclusion, Ma teases readers with an interpretation of a very recent Chinese sci-fi novel, convincingly making the case for the contemporary political relevance of her study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, exit from coal and ending deforestation. She also reveals some insights from the annual Southeast Asia Climate Survey reports, such as perceptions in the region of the US as a climate leader and the (dis)connects between climate action and COVID-19 responses. Sharon Seah is Senior Fellow and Coordinator at the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. She co-edited 50 Years of ASEAN and Singapore (World Scientific: 2017) and Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans (NUS Press: 2019). Prior to academia, Ms Seah worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore and the National Environment Agency for fifteen years. She may be reached at [email protected]. Quynh Le Vo is a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk 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 Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier than in Europe. In response to the commercial revolutions of the late 1500s, Chinese intellectuals and officials called for the end of state intervention in the market, recognizing its power to self-regulate. They also noted the elasticity of domestic demand and production, arguing in favour of ending long-standing rules against luxury consumption, an idea that emerged in Europe in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Zanasi challenges Eurocentric theories of economic modernization as well as the assumption that European Enlightenment thought was unique in its ability to produce innovative economic ideas. She instead establishes a direct connection between observations of local economic conditions and the formulation of new theories, revealing the unexpected flexibility of the Confucian tradition and its accommodation of seemingly unorthodox ideas. Margherita Zanasi is Professor of Chinese History at Louisiana State University. She has published widely on different aspects of modern China's history, including her first book Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2005). She also serves as the editor of the journal Twentieth Century China. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge 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

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Europe and other parts of the globe in spring of 2020, the Chinese government started reporting donations of Personal Protective Equipment as well as other medical supplies to areas experiencing severe shortage. Listen to Dr. Lauri Paltemaa and Dr. Hermann Aubié discuss their research on the exact nature of China's so-called Mask Diplomacy. How did the recent situation differ from past examples of Chinese humanitarian aid and disaster relief? What are the difficulties in obtaining hard data about the donations? Dr. Paltemaa and Dr. Aubié explain the multiple players that have participated in providing China's international humanitarian aid, as well as the symbolic significance of such aid. Dr. Lauri Paltemaa is professor and director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Dr. Hermann Aubié is a senior researcher at CEAS. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. 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

Shao-yun Yang's The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China (University of Washington Press, 2019) challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China. This is a really important work in understanding how ethnicity was articulated in premodern China. The implications of Yang's detailed and meticulous study make it must-read for anyone interested in the intellectual and political history of China, that includes not only for those concerned with the Middle Period, but also both the classical, late imperial, and modern periods. Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty, and therefore is drawn to complicated questions of identity in premodern China like a moth is drawn to flame. He 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

When faced with some of the complex identity questions which often arise in borderlands, Koreans in China – known as Chosonjok in Korean, Chaoxianzu in Chinese – have long seemed adept at navigating the shifting demands of being both Chinese and Korean. Sunhee Koo’s new book, Sound of the Border: Music and Identity of Korean Minority Nationality in China (U Hawaii Press, 2021), makes a strong case for Chaoxianzu music being a clear index of this, reflecting as it does the layered cultural worlds of this community living in Yanbian prefecture where China, North and South Korea, and the wider world collide. Offering an in-depth account of the shifting styles, genres and themes present in Chaoxianzu musical output across the decades, Koo examines the form and content of Korean folksongs and traditional instrumentation, Chinese- and North Korean-inflected socialist propaganda tunes, and more recent commercialised blends of essentialised ‘ethnic’ music and South Korean pop. Woven into the book’s close musical analysis are rich reflections on the often-tumultuous social and political contexts navigated by Chaoxianzu musicians and their publics over time, all of which reveals that from these intersecting cultural worlds has emerged not so much a musical chimera as a varied and distinctive musical tradition in its own right. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies