New Books in Chinese Studies

Why do so many contemporary Chinese artists use porcelain in their work? How do artists make sense of the legacy that porcelain has in China, and how do they use it to transmit ideas about China, Chinese art, and Chinese culture? In New Export China: Translations across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), Alex Burchmore explores the place of ceramics in the work of four artists: Liu Jianhua, Ai Weiwei, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho. By unpacking the history of porcelain production and export in China, the way artists make use of the unique features of ceramics, and the global reception of ceramics, Burchmore effectively demonstrates why understanding ceramics is central to understanding Chinese contemporary art. Filled with wonderfully nuanced readings of artworks and equally beautiful images, this book is sure to be of interest to readers looking to learn more about contemporary art and porcelain, and anyone looking to think about phrases like "Chinese art" and "mass production" in new ways. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Is Kiribati in the American lake, Indo-Pacific or Chinese Pacific? In this Episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki to conceptualize Kiribati as an interstitial island in the Chinese Pacific. Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. In 2023, he published an article in Political Geography that critically analyzes the case of a 2020 Chinese diplomatic visit in Kiribati. The event became known on August 16th, 2020, when Michael Field, a journalist writing with a focus on the South Pacific, posted a visually shocking photograph on Twitter. He typed the following words as a commentary to the exceptional circumstances that the picture depicted: “KIRIBATI - Event in which Chinese Ambassador Tang Songgen walked on backs of children as part of a welcome took place Friday/Saturday at Marakei, 80 km northeast of Tarawa, Kiribati”. Rodolfo Maggio uses his anthropological lens to clarify that the way the welcome ceremony for the Chinese diplomat has been enacted suggests that the “I-Kiribati political project” is far from being a passive acceptance of Chinese presence and influence in the Pacific Ocean. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). 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). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EU twinning project “The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region”, leading the preparatory research and providing supervision and counselling to junior researchers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Conceptualising China through Translation (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. James St Andre provides an innovative methodology for investigating how China has been conceptualised historically by tracing the development of four key cultural terms (filial piety, face, fengshui, and guanxi) between English and Chinese. It addresses how specific ideas about what constitutes the uniqueness of Chinese culture influence the ways users of these concepts think about China and themselves. Adopting a combination of archival research and mining of electronic databases, it documents how the translation process has been bound up in the production of new meaning. In uncovering how both sides of the translation process stand to be transformed by it, the study demonstrates the dialogic nature of translation and its potential contribution to cross-cultural understanding. It also aims to develop a foundation on which other area studies might build broader scholarship about global knowledge production and exchange. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of the colonial Japanese era in Taiwan, focusing on the Musha Rebellion and its brutal suppression by the Japanese military. The book presents the translated account of Kondō Katsusaburō, a Japanese adventurer who married into an indigenous Taiwanese family. Kondō's journals offer an intimate and personal perspective on the events, though they can also be unreliable and prone to sensationalism. To help readers navigate Kondō's account, Barclay has provided a deeply-researched introduction, extensive notes, and context essential to understanding what really happened during the Musha Rebellion. The book sheds light on the cultural clashes and sporadic violence that characterized Taiwan during this period. Through the writing of Kondō, interpreted and contextualized by Barclay, readers gain insight into the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, and indigenous resistance. The Musha Rebellion was a pivotal moment in the relationship between the indigenous people and the Japanese colonial government. In 1930, after years of oppression, the Seediq people of central Taiwan, led by Mona Rudao, attacked a gathering of Japanese people at a local school, slaughtering over one hundred men, women, and children. The Japanese military responded with overwhelming force, employing tactics including poison gas, artillery, and aerial bombardment to quell the rebellion. Barclay's book offers a fresh and engaging perspective on a tragic chapter in Taiwan's past, and the notes and context provided help readers understand the complexities of the events. The book is an important addition to the growing body of literature on Taiwan's history, and it underscores the power of personal narratives to illuminate broader historical themes. Kondo the Barbarian is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Taiwan, the contradictions of colonialism, and the challenges of interpreting personal accounts of historical events. Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

This episode’s host, Adina Zemanek, invited Sherry Lee, Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO of the non-profit, independent media organization The Reporter, for a conversation on a recent graphic journalism series, The Reporter File. We talked about what inspired the inauguration of this series and its role alongside traditional news reporting, the characteristics of these graphic narratives, pathways for establishing collaboration with the publisher of the print edition and with comics artists, other works of comics journalism published by The Reporter, and further plans. The two graphic narratives can be accessed at the following links: 留學黑工/Study Abroad Illegal Workers (volume 1, 2022) and 神木下的罪行/Crime Under the Sacred Trees (volume 2, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Despite its extraordinary diversity, life in the People’s Republic of China is all too often viewed mainly through the lens of politics, with dynamics of top-down coercion and bottom-up resistance seen to predominate. Such a binary framing is particularly often applied to analyses of the country’s media which is understood... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Musicians and community activists in Ghana have raised their voices to increase awareness of the environmental impact of Chinese activities in the country. The chart-topping song “Greedy men” by Stonebwoy directly criticizes Chinese illegal gold mining in the region. On a separate occasion, a community movement compelled the Ghanaian Minister of Environment to cancel a Chinese coal plant project. In this episode, Dr Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi, lecturer at the Lagos State University in Nigeria, joins University Lecturer Outi Luova at the University of Turku, Finland, to discuss his research on non-state reactions to China’s environmental impact in Africa. Alongside the two compelling cases, the discussion delves into the need for more nuanced approaches to researching the consequences of China’s engagement in Africa. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Asianettverket, University of Oslo (Norway), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden). Link to the “Greedy men” video by Stonebwoy on Youtube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Michael R. Sheehy and Klaus-Dieter Mathes's edited collection The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet (SUNY Press, 2019) brings together perspectives of leading international Tibetan studies scholars on the subject of zhentong or “other-emptiness.” Defined as the emptiness of everything other than the continuous luminous awareness that is one’s own enlightened nature, this distinctive philosophical and contemplative presentation of emptiness is quite different from rangtong—emptiness that lacks independent existence, which has had a strong influence on the dissemination of Buddhist philosophy in the West. Important topics are addressed, including the history, literature, and philosophy of emptiness that have contributed to zhentong thinking in Tibet from the thirteenth century until today. The contributors examine a wide range of views on zhentong from each of the major orders of Tibetan Buddhism, highlighting the key Tibetan thinkers in the zhentong philosophical tradition. Also discussed are the early formulations of buddhanature, interpretations of cosmic time, polemical debates about emptiness in Tibet, the zhentong view of contemplation, and creative innovations of thought in Tibetan Buddhism. Highly accessible and informative, this book can be used as a scholarly resource as well as a textbook for teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on Buddhist philosophy. Sangseraima Ujeed, ACLS Robert H.N Ho Postdoctoral Fellow in Buddhist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara received her MSt and DPhil degrees in Oriental Studies from the Department of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Her main research focus is the trans-national aspect of Buddhism, lineage and identity in Tibet and Mongolia in the Early Modern period, with a particular emphasis on the contributions made by ethnically Mongolian monk scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote: “There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich were reduced to scrounging for beans or wheat, the poor for chaff or rotting garbage. Being able to buy a few pecks of chaff or bark was ecstasy.” The Ming Dynasty collapsed two years later. Timothy Brook, in his latest book The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton University Press: 2023), points to environmental disaster as the spark that helped cause the Ming Dynasty’s fall, relying on a history of surging prices to show how the over-275 year dynasty eventually fell to the Qing. In this interview, Timothy and I talk about inflation in Ming China, how it connects to climate change, and how short-term environmental shocks can cause a market to break down. Timothy Brook is professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Great State: China and the World (Harper: 2020), Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer (Bloomsbury Press: 2013), and Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury Publishing: 2009). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Price of Collapse. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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

Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic... 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 Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how... 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 an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead. The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international support for the puppet state of Manchukuo—and it’s the subject of Scott Seligman’s latest book, Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China (U Nebraska Press, 2023) In this interview, Scott and I talk about Harbin, the major players in Semyon’s abduction and murder, and how the investigation and trial became an international sensation. Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the national award-winning author of numerous books, including The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (Potomac: 2020), The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice (Potomac: 2018), and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo (Hong Kong University Press: 2013) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Murder in Manchuria. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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 his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the layers and complexities of Sino-Muslim intellectual... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and how it interrelates with issues of human mobility. In this richly informative and captivating book, Park focuses on the movement of Koreans around the point where China, Russia and Korea converged from the mid-19th century onwards. Deftly moving between intimate migrant experiences and higher-level government activity, the author’s interweaving of the personal and the political gives us a newly grounded perspective on several large empire-states and how they came to understand sovereignty, population and loyalty in the 19th and 20th centuries. These understandings continued to reverberate in the decades that followed, and many remain with us in the present. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and 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

The modern popularity of acupuncture and herbal medicine belies the long history of Chinese medicine in the U.S. In Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace (Yale University Press, 2019), Tamara Venit-Shelton (Claremont McKenna College) examines the historical contexts that shaped perceptions of traditional Chinese medicine from the colonial period to the present. Venit-Shelton draws from court records, material culture, census records, oral interviews, and newspapers to uncover the multi-faceted roles that Chinese herbalists played in both Chinese and non-Chinese communities during the “long Progressive Era.” Through self-Orientalizing presentations, these health practitioners enterprisingly navigated, accommodated, and resisted waves of rising xenophobia and medical regulation. After a period of struggle between the 1930s and 1970s when depression and war disrupted supply chains, Chinese medicine made a roaring comeback even as increasing numbers of Chinese Americans trained in Western medicine, leading to the rise of integrative medicine. Herbs and Roots deepens our understanding of histories of medicine and public health, American Orientalism, Asian immigration to the US, and the environment and ideas of nature. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women entertainers, hostesses, and hibakusha have rarely been analyzed. This book addresses this intellectual lacuna by closely examining memories, (semi-)autobiographical stories, and newspaper articles, grounded or inspired by lived experiences not only in Japan, but also in Shanghai, Manchukuo, colonial Korea, and the Pacific. Chapters further explore the voices of diasporic Korean women (Zainichi Korean woman born in Japan, as well as Korean American woman born in Korea) whose lives were impacted, intervening ethnocentric narratives that were at the heart of the Japanese empire. An appendix presents the first English translation of a memorable statement on comfort women by former Japanese propaganda actress, Ri Kōran / Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki's book Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire (Routledge, 2021) will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature and film studies, as well as gender, sexuality and postcolonial 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

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I’m very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center 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

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written. Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China (Columbia UP, 2023) broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material. Huijun Mai is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 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 Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. James Cummings explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Russia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile. In China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale UP, 2023), Philip Snow provides a full account of the relationship between these two global giants. Looking at politics, religion, economics, and culture, Snow uncovers the deep roots of the two nations' alignment. We see the shifts in the balance of power, from the wealth and strength of early Qing China to the Tsarist and Soviet ascendancies, and episodes of intense conflict followed by harmony. He looks too at the experiences and opinions of ordinary people, which often vastly differed from those of their governments, and considers how long the countries' current amicable relationship might endure. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Today I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon draws on archives from three continents to argue that Overseas Chinese were key to this development, utilizing their global connections and diasporic links to procure much-needed money, supplies, and medical expertise. The remarkable expansion of care and education that they spurred saved more than four million lives and trained more than fifteen thousand medical personnel. Moreover, the introduction of military medicine shifted biomedicine out of elite, urban civilian institutions and laboratories and transformed it into an adaptive field-based practice for all. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort. Wayne Soon is an Associate Professor in the Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Soon is a historian of medicine as well as modern China and Taiwan, with an interest in how international ideas and practices of medicine, institutional building, and diaspora have shaped Chinese East Asia’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. He has published scholarly articles in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Twentieth Century China, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures 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

Migration is a theme intertwined with hopes and dreams. In Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke UP, 2023), June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream. June Hee Kwon is Associate Professor in the Asian Studies Program at California State University Sacramento. Her research and teaching focuses include Korean diaspora and transnational migration, borderlands and political ecology, materiality and affect, gendered labor and class formation, and human suffering and memories. Her area of expertise spans contemporary Korea (North and South), China, and Japan and includes postcolonial and post-Cold War culture and political economy across East Asia. She received my Ph.D. from the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Like countless other migrants from China, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers–Wong Foon Chuck and Leung Hing–travel across the Pacific to make a life for themselves in San Francisco. Unlike many of their peers, they don’t stay, instead traveling south, to Mexico–in part to escape growing anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States. They thrive, at least initially, in Mexico, as Hugo explains in his book America's Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream (Hurst, 2023). They assimilate and become upstanding members of the Mexican business community–only for things to fall apart during the Mexican Revolution. In this interview, Hugo and I talk about his great-grandfathers, why they decided to make a life in Mexico, and the lost history of Chinese migration to this Latin American country. Hugo Wong grew up between Paris and Mexico City. From the early 1990s, he has lived almost fifteen years in Greater China, including in Beijing, where he has helped found various Sino–foreign joint ventures, such as China’s first investment bank. He has built his career in emerging markets investing at major financial institutions in Hong Kong, London and New York. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of America’s Lost Chinese. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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

Environmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jean Yen-chun Lin demonstrates how a rising middle class acquires the capacity for organising in an authoritarian context. Dr. Lin examines how urban residents create civic life through everyday associational activities—learning to defend property rights, fostering participation, and mobilising to address housing-related grievances. She shows that homeowners cultivated petitioning skills, informational networks, and community leadership, which they would later deploy against incinerator projects. To interact with government agencies, they developed citizen science–based tactics, a middle-class alternative to disruptive protests. Homeowners drew on their professional connections, expertise, and fundraising capabilities to produce reports that boosted their legitimacy in city-level dialogue. Although only one of the three incinerator projects Dr. Lin follows was ultimately cancelled, some communities established durable organisations that went on to tackle other environmental problems. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, A Spark in the Smokestacks casts urban Chinese communities as “schools of democracy,” in which residents learn civic skills and build capacity for collective organising. Through compelling case studies of local activism, this book sheds new light on the formation of civil society and social movements more broadly. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Michael W. Doyle's book Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (Liveright, 2023) offers an urgent examination of the world barreling toward a new Cold War. By 1990, the first Cold War was ending. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact was crumbling; following Russia’s lead, cries for democracy were being embraced by a young Chinese populace. The post–Cold War years were a time of immense hope and possibility. They heralded an opportunity for creative cooperation among nations, an end to ideological strife, perhaps even the beginning of a stable international order of liberal peace. But the days of optimism are over. As renowned international relations expert Michael Doyle makes hauntingly clear, we now face the devastating specter of a new Cold War, this time orbiting the trilateral axes of Russia, the United States, and China, and exacerbated by new weapons of cyber warfare and more insidious forms of propaganda. Such a conflict at this phase in our global history would have catastrophic repercussions, Doyle argues, stymieing global collaboration efforts that are key to reversing climate change, preventing the next pandemic, and securing nuclear nonproliferation. The recent, devastating invasion of Ukraine is both an example and an augur of the costs that lay in wait. However, there is hope. Putin is not Stalin, Xi is not Mao, and no autocrat is a modern Hitler. There is also an unprecedented level of shared global interest in prosperity and protecting the planet from environmental disaster. While it is unlikely that the United States, Russia, and China will ever establish a “warm peace,” there are significant, reasonable compromises between nations that can lead to a détente. While the future remains very much in doubt, the elegant set of accords and non-subversion pacts Doyle proposes in this book may very well save the world. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance through the Qing legal code. Fengshui has long been dismissed as a “superstition” whose historical significance is limited to its obstruction of (narrowly) infrastructural development and (broadly) modernization. Laws of the Land instead pushes us to understand fengshui as a form of knowledge production that allowed the state to govern in an era of increasing resource scarcity and crisis. The book covers cases related to land use (and misuse) in relation to graves, examination success, and mining concerns. It introduces readers to a cast of claimants, defendants, and legal “experts,” including clerks who meticulously mapped conflicted landscapes and geomancers who gave evidence in court. In his analysis of fengshui and Qing dynastic collapse, Brown builds upon the work of other scholars who reject narratives of Chinese “reaction” to Western influence and incursion; he posits instead the legal system’s entanglement with fengshui shows a vibrant interaction of various epistemological systems. I am very much looking forward to my conversation with Prof. Brown about the “life and death of Qing landscape.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Newbery and Caldecott honoree and New York Times bestselling author Grace Lin joins New Books Network to talk about her new, groundbreaking, lushly illustrated, book that explores the whimsical myths and stories behind your favorite American Chinese food. From fried dumplings to fortune cookies, she shares the magical tales and historical roots of these well-loved dishes in Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods (Little, Brown Books, 2023). From the fun connection between scallion pancakes and pizza to a look at how wonton soup represents the creation of the world, Grace Lin offers up a mix of insights and folklore. Separated into courses like a Chinese menu, these tales are filled with squabbling dragons, magical fruits, and hungry monks. Her book brings you to far-off times and marvelous places, all while making your mouth water. And, along the way, you might just discover a deeper understanding of the resilience and triumph behind this food, and what makes it undeniably American. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com. 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 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz left Paris on a train bound for China. She was on her way to her fourth wedding, and her fourth husband: An American investment banker named Chester Fritz, who’d proposed after a whirlwind meeting earlier in Shanghai. Bernardine is then forced to find herself things to do in interwar China–and her husband isn’t helping much. That’s how Susan Blumberg-Kason’s newest book, Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China (‎Post Hill Press: 2023), starts. The book charts Bernardine’s life as she sets up a theater, and makes friends with such illustrious figures like Lin Yutang, Victor Sasoon and Anna May Wong. In this interview, Susan and I talk about Bernardine, her life, and why interwar Shanghai remains such a compelling setting for fiction and nonfiction writers. Susan Blumberg-Kason is also the author of a memoir, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong. She is also the co-editor of Hong Kong Noir . Susan is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, Cha: An Asian Literary Review and World Literature Today. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, PopMatters, and the South China Morning Post. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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

We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing how “modernity claims” try either to erase the past or to master it for our own uses, we can appreciate what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity." Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice Institute Featured Scholar: Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University Special thanks: Travis DeCook, Rokhaya Dieng, Gina Elia, Thomas A. Lewis For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, visit https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/season-ii. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Dr. Amy Matthewson's Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the Dr. Matthewson engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness. This book will interest scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political history and Empire, Chinese studies, popular culture, Victoriana, as well as media studies comics-based research. Dr. Amy Matthewson has a PhD degree in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London, in the UK. Dr. Matthewson is a historian interested in representation through visual and material culture, in particular the ways in which China and Chinese communities were understood by Western nations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specific interest in Britain’s relationship with China. She is currently teaching history at University of Iceland. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic 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

The Qing dynasty's office purchase system (juanna) allowed men to legally and openly pay for appointments in the civil service — enabling them to skip the much-lauded civil service examination entirely. Thoroughly forgotten by historians and often dismissed as "corruption," Lawrence Zhang's meticulous book, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), unpacks this system. Through a thorough analysis of archival and other print sources — including personnel files, lists of buyers, and late Qing novels — Zhang shows that office purchase was widespread, common, and an important part of the state's recruitment strategy. By upending the "ladder of success" narrative of the Qing, Zhang's book challenges the characterization of the Qing as a meritocracy and calls into question how we (and historians) today think of merit. As he writes in the book: "The link between wealth and power has always been one of the most important relationships in any organized society. Rarely do we get a chance to understand it as a fresh problem that undermines so many existing assumptions about a society we thought we knew well. Office purchase is precisely such a system" (p. 266). Listeners interested in bureaucracy, Chinese history, examination systems, and the lengths that parents will go to to ensure their children's success should seek it out. Listeners especially interested in meritocracy might also want to check out the edited volume mentioned in the episode (which Lawrence Zhang also contributed to!): Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2022). It was also discussed on another NBN podcast, hosted by Nicholas Gordon, over here. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Dr Darryl Sterk, a Canadian eco-translator who is now based in Lingnan University in Hong Kong and dedicated his work in Taiwanese eco-literature and translation. In our conversation, Darryl told us how he ends up choosing a career path for eco-translation and how he defines “eco-translation” in his own way. He also shared with us his translation experience more in details by drawing reference to Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle. Furthermore, facing challenges of AI (artificial intelligence) in the field of translation, Darryl also chatted with us what kind of unique feature that human translators can offer but a machine is unable to provide so far. 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 “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples—the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths—all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world. Professor Kenneth W. Harl’s newest book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2023) vividly re-creates the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever ready to learn from their more advanced neighbors. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own. 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 provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here. Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. 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 Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2021) is a fascinating history of China's relations with the West--told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators. The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney's two interpreters at that meeting--Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars. Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court's ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li's influence as Macartney's interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain. Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers an empathic argument for cross-cultural understanding in a connected world. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A dictator's power is secure, the authors begin in this muscular, impressive study, only as long as citizens believe in it. When citizens suddenly believe otherwise, a dictator's power is anything but, as the Soviet Union's collapse revealed. This conviction – that power rests ultimately on citizens' beliefs – compels the world's autocrats to invest in sophisticated propaganda. Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Erin Baggott Carter and Dr. Brett L. Carter draws on the first global data set of autocratic propaganda, encompassing nearly eight million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. The authors document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and its opponents, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it. The book explains why Russian President Vladimir uses Donald Trump as a propaganda tool and why Chinese state propaganda is more effusive than any point since the Cultural Revolution. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Kimberley Ens Manning's book The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China (Cornell UP, 2023) explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leaders of reform. Drawing on interviews with 163 participants in the provinces of Henan and Jiangsu, as well as government documents and elite memoirs, biographies, speeches, and reports, Manning offers a new theoretical lens—attachment politics—to underscore how family and ideology intertwined to create an important building block of state capacity and governance. As The Party Family details, infant mortality in China dropped by more than half within a decade of the PRC's foundation, a policy achievement produced to a large extent through the personal and family ties of the maternalist policy coalition that led the reform movement. However, these achievements were undermined or reversed in the complex policy struggles over the family during Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–60). Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South 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

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Huping Ling on her two latest books, Chinese Americans in the Heartland: Migration, Work, and Community and Asian American History, both published by Rutgers University Press in 2022 and 2023, respectively. We begin our conversation with Asian American History, a comprehensive survey text that places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts. In this text, Ling uses the histories of ethnic groups spanning from East, Southeast, South, and West Asia to explore the significant elements that define Asian America, such as imperialism, global capitalist expansion, transnationalism, labor, immigration, exclusion, family, community, and gender roles. The second part of the conversation is dedicated to Chinese Americans in the Heartland. The book draws upon rich evidence from various government records, personal stories, interviews, and media reports to shed light on the commonalities and uniqueness of the region, as compared to the Asian American communities on the East and West Coast, as well as Hawaii. An internationally renowned historian and award-winning writer, Huping Ling is a Professor of History, the founder of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program, and the past department chair at Truman State University. She is a Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and is also affiliated with many programs studying overseas Chinese including serving as the Changjiang (Yangtze River) Scholar Chair Professor of the Chinese Ministry of Education. She is the founding and inaugural book series editor for Asian American Studies Today with Rutgers University Press and former editor-in-chief for the Journal of Asian American Studies. She has authored or edited 34 books and published over 200 articles in Asian American studies. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (University of Washington Press; 2023) looks at the history of court-sponsored porcelain production in Qing China through the work and career of the Manchu polymath Tang Ying (1682-1756). Viewing him as a technocrat — an official who combined technological specialization and managerial expertise — Kai Jun Chen uses Tang to explore how porcelain manufacture was carried out in the Qing, how technological innovations were created and passed on, and how technocrats learned their skills. At the same time, the book shows how technocrats imposed and extended imperial order over local society, and how essential technocrats were to the operation and success of Qing cultural policies. Lucidly written and complete with truly striking images, Porcelain for the Emperor is a beautiful combination of the study of material culture, literature, art history, and technology. This book should be of interest not only to historians of the Qing and the early modern world, but also art historians and curators, as well as anyone who has ever seen a piece of Qing porcelain and wondered how it came to be. Curious readers should also seek out Making the Palace Machine Work, co-edited by Kai Jun Chen, Martina Siebert, and Dorothy Ko. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals. In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to set out from the preexisting assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its public(s). It also suggests researchers further explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice. Emily Chua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. Her articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review, and China Quarterly. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Kin Cheung, a scholar of contemporary Buddhism at Moravian University. We talk about his research on a Chinese-American community healer who happens to be his father. We discuss how his father’s practice raises challenging questions for scholars, and reveals gaping holes in current academic approaches to Buddhism. Along the way, we talk about how code-switching between different ontologies is a feature of life for Asian Americans, and hear Kin’s father conduct a blessing ritual. Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes are distributed by NBN, so be sure to subscribe to Blue Beryl! Resources mentioned in this episode: First installment of Pierce's blog series on Meta Approaches to Asian Medicine Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (2021) Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (2019) Pierce Salguero, Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources (2020) Jivaka Project Philadelphia (documentary films on Asian American Buddhism in Philadelphia, by Pierce and Lan) Pierce Salguero, Kin Cheung, and Susannah Deane, Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World (2024) Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber, Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan (2020) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions. Huwy-min Lucia Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South 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

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model (Harvard UP, 2022), Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred. Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese businesspeople, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world. This book is the winner of 2023 Global and Transnational Sociology Best Publication (Book) by an International Scholar Award, the American Sociological Association, 國科會111年度(2022) 傑出研究獎, 2020年第九屆中央研究院人文及社會科學學術性專書獎, 科技部2020最具影響 力研究專書(人文及社會科學領域), 2019年孫運璿學術獎最佳書籍. Wu Jieh-min is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Stacy Mosher is a translator and editor based in Brooklyn. Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures 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

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication - but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food (Norton, 2023), the James Beard Award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting local food producers, chefs, gourmets and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is made, cooked, eaten and considered in its homeland. Weaving together historical scholarship, mouth-watering descriptions of food and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton UP, 2023) provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule. The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadliest phase of the Little Ice Age, when temperatures and rainfall plunged and world economies buckled. Timothy Brook draws on the history of grain prices to paint a gripping portrait of the final tumultuous years of a once-great dynasty. He explores how global trade networks that increasingly moved silver into China may have affected prices and describes the daily struggle to survive amid grain shortages and famine. By the early 1640s, as the subjects of the Ming found themselves caught in a deadly combination of cold and drought that defied all attempts to stave off disaster, the Ming price regime collapsed, and with it the Ming political regime. A masterful work of scholarship, The Price of Collapse reconstructs the experience of ordinary people under the immense pressure of unaffordable prices as their country slid from prosperity to calamity and shows how the market mediated the relationship between an empire and the climate that turned against it. Huijun Mai is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 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 talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song’s account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center 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

To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubrière witnessed the collapse of the Qing empire, the warlord's chaos that followed, the rise and fall of Japanese Manchukuo, and the emergence of communist China. Caubrière's incredible personal archive, on which Ji Li draws extensively, opens a unique window into everyday interaction between Manchuria's grassroots society and international players. His gripping accounts personalize the Catholic Church's expansion in East Asia and the interplay of missions and empire in local society. Through Caubrière's experience, At the Frontier of God's Empire examines Chinese people at social and cultural margins during this period. A wealth of primary sources, family letters, and visual depictions of village scenes illuminate vital issues in modern Chinese history, such as the transformation of local society, mass migration and religion, tensions between church and state, and the importance of cross-cultural exchanges in everyday life in Chinese Catholic communities. This intense transformation of Manchurian society embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of political turmoil and war, China nevertheless is the only nation to successfully navigate the twentieth century with its imperial territorial expanse largely intact. In Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2023), Dr. Shellen Xiao Wu demonstrates how global examples of frontier settlements refracted through China's unique history and informed the making of the modern Chinese state. Dr. Wu weaves a narrative that moves through time and space, the lives of individuals, and empires' rise and fall and rebirth, to show how the subsequent reshaping of Chinese geopolitical ambitions in the twentieth century, and the global transformation of frontiers into colonial laboratories, continues to reorder global power dynamics in East Asia and the wider world to this day. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford University Press, 2023) is Chris Fraser's topically organized study of the Warring States period of Chinese philosophy, the third century BCE. In addition to well-known texts like the Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mencius, Fraser's book introduces readers to Lu's Annals, the Guanzi, the Hanfeizi, the Shangjun Shu, and excerpts from the Mawangdui silk manuscripts. Beginning with a chapter on "The Way," or the dao, Late Classical Chinese Thought explores topics in metaphysics, metaethics, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of language and logic. By focusing on topics rather than texts, the book aims to show how philosophical discourse happened in the philosophically productive period of the third century. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What does Buddhism have to do with harbors? Find out how China is leveraging religion in its foreign policy and why it is a vital part of China's soft power strategy, aligned closely with domestic policies. Learn how Sri Lanka's reception and reproduction of narratives can impact the country's foreign relations and domestic dynamics. Tabita Rosendal Ebbesen, Doctoral student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University unravels Chinese Development policy, governance practices and the use of Buddhism in diplomatic and public diplomacy efforts in Sri Lanka in conversation with Frode Hübbe. Mentioned in the article is Tabita’s great article China’s Buddhist Strategic Narratives in Sri Lanka – Benefits and Buddhism? Which is accessible open source. Tabita's research focuses on contemporary Chinese governance practices of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Aiming to fill knowledge gaps on port projects, Tabita has conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka, interviewing key stakeholders. Read more here. Frode is a student assistant as the Nordic Institute of Asia Studies and a China Studies Student at the University of Copenhagen with a particular interest in China’s regionalizing efforts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies