New Books in East Asian Studies

In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose.  In Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Cambridge UP, 2020), Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world.  Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, Pleasure in Profit also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

How does revolution literature help to engage Mongolia’s nomadic population with the utopia of a “new society” promised by the Mongolian People’s Revolution Party? In Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Simon Wickhamsmith explores the relationship between literature and politics in the period between the 1921 socialist revolution and the first Writers’ Congress in 1948. He argues that the literature of this time “helped to frame the ideology of socialism and the practice of the revolution for those Mongolians who had little understanding of what it could offer them.” Through discussing the works of Mongolian writers such as D. Natsagdorg, S. Buyannemeh, Ts. Damdinsüren, and D. Namdag, who wrote on education, health care, religion, and labor, the book reveals how these writers represented the new Mongolia and the difficulties that accompanied with it. Wickhamsmith reminds us that although the period between 1921-1948 saw a sustained literary development in Mongolia assisted in part through the financial and moral sponsorship of the Soviet Union, many writers also suffered from censorship and even torture and death. Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 is one of the first books of its kind to translate some of the works by these writers into English, including works of poetry, fiction, and drama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

There are currently eleven million Uyghurs living in China, but more than one million are being held in so-called reeducation camps. A cultural genocide is taking place under the guise of counterterrorism.  In this profound and explosive book, Sean Roberts shows how China is using the US-led global war on terror to erase and replace Uyghur culture and persecute this ethnic minority in what has become the largest program of mass detention and surveillance in the world. In The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority, Roberts contextualises these harms in the PRC's colonial legacy of the region. He demonstrates how the Chinese government was able to brand Uyghur dissent as a dangerous terrorist threat which had links with al-Qaeda. He argues that a nominal militant threat was a 'self-fulfilling prophecy'; the limited response to more than a decade of harsh repression and surveillance.  This is the humanitarian catastrophe that the world needs to know about now. Beyond the destruction of Uyghur identity and culture, there are profound implications for the global community by this cultural genocide.  Dr. Sean R. Roberts is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs; Director, International Development Studies Program at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. He is is a cultural anthropologist with extensive applied experience in international development work. Roberts conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Uyghur people of Central Asia and China during the 1990s, and has published extensively on this community in scholarly journals and collected volumes. In 1996 he produced a documentary film on the community entitled Waiting for Uighurstan. You can find him on twitter at @robertsreport  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard UP, 2020) is a nuanced look at the experiences, narratives―and the popular/historical memories of those experiences and narratives―of World War II-era Allied POWs in Japanese custody, especially in the English-language world. While never denying the horrors of war and the POW experience, Kovner finds less systemic and intentional cruelty by the Japanese camp commanders and guards than she does poor planning and preparation, and often outright neglect when it came to the fate of internees.  Simultaneously, the book is sensitive to how POWs’ experiences differed enormously due to their status in the eyes of the Japanese as well as the time and place of their captivity. In particular, Kovner contrasts the experience of white, mostly Anglophone POWs and Asians, who were more likely to be subjected to systematically poor treatment. In addition, Prisoners of the Empire also explores the ways that Japan “was present even when it was absent” in the twentieth-century history of international agreements on POW treatment and war crimes. Kovner has produced a significant and thought-provoking contribution to several different subfields of history. In addition to its obvious relevance to those interested in the history of modern Japan, World War II, and historical memory, because of its considerations of such issues as the Geneva conventions and war crimes trials, the book will also be of interest to readers interested in international law and relations. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (Intellect Books, 2020) is an exploration of China’s cultural economy over the last twenty years, particularly through the lens of its creative hub of Shanghai. The research presented here raises questions about the nature of contemporary ‘creative’ capitalism and the universal claims of Western modernity, offering new ways of thinking about cultural policy in China. Taking a long-term historical perspective, Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu analyze the ongoing development of China’s cultural industries, examining the institutions, regulations, interests, and markets that underpin the Chinese cultural economy and the strategic position of Shanghai within it. Further, the authors explore cultural policy reforms in post-colonial China and articulate Shanghai’s significance in paving China’s path to modernity and entry to global capitalism. In-depth and illuminating, Red Creative carefully situates China’s contemporary cultural economy in its larger global and historical context, revealing the limits of Western thought in understanding Chinese history, culture, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots. In Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (Columbia UP, 2019), Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

What were the stories of modern China-India relations in the age of empires? How did India and China engage with each other beyond pan-Asianist and anti-colonialist interactions? In Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (Oxford UP, 2020), fifteen diverse scholars attempt to answer these questions through analyses on literature, religion, diplomacy, intelligence, political activism, nationalism, and more. Together, the chapters of the book argue for a need to understand China-India relations in the period between 1840s to 1960s beyond idealist perceptions of Asian unity. They question the use of fixed periodization and geographically constrained understandings of China-India interactions, at the same time reminding us of the complexities of political transitions and the various roles of mediators. This edited volume also actively engages with existing frameworks for understanding China-India relations, such as ‘Pan-Asianism’ and ‘China/India as method’ in different ways. Some contributors converge with these frameworks to show how thinkers from India and China tried to imagine alternatives to global imperialism and capitalism. Other contributors suggest that state-driven geopolitical designs and desires to overcome the nation-state system cannot be neatly demarcated. Prasenjit Duara, in the epilogue of the volume, points out that “India-China studies of the modern period have been largely confined either to the study of ancient civilizational exchanges or to contemporary realpolitik competitions.” He argues, “…what is not mentioned in these formulations is the extent to which these obscuring strategies are themselves an effect of postcolonial Asian societies participating in and even dominating the capitalist nation-state system for control of global resources.” Utilizing new and diverse archival materials in various languages, Beyond Pan-Asianism attempts to address these issues and highlights that modern China-India ties indeed went beyond, if not challenged, the capitalist nation-state system but also reinforced it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura's 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan. Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document. As the translators, James Hadley and Nell Regan, note in A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (Dedalus Press, 2020), "these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The texts that are examined in this study move in and out of different languages or are multilingual in their origins. Texts and authors do not move randomly; rather, they follow routes shaped by the history of contact between different nations of the transpacific. As these texts move into and out of the Chinese language or become multilingual, they necessarily do not always remain Sinophone. The works of the authors discussed are refracted out of Chinese literature into American, Malaysian, and Japanese literatures and, in some cases, back into Chinese again. Following their paths through multiple languages makes visible the ways that these trajectories are informed by, are arrested by, and bend around historical and geopolitical barriers across the Pacific. To this end, examining the path that these texts from a transpacific perspective allows for the possibility of not only multilingual but multidirectional movement. The transpacific trajectories discussed in this book give rise to a number of different versions or interpretations of several texts. When put into conversation with one another, these texts often acquire new meaning as they move between different languages, countries, or time periods. In Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions Across the Transpacific (Cambria Press, 2020) author Clara Iwasaki reads four canonical Chinese writers in relation to their translations, interpellations, and interpretations in different languages, revealing them to be more worldly than previously supposed. Texts, writers, and characters appear in different languages, sometimes taking markedly different forms. Authors translate and translators become authors. When individual texts are read in the context of their language or country of origin, these valences of meaning become lost. It is in reading clusters of texts together that these hidden relationship to other writers, other languages, and other texts become visible. To this end, Iwasaki looks at four writers, Xiao Hong, Yu Dafu, Lao She, and Zhang Ailing, through what she calls refractive relations. Following transpacific circuits, these writers and texts move not simply from periphery to center, or from obscurity to canon, but back and forth between literary, linguistic, and national communities. Many literary encounters today have their origin in meetings of authors and texts decades earlier. Rather than focusing on a single text, this book focuses on the relationship between the different works and how these texts acquire meaning when read in relation to each other.  This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series headed by Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania).  Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies Department at 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/east-asian-studies

The Russian cultural presence in Japan after the Meiji Revolution was immense. Indeed, Japanese cultural negotiations with Russian intellectuals and Russian literature, art, theology and political thought, formed an important basis for modern Japanese transnational intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production. And yet, despite the depth and range of “Japan’s Russia,” this historical phenomenon has been markedly neglected in our studies of modern Japanese intellectual life. This absence may be attributed to the fact that “Japan’s Russia” as idea and cultural expression developed outside the logic of Western modernity. There has been an interconnected logic behind this ignorance, a systematic lacuna in our historiography that tied method to historical actors, concept to theory. Olga V. Solovieva and Sho Konishi's Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria, 2021) seeks to depart from this logic in order to identify thoughts and practices that helped produce a dynamic transnational cultural phenomenon that we identify as “Japan’s Russia.” It does so by orchestrating case studies from cutting-edge scholarship originating in multiple disciplines, each with its own methodological and theoretical implications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre (Harvard UP, 2020) is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts—eight Mirrors—that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, “China,” attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval. Despite the Mirrors’ common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020) Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations.  Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity.  Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution's unrealized dreams and staggering losses. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

In Transnational Identities on Okinawa’s Military Bases: Invisible Armies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Johanna Zulueta considers the role of civilian workers on U.S. bases in Okinawa, Japan and how transnational movements within East Asia during the Occupation period brought foreign workers, mostly from the Philippines, to work on these bases. Decades later, in a seeming “reproduction of base labour”, returnees of both Okinawan and Philippine heritage began occupying jobs on base as United States of Japan (USFJ) employees. The book investigates the role that ethnicity, nationality, and capital play in the lives of these base employees, and at the same time examines how Japanese and Okinawan identity/ies are formed and challenged. It offers a valuable resource for those interested in Japan and Okinawa, U.S. military basing, migration, and mixed ethnicities. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic. China's Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society Under Mao (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status. Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956) was a journalist, intellectual, and self-proclaimed socialist active in early twentieth-century Japan. In Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imaginations: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Leiden UP, 2020), Nadine Willems follows the life and travels of this thinker, who has been known as a “radical anarchist” as well as “the conscience of Japan.” During his seven-and-a-half-year self-imposed exile in England, Belgium, and France following the High Treason Incident, Ishikawa Sanshirō mingled with thinkers and activists such as the English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and lived with the family of Paul Reclus (1858-1941), the nephew of the French anarchist and geographer Elisée Reclus (1830-1905). Reclusian ideas of “social geography” as a politically engaged science that is mindful of the moral responsibilities of geography as a discipline were pivotal to the formation of Ishikawa’s own socio-political model of domin seikatsu (“life of the people of the earth”). However, instead of characterizing Ishikawa as a radical intellectual inspired by Western thought in a narrative of one-directional influence, Willems positions Ishikawa in a transnational network of thinkers that engaged with geographical imaginations and their actualizations. Willems observes that through his engagements with “grassroots” geography and Buddhist ideas such as interconnectedness, Ishikawa Sanshirō challenged Japan’s modernization, capitalism, and social-Darwinism, proposing instead to “re-humanize” science and embark on experiments in self-sufficient living and the establishment of a loose local network of self-governing farmers’ councils in Japan. Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, 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

Winifred Bird’s Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes (Stone Bridge Press, 2021) is more than just a look at the culture and meanings of foraging in Japan complete with an eclectic collection of recipes and a guide for foragers, though it is certainly that. Eating Wild records the author’s encounters with quirky people―including a caldera dweller, a bear hunter, and a seaweed scientist―in surprising places―from snowy northern mountains to quiet Kyoto streets―and is animated by an obvious and effusive love of food, of travel, of people, and of the environment. Bird begins by observing that for many in contemporary Japan, wild forage is as much about “the pleasure of picking and the incidental beauty” as it is about “anything as practical as nutritional content,” but that this attitude is very much the product of particular historical and economic circumstances. Her sensitivity to this issue is foregrounded in chapters 2 and 3, on horse chestnuts and bracken, respectively. Bird’s background as an environmental journalist is particularly noticeable, for example, in her final chapter on wild seaweeds and the costs and benefits of aquaculture. Though as its full title Eating Wild Japan indicates, Bird’s fieldwork is rooted firmly in Japan, this is a book that will appeal to foodies and travel-starved East Asia neophytes as much as to veterans and scholars of Japan. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

In The Sea and the Sacred in Japan: Aspects of Maritime Religion (Bloomsbury 2018), Fabio Rambelli invites various fifteen scholars of Japanese religions to reflect on a well taken-for-granted fact: although the sea has always been a critical source of religious inspirations for Japan, the study of Japanese religions has chosen to turn its attention away from the sea and in the process, became essentially continental and landlocked.  In fifteen chapters, this edited volume re-centers the study of Japanese religions on the coastal peripheries and calls for a geo-philosophy of the sea, or, a thalassosophy. Rambelli reminds us that "there is no sustained study in the intellectual history of the sea in Japan," and in fact, "we know very little about Japanese conceptualizations of the sea, not only in religious thought, but also in cosmology and premodern scientific discourses." This edited volume is thus an attempt to fill this knowledge gap and is the first book of its kind to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions.  Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, 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

Chelsea Szendi Schieder’s Co-Ed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left and Naoko Koda’s The United States and the Japanese Student Movement, 1948-1973: Managing a Free World provide new insights into the postwar Japanese student movement. Koda, a scholar of diplomatic history and international relations, situates student activism within the larger context of the Cold War. Among its historiographical contributions, Managing a Free World pushes back the timeline of the student movement’s origins to occupation-era policies, explores the role of subsequent American cultural diplomacy in combating the Marxist bent of major student organizations, and spotlights the particular importance of Okinawa in the development and ultimate neutralization of leftist activism in postwar Japan. Koda highlights the Kennedy administration’s “Kennedy-Reischauer Offensive” and promotion of modernization theory amongst intellectuals on the one hand and effective promotion of American democratic ideals in driving fissures in the New Left. In contrast, Co-Ed Revolution focuses on the convoluted gender dynamics of the campus-based New Left. Schieder approaches this issue from a number of different angles, including the media-manufactured public memory of a number of important women activists such as Kanba Michiko, killed in demonstrations against renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and the “titillating and terrifying” figures of the so-called “Gewalt Rosas” of the student movement such as Kashiwazaki Chieko. In addition to these analyses of both individual thinkers and their transformation into manipulable media spectacles, Schieder also shows that the historiographical tendency to focus on the aggressive and violent masculinity of the New Left in the late 1960s not only minimizes the role of women in the campus-based New Left, but does so in a way that repeats the internal gender politics of the movement itself; the “masculine ideal of political action” justified and masked the way that women were relegated to support and care work. These two books are part of a wave of recent scholarship reexamining the student movement and New Left in Japan from fresh angles, and seeing the campus protests of the 1960s as both a distinctly Japanese history and part of larger global currents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

With over 100 million followers, Buddhism in the People's Republic of China now fosters the largest community in the world of individuals who self-identify as Buddhists. Although Buddhism was harshly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution under the leadership of Mao Zedong, Buddhist communities around the country were able to revive their traditions in various ways since the 1980s.  In the post-Mao era, Buddhism in China has been able to become a more visible, social, and cultural phenomenon. The editors of Buddhism after Mao: Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions (U Hawaii Press, 2020), Ji Zhe, Gareth Fisher, and André Laliberté observes: "Numerous temples and monasteries have received official permission and even encouragement to rebuild and expand, and the party-state has directly engaged Buddhist groups in activities to promote social welfare, national unity, and the PRC's soft power." Despite Buddhism's current size and influence in the PRC, the editors argue, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Together with nine other scholars of modern and contemporary Buddhism in China, Buddhism After Mao attempts to fill this gap.  Ji, Fisher, and Laliberté point out that first of all, the rapid growth of Buddhism in the past few decades and its continued survival into the future has depended on the maintenance of a careful balance between varying interests and demands. This balance is achieved through negotiation, continuities, and reinventions, which also categorize the chapters of the book.  On the one hand, Buddhists have been negotiating with the post-Mao authoritarian and atheist state to maintain or expand legal spaces for Buddhist practices. On the other hand, Buddhists have been expected to rebuild or maintain continuities with the past to stay "legitimate" in both the state and society's eyes. However, through these processes of tension and negotiation, the contributors of the volume also observe innovations and inventions in Buddhist communities in contemporary China, which have emerged from both design and necessity on both discursive and practical levels.  Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, 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

Suyoung Son’s book Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2018) examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial transactions in textual production and circulation. Combining approaches from various disciplines, such as history of the book, literary criticism, and bibliographical and textual studies, Suyoung Son reconstructs the publishing practices of two seventeenth-century literati-cum-publishers, Zhang Chao in Yangzhou and Wang Zhuo in Hangzhou, and explores the ramifications of these practices on eighteenth-century censorship campaigns in Qing China and Chosŏn Korea. By giving due weight to the writers as active agents in increasing the influence of print, this book underscores the contingent nature of print’s effect and its role in establishing the textual authority that the literati community, commercial book market, and imperial authorities competed to claim in late imperial China. Suyoung Son is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. She is a literary and cultural historian of early modern China (1500-1900). Aliki Semertzi is a PhD Candidate in International Law, at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

The remarkable life of history's first foreign-born samurai and his astonishing journey from Northern Africa to the heights of Japanese society. When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traveled much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child, and trained into a boy soldier in India, he had ended up an indentured servant and bodyguard to the head of the Jesuits in Asia, with whom he visited India, China and the budding Catholic missions in Japan. From the volatile port city of Nagasaki to travel on pirate-infested waters, he lived it all and learned more every day. His arrival in Kyoto, however, literally caused a riot. Most Japanese people had never seen an African man before, and many of them viewed him as the embodiment of the black-skinned (in local traditions) Buddha or a local war god or demon. Among those who were drawn to his presence were Lord Nobunaga, head of the most powerful clan in Japan, who made Yasuke a samurai in his court. Soon, he was learning the traditions of Japan's martial arts, fighting in battles and ascending to the upper echelons of Japanese society. In the four hundred years since, Yasuke has been known in Japan largely as a legendary, perhaps mythical, figure. Now, combining all the primary sources for the first time, African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan (Hanover Square Press, 2021) presents the never-before-told biography of this unique figure of the sixteenth century, one whose travels between countries, cultures and classes offers a new perspective on race in world history and a vivid portrait of life, faith and war in medieval Japan. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

If we wish to understand the role of China in today’s global society, we would do well to remind ourselves of the tragic, titanic struggle which that country waged in the 1930s and 1940s not just for its own national dignity and survival, but for the victory of all the Allies, west and east, against some of the darkest forces that history has ever produced. – Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s War with Japan 1937-45 Understanding China and its approach to policy formation in various political and economic spheres of the 21st century needs to recognize this influential country’s historical reference points in order to better grasp its sensitivities and the interwoven nature of its relationships with the west. One way to commit to such an educational undertaking is through the highly accessible scholarship of Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University. His interesting and readable works cover much of contemporary Chinese history, and his most recent book, China’s Good War: how World War II is shaping a new nationalism was published last year by Harvard University Press, and thoroughly covered on the New Books Network East Asian Studies with Daigengna Duoer in December 2020 – well worth a careful listen. Today’s interview introduces Professor Mitter’s four previous books revealing people significant to the political and social history of early to mid-20th century China, as well as his smart summary of modern China – part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series. Mitter’s framing of his historical narratives help provide an understanding of a Chinese nation composed of individuals confronting stark choices, and revealing what it means to be Chinese. Along with his latest book China’s Good War, those interested in the contemporary arc of social history and the development of a political system are well advised to dig into Mitter’s books which can be nicely supplemented with his well-articulated thoughts on BBC radio programs and his 2015 Asia History Channel documentary, “The Longest War: China’s World War II.” His first four books briefly discussed today start in 2000 with the University of California Press release of: The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China; A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2004) Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008) Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) Rana’s contributions to China studies and scholarship since receiving his PhD from Cambridge University include not only his books, journal articles, and chapters in edited books, but regular contributions to reviews and essays for the Financial Times, Guardian, and International New York Times among others. Rana Mitter is currently Director of the Oxford University China Center, and is currently working on the connections between war and nationalism in China from the 1930s to the present. His interests include the Republican period (1912-1949), the Cold War and Sino-Japanese relations. Keith Krueger lectures at SILC Business School – Shanghai University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

In today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grassroots groups organizing around sexual identity have achieved significant social change—in terms of visibility, social acceptance, and participation—in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. But, more pertinently to our special series, our guest tells us about what drew her to the project, and the kinds of dilemmas, issues, and opportunities that marked her fieldwork in the region. For instance, she walks us through what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork on a cruise ship! We also chat about what it means to do ethnographic observations online and why teaching digital ethnographic methods is a welcome opportunity to rethink our very dated presumptions around physical co-presence in fieldwork being desirable to gather more “authentic” data. In all, tune in for a very candid, witty, and insightful conversation around fieldwork and for a dose of Dr. Fugazzola’s vivacious and contagious energy for the affordances of digital ethnography. Learn more about Ethnographic Marginalia here. Dr. Caterina Fugazzola is is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology. Her general interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eika Tai’s Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) tackles the complex histories of Japanese “military sexual violence” and the activism by women in Japan, mostly since the 1990s.  Tai’s contribution to scholarship on the so-called “comfort women” issue begins with a helpful overview of both the comfort women movement and also the political and social context in which that movement arose and continues today.  Part 2: Activist Narratives, includes four chapters. Chapters 3-5 look at different ways that activists in Japan―primarily Japanese women responding directly or indirectly to the testimony of survivors―have approached the “comfort women” issue.  Tai tells the stories of two or three representative activists in each of these chapters, and demonstrates how they encapsulate a particular way of being “activists in the perpetrator state.” Chapter 6 follows the same structural approach, but ties together some of the threads from previous chapters in its analysis of the transnational feminism that led to the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in 2000.  The book’s conclusion contrasts this approach with the thought of feminist scholar Ōgoshi Aiko, and introduces the idea of “Feminism against Japan’s Military Sexual Violence,” the title of Chapter 7.  Because it breaks new ground in understanding not just the question of military sexual violence, but also the histories of philosophical and activist feminisms, Comfort Women Activism will be of interest to historians of East Asia, gender, social movements, and more. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 2002 to 2013, China’s rapid economic growth caused a boom in the prices of commodities—particularly of metals, fuel, and soybeans. According to political economist Dr. Nick Jepson, the commodity boom offered resource exporters in the Global South the financial resources and thus the opportunity to break away from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and set their own policy agendas. But not all resource-exporting countries that benefited from the commodity boom took this path away from neoliberalism.  In his new book In China’s Wake: How the Commodity Boom Transformed Development Strategies in the Global South (Columbia University Press 2020), Jepson uses fieldwork, interviews, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to identify and describe five typologies of resource exporters during the boom and the factors that contributed to differing development strategies and trajectories. China’s rise has had profound consequences on the processes of global capitalism, and this can be observed most clearly in the fortunes of commodity-exporting countries of the Global South. In China’s Wake explores fascinating case studies of countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa to demonstrate the wide-ranging impact of China’s growth. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter @LDickmeyer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) by Torsten Weber examines how Asianism became a key concept in mainstream political discourse between China and Japan and how it was used both domestically and internationally in the contest for political hegemony. It argues that, from the early 1910s to the early 1930s, this contest changed Chinese and Japanese perceptions of ‘Asia’, from a concept that was foreign-referential, foreign-imposed, peripheral, and mostly negative and denied (in Japan) or largely ignored (in China) to one that was self-referential, self-defined, central, and widely affirmed and embraced.  As an ism, Asianism elevated ‘Asia’ as a geographical concept with culturalist-racialist implications to the status of a full-blown political principle and encouraged its proposal and discussion vis-à-vis other political doctrines of the time, such as nationalism, internationalism, and imperialism. By the mid-1920s, a great variety of conceptions of Asianism had emerged in the transnational discourse between Japan and China. Terminologically and conceptually, they not only paved the way for the appropriation of ‘Asia’ discourse by Japanese imperialism from the early 1930s onwards but also facilitated the embrace of Sino-centric conceptions of Asianism by Chinese politicians and collaborators. Dr. Torsten Weber is a historian of modern and contemporary East Asia specializing in the history of Japanese-Chinese relations and interactions. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is the Indo-Pacific already the most dominant in terms of global power, politics, and wealth? In his newest book, Michael R. Auslin considers the key issues facing the Indo-Pacific which have ramifications for the entire world. Geopolitical competition in the region threatens stability not just in Asia, but globally.  In a series of essays, Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) Auslin examines the key issues that are changing the balance of power in Indo-China and globally. He examines China's aggressive global policies and strategies, and its attempts to bend the world to its wishes.  He argues that the global focus on the Sino-US competition for power has obscured "Asia's other great game" - the rivalry between long-time foes, China and Japan. He questions whether Kim-Jong-un can control his nuclear weaponry and the implications for safety if he cannot.  Auslin examines the plight of women in India and asks whether its "missing women" are potentially hampering any role that India might play on the global stage. Underlying these concerns, the book analyses U.S. strategy in region. If there is be a shift in the global balance of power, what role can and should the U.S. take in limiting China's hegemony?  The dramatic final chapter paints a bleak picture of a Sino-American Littoral war in the very near future. Is this the geopolitical trajectory in the Indo-Pacific? Michael R. Auslin offers a "future-history" of what soon could be.  Michael Auslin, PhD, is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region.   Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On 9th August 1945, the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Of the dead, approximately 8500 were Catholic Christians, representing over sixty percent of the community. In Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests, and Catholic Survivor Narratives (Routledge, 2019), Gwyn McClelland presents a collective biography, where nine Catholic survivors share personal and compelling stories about the aftermath of the bomb and their lives since that day.  Examining the Catholic community’s interpretation of the A-bomb, this book not only uses memory to provide a greater understanding of the destruction of the bombing, but also links it to the past experiences of religious persecution, drawing comparisons with the ‘Secret Christian’ groups which survived in the Japanese countryside after the banning of Christianity.  Through in-depth interviews, it emerges that the memory of the atomic bomb is viewed through the lens of a community which had experienced suffering and marginalisation for more than 400 years. Furthermore, it argues that their dangerous memory confronts Euro-American-centric narratives of the atomic bombings, whilst also challenging assumptions around a providential bomb. Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki presents the voices of Catholics, many of whom have not spoken of their losses within the framework of their faith before. As such, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese history, religion and war history. I asked Gwyn about three questions that we could face when reflecting on the complex survivor narratives provided by the Catholic victims of the nuclear Holocaust in Japan, or more precisely, what the book refers to as the "dangerous memory in Nagasaki."   Do Nagasaki Christians and their unique intercultural Mariology (i.e., Maria kannon and Maria with a keloid scar) present any issues to today's theology (especially with regard to their possible reception by the Vatican)? How was John Paul II's visit to Nagasaki, which put an emphasis on human responsibility regarding war atrocities, received among the survivors who embraced the traditional interpretation of their losses as a sacrificial hansai (a burnt offering) or a part of setsuri (providence)?  How can the nation of Japan (both Catholics and the rest of the country) move forward in light of the dangerous memory of Nagasaki?  The author's responses to these questions reflected his intellectual virtue as a patient witness to the extraordinary life stories of the war victims in Nagasaki. The interview ends with a note of undying hope, the future possibility of transformative reconciliations that can move the whole country forward, while doing justice to dangerous memories.    Gwyn McClelland holds a Master of Divinity from the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Japanese history from Monash University. He is the winner of the 2019 John Legge prize for best thesis in Asian Studies, awarded by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). Takeshi Morisato is a philosopher and sometimes academic. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan’s greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye. The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda’s films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics. An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda’s oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives. Linda C. Ehrlich—writer, teacher, editor—has published extensively about world cinema, art, and traditional theatre in a number of acclaimed academic journals. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Zhen’gao, or Declarations of the Perfected is one of the most important Daoist texts, and a literary classic in its own right. The Declarations of the Perfected collects fragmentary texts—poems, information on the realm of the dead, instructions for practice—revealed to Yang Xi (330—ca. 386) by celestial beings. These texts were assembled and annotated by Tao Hongjing (456–536), whose notes provide a window into textual and literary practices of medieval China. The fragments themselves are richly informative not only about divine beings and celestial realms but also about the social world in which these revelations were made, and the interactions between Daoism and Buddhism. In A Fourth-Century Daoist Family: The Zhen’gao, or Declarations of the Perfected, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 2020), these texts are translated and introduced by Stephen R. Bokenkamp, one of the world’s foremost scholars on early Daoist texts. Stephen R. Bokenkamp is Regents Professor of Chinese Religion at Arizona State University. Natasha Heller is associate professor of Chinese Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (U Chicago Press, 2019), Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan. Dr. Richard M Jaffe is a Religious Studies Professor at Duke University focusing on Japanese Buddhism. He is also the director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantation and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed the whole way by tourists, who have bought tickets for the privilege. The traditional wedding ceremonies are performed for the ethnic tourism industry in Lijiang, a World Heritage town in southwest China.  Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China (Amsterdam UP, 2018) examines how heritage interacts with social-cultural changes and how individuals perform and negotiate their identities through daily practices that include tourism, on the one hand, and the performance of ethnicity on the other. The wedding performances in Lijiang not only serve as a heritage 'product' but show how the heritage and tourism industry helps to shape people's values, dreams and expectations. This book also explores the rise of 'romantic consumerism' in contemporary China. Chinese dissatisfaction with the urban mundane leads to romanticized interests in practices and people deemed to be natural, ethnic, spiritual and aesthetic, and a search for tradition and authenticity. But what, exactly, are tradition and authenticity, and what happens to them when they are turned into performance? Yujie Zhu is a Lecturer at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. He is the co-editor of Politics of Scale and Sustainable Tourism Management at World Heritage Sites. 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

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where a complex history has created a situation where authors can represent any sentence element in three distinct scripts.  In Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese (Routledge, 2020), Wesley Robertson provides the first investigation into the ways Japanese authors and their readers engage with this potential for script variation as a social language practice, looking at how purely script-based language choices reflect social ideologies, become linked to language users, and influence the total meaning created by language acts. Throughout the text, analysis of data from multiple studies examines how Japanese language users' experiences with the script variation all around them influence how they engage with, produce, and understand both orthographic variation and major social divides, ultimately evidencing that even the avoidance of variation can become a socially significant act in Japan. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform (University of Washington Press, 2018) is the first full-length ethnography of Tibetan medical practitioners (amchi) in central Tibet working outside of major Tibetan medical institutions in Lhasa. Departing from extant ethnographies and scholarship on Tibetan medicine in the twentieth-century that often focus on institutions such as the Mentsikhang, Tibetan Medical College, and TAR Tibetan Pharmaceutical Factory, Theresia Hofer follows and traces the medical work of local Tibetan doctors in rural settings in Tsang and in Shigatse Town. By centering on amchis who were not part of the Tibetan state-sponsored medical structures that were incorporated into the PRC socialist health care system in the 1950s, Hofer reveals perspectives and experiences that have been overlooked in national and institutional narratives. Drawing on literature addressing Tibetan amchis' memory and oral history in socialist and postsocialist contexts, Hofer also inquires into the social and political dynamics that influence memory and history-making, especially with regard to the violent past. Medicine and Memory in Tibet also consistently considers gender and aims to tackle the lack of understanding of gender in Tibetan medicine in the twentieth century. The perspectives of the amchis allow the inclusion of more women in the study of Tibetan medicine and uncover different subaltern histories of the Tibetan experience.   Medicine and Memory in Tibet demonstrates that amchis outside of major state-sponsored institutions have continued to contribute significantly to the survival and revival of Tibetan medicine and culture into the present day. Through the amchis' negotiations and agency within the new regime since the 1950s, Tibetan medicine was able to not only become an important health care resource for Tibetans and the state into the 1990s, it also became a stronghold for the preservation and revival of other aspects of Tibetan culture, language, and the local economy in contemporary China.  Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier (Cornell University Press, 2020) Benno Weiner provides an in-depth study of what happened when the Chinese Revolution came to Amdo, a Tibetan region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Focusing primarily on the 1950s, Weiner demonstrates that the Chinese Communist Party wasn't just trying to build a state during this period — it was trying to build a nation. Under the banner of the “United Front” the CCP attempted to gradually, voluntarily, and organically bring Amdo into the modern, Socialist, and multi-ethnic nation. In this meticulously researched book Weiner examines why and how this failed, and the violent and painful consequences of that failure. The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier is an important read for those interested in the history of Amdo, the Sino-Tibetan borderland, and modern Chinese history more broadly. It is also crucial and timely reading for anyone looking to understand contemporary China, and in particular why the CCP continues to struggle to persuade Tibetans (and those in other ethnic minority regions) of their membership in the modern Chinese nation today.  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do local residents and colonial settlers manage to live side-by-side in new imperial arrangements? In Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45 (University of British Columbia Press 2019), Bill Sewell examines how Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other civilians in northeast Asia sought to inscribe Manchuria as theirs, and how Japanese imperial architects and civilians in Changchun engaged in diverse empire-building efforts that transformed the city into a modern urban capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell argues that "Constructing empire was a mundane and popularly imagined affair as well as a diplomatic, political, and military one." Although studies on empire tend to focus on elite decisions or actions, Sewell contends that "popular dimensions must also be considered to grasp fully empire's nature." Constructing Empire also reminds us that Changchun, a city in northeast China and today's Jilin province, was a regional trade hub in Qing Inner Asia before the arrival of foreign empire builders. Although the land on which the city was built originally belonged to the Mongolian Front Gorlos Banner, Changchun's first cityscape was constructed by its Chinese settlers in the Qing. After the Russo-Japanese War, Changchun became a boundary between the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in northeast China and a transfer point for travel between Europe and Asia. Although the Japanese presence in Manchuria was initially under military authority following the Russo-Japanese War, Sewell observes that the presence of Japanese civilians became increasingly strong after the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu) established transportation infrastructures, coal mines, power-generation facilities, factories, experimental farms, and railway-zone towns. Under Japanese occupation, Changchun was renamed Xinjing (J: Shinkyō) and became the capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Sewell shows that constructing empire in Xinjing occurred in diverse contexts and was motivated by colonial imaginaries that allowed Japanese civilians to perceive the urban city and its spaces as places of work, worship, recreation, and residence.  Residents of Xinjing were also segregated between the Chinese, Koreans, and the Japanese, with access to spaces and resources in the city unequally distributed. Sewell points out that behind the façades of Pan-Asianism, the Japanese recreated in Xinjing much of the lifestyle that characterized life back home, demonstrating that "there was a closer allegiance to Japanese customs and society than to anything broadly Pan-Asia." Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As well as presenting practical challenges, addressing the question ‘what is it like in North Korea?’ raises ethical concerns around who is entitled to interpret life in a place so often discussed in luridly exoticizing terms. The awareness of authorial position and sensitivity to shared humanity which runs through Andray Abrahamian’s Being in North Korea (Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2019) is thus one of its real strengths. Weaving together a trove of insights into local society, politics and economics gleaned from years of visits to the country, including many trips as an organiser of local business workshops, Abrahamian offers a convincing and authoritative account of both lesser-known everyday North Korean affairs and clear-eyed interpretations of more familiar macro-level topics. Frank in its acknowledgement of the limits to what an outsider can know about a society that has made opacity the key to its very survival, this is a book which goes as far as anything by a Western outsider is likely to in showing readers what life is like there. 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 northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian M. Miller’s book Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020) offers a transformation of our understanding of China’s early modern environmental history. Using a wide range of archival materials, including tax, deed, and timber market records, Miller presents a picture of China’s forestry regime, something that, while not centralized—as in European states—was highly effective. Though China never adopted a forest bureau system, Miller shows how China managed, through fiscal policies alone, to engender a remarkably productive commerce in timber and other forest products. Revising the narrative of deforestation, this history of China’s distinct form of forest oversight is sure to be a must-read for anyone interested in the history of China, or environmental history more broadly. Though this is a sweeping book—beginning in China’s early empires and stretching through the Song, Yuan, and Ming to end in the nineteenth century—it is also filled with a number of much more local case studies. With chapters on forest deeds, fleet construction, and the logging of the last old-growth forests for palace construction, this book not only tells a story that will have wide impacts for the field, but manages to create an intimate look at what China’s forest management system looked like to those trying to operate and profit from it. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives: Class and Place in Contemporary China (U Washington Press, 2016) probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the role of the intellectual? Is violence, not to mention radical change, necessary? Can there be a revolution without them? Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989 by Els van Dongen (Cambridge University Press, 2019) analyses a series of debates in the early 1990s between Chinese intellectuals as they discussed such questions. Grappling with China’s turbulent twentieth century, such intellectuals came to say goodbye to radicalism, and instead advocated for “realistic revolution” in the service of future modernization. Using journal articles, official newspapers, monographs, and edited volumes, as well as interviews conducted with the main scholars involved in the debates, this book unpacks these complex—often convoluted yet always fascinating—debates effortlessly. Shedding light on the transnational nature of these debates and tracing intellectual exchanges and the evolution of concepts and ideas borrowed from other thinkers, van Dongen has created an intimate look at intellectual thought in early 1990s China. This book should interest those seeking to learn more about Chinese intellectual thought and this moment in global intellectual history, as well as those seeking a model for thinking beyond Eurocentric definitions and interpretations of concepts like ‘conservatism,’ ‘radicalism,’ and ‘modernity.’ 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The “diva” is a common trope when we talk about culture. We normally think of the diva as a Western construction: the opera singer, the Broadway actress, the movie star. A woman of outstanding talent, whose personality and ability are both larger-than-life. But the truth is throughout history, many cultures have featured spaces for strong female artists, whose talent allows them to break free of the gender roles that pervaded their societies. In Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press: 2020) David Chaffetz briefly explores how these “Asian divas” could be seen as some of the first recognizably “modern women''. In this interview, David and I talk about the three different cultures of Three Asian Divas: Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou. We discuss what it meant to be a diva in these historical contexts, and what they say about gender roles in these historic Asian societies. After studying Persian, Turkish and Arabic in college, David Chaffetz worked on the publication of the Encyclopedia Iranica and is also the author of A Journey through Afghanistan, a study of its varied people, social classes and religious sects. He has lived in Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, and travelled extensively in Asia. After a forty-year break working in the technology industry, he returned to writing with “Three Asian Divas.” You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much is known about the Qing sartorial regulations and how the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. But what happened on the stage? What did Qing performers wear, not only when they performed as characters in the Han past, but also when they appeared as subjects in the Manchu present? Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores a two-sided question: how did the Ming-Qing transition influence costuming as theatrical practices and how, in turn, did costuming enable the production of different types of personhood in early Qing China? With readings of several early Qing theatrical works, from the canonical Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) to the lesser-known A Ten-Thousand-Li Reunion (Wanli yuan), combined with visual and performance records and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a new and interdisciplinary perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China. Not only does this book turn an interdisciplinary lens to the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule, it contains a plethora of fascinating moments from early Qing plays—from double-cross-dressers to fake queues—touching on issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and conceptions of time. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Creativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a Mature City (Palgrave, 2020), Heide Imai and Matjaz Ursic focues on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urban milieu in contemporary cities. Filled with reflections based on interviews with a diverse range of creative actors in various local neighborhoods in Tokyo, it offers a rare glimpse into the complex set of elements that provide long-term, physical, and sociocultural support to urban creativity. The authors highlight the interplay between physical and soft (social) factors in the process of place-making and explore how a city’s creativity is influenced by financial support and accessible infrastructure, as well as the sets of informal networks, services, and tacit, locally embedded knowledge that provide the basic layers of stimuli needed for creativity to fully develop. The authors show how the future development of creativity and the overall development of a city depend not only on the (top-down) planning strategies of formal authorities, but also on the appropriate (bottom-up) inclusion of heterogeneous elements that are provided and embedded within the small, hidden context of city spaces.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Silberstein’s book A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020) reveals how Qing fashion was produced at the intersection of commerce and culture. Drawing on a wide array of visual and textual sources, from pattern books and gazetteers to embroidered jackets and a sample book of ribbons, Silberstein both challenges the myth of the absence of fashion in China — perpetuated in large part, as is shown in the book, by museum narratives and collection practices — and presents women as active consumers, participants, and producers in Qing fashion. A Fashionable Century is not only deft in its writing and visual analysis, but this well-written book is itself a beautiful object itself. Woven throughout the chapters are numerous paintings, photographs, prints, and objects, all of which bring the vibrant world of Qing fashion into vibrant (and well-trimmed) relief. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Intertwining autobiography and ethnography, Clara Han’s touching new book Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2020) asks how scholarship can be transformed from a child’s perspective. Through a critique of anthropological practices that assume fully formed “I” in its emphasis on self-reflexivity as well as the prioritization of pre-established epistemological categories in the scholarship on transgenerational trauma, Han shows how distinction between historical and ordinary events breaks down as the violence of war is seeped into everyday lives. The make-believe world interlocks with mundane details of the everyday as a child constructs the world around them through languages that are differently encoded with trauma and joy from the legacy of the war. Divided into four parts, “Part I: Loss and Awakenings” enters into how the trauma of father’s isan kajok (dispersed families) intersect with the memories of illness and affliction of Han’s mother. “Part II: A Future in Kinship, a Future in Language” depicts the process of reconnecting with kin through language while “Part III: The Kids” discusses how sibling relations play an integral role in the inheritance of the Korean War. “Part IV: Mother Tongue” delves into Han’s daughter’s learning about death, loss, and affliction through Han’s father. “Epilogue” further asks how the process of inheriting the trauma of war is gendered and how self-knowledge can lead to anthropological knowledge. Han’s beautifully written and insightful work will be helpful for scholars who are thinking critically about boundaries of knowledge and disciplines, transgenerational trauma and war, and the formation of diasporic communities. Clara Han is Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University. Her research interests include care and violence, the catastrophic and the everyday, and kinship relations in Chile and South Korea. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. In The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Woojeong Joo offers a new interpretation of Ozu's career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence. Firmly situating him within the context of the Japanese film industry, Woojeong Joo examines Ozu's work as a studio director and his relation to sound cinema, and looks in-depth at his wartime experiences and his adaptation to post-war Japanese society. Drawing on Japanese materials not previously examined in western scholarship, this is a ground-breaking new study of a master of cinema. In this interview, I asked Woojeong a series of questions concerning the operative notion of the "everyday" in the works of Ozu. It seems that the ordinary and oft-repetitive experience of the "present" enabled Ozu to create a space in which one could resist the nationalistic dictum of the "Japanese spirit" in 1930–40s Japan. Despite the fact that there is a certain continuity between his pre-war and post-war works (just like the works of the Kyoto School philosophers that the book cites), and despite the limitations Ozu's works inherently contain for a contemporary audience, his films are saturated with acute social commentaries, and offer insight into the emergence of different social "everday"s in modern Japan. Woojeong's interpretation of "feminity" in the works of Ozu also demonstrates his cross-cultural and cross-generational sensitivity, which is necessary for understanding the significance of "femininity" in the wider intellectual and historical context of feminist philosophy and Gender studies.  I ended with a question about Ozu's signature technique of the "low height" angle. Is there anything that we should know about this distinct technique? What did Ozu intend to achieve with this peculiar viewpoint? Woojeong's informed answer, just like this book, will no doubt make us feel like watching the Ozu films again. Woojeong Joo received his PhD degree from University of Warwick. He has worked at the University of East Anglia as a postdoctoral research assistant for the AHRC-funded project "Manga to Movies" and is currently teaching in the Japan-in-Asia Cultural Studies Program at Nagoya University, Japan. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. I specialize in comparative and Japanese philosophy but I am also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present. Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China (University of California Press, 2020) is an important intervention contributing to cultural and medical anthropology and to the field of China studies. Suvi Rautio is a part-time Course Lecturer at the Social & Cultural Anthropology discipline at University of Helsinki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities. An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin. In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon (Columbia UP, 2019), William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens of The Water Margin’s literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese Cultural and Literary History, University of Arizona Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Immigrant Japan? Sounds like a contradiction, but as Gracia Liu-Farrer shows in Immigrant Japan Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020), millions of immigrants make their lives in Japan, dealing with the tensions between belonging and not belonging in this ethno-nationalist country. Why do people want to come to Japan? Where do immigrants with various resources and demographic profiles fit in the economic landscape? How do immigrants narrate belonging in an environment where they are "other" at a time when mobility is increasingly easy and belonging increasingly complex? Gracia Liu-Farrer illuminates the lives of these immigrants by bringing in sociological, geographical, and psychological theories—guiding the reader through life trajectories of migrants of diverse backgrounds while also going so far as to suggest that Japan is already an immigrant country. In this interview we talked about what has contributed to the formation of "ethno-nationalism" in the history of modern Japan and how the growing population of immigrants and the complex reality of their lives offer us a more comprehensive understanding of "belonging" and "displacement" in contemporary Japanese society. After discussing the problems that prevent us from clearly seeing Japan as an immigrant country I asked Gracia two questions about the present and the future of this country: "Does the COVID19 pandemic introduce any new problems that fall outside the purview of this book, or does the book provide any new insights into current situation?" "What could people do to create a robust sense of belonging that is inclusive of everyone in Japan?" Her answers were as insightful and salient as her analysis of the relationship between migration and belonging in Japan. Gracia Liu-Farrer is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, and Director of Institute of Asian Migrations, Waseda University, Japan. She is the author of Labor Migration from China to Japan and coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. In The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2018), anthropologist William Kelly analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watched and talked-about professional baseball teams, second only to their powerful rivals, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Despite a largely losing record, perennial frustration, and infighting among players, the Tigers remain overwhelming sentimental favorites in many parts of the country.  This book analyzes the Hanshin Tiger phenomenon, and offers an account of why it has long been so compelling and instructive. Professor Kelly argues that the Tigers represent what he calls a sportsworld —a collective product of the actions of players, coaching staff, management, media, and millions of passionate fans. The team has come to symbolize a powerful counter-narrative to idealized notions of Japanese workplace relations. The Tigers are savored as a melodramatic representation of real corporate life, rife with rivalries and office politics familiar to every Japanese worker. And playing in a historic stadium on the edge of Osaka, they carry the hopes and frustrations of Japan’s second city against the all-powerful capital. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1930s-40s expansion of the Japanese empire was marked by significant interest among Japan-based scholars and policy-makers in China’s Muslim population and how best to write them into a new pan-Asian story. At the very same time, as Kelly Hammond shows in China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II (UNC Press, 2020), members of this longstanding community of Sino-Muslims were themselves engaged in numerous complex debates over culture and identity, and their place in an emerging post-dynastic China and a wider Islamic world. Choosing to reciprocate Japanese interest was thus just one possible path. Expertly navigating the multi-layered, transnational concerns which are brought into focus by the twentieth-century encounter between Japanese Empire, Chinese Nationalism and Sino-Muslims, Hammond reframes our understanding of wartime East Asia. From global developments stretching as far afield as Central Asia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to the more intimate everyday experiences of Sino-Muslims caught between imperial spaces, the author offers a rich and little-told account of a particularly febrile period of recent history, as well as charting developments which continue to resonate in international relations and domestic minority policies to this day. 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 northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Wei’s book Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) studies queer cultures and social practices in China and Sinophone Asia. Young queer people in Asia struggle under the dual pressures of compulsory familism and compulsory development, that is, to marry and continue the family line and to participate successfully in the neoliberal development of Asia. Compulsory development often necessitates migration for education and work. Wei explores how queer people grapple with kinship, home, and developing queer communities under these conditions. Using his training in film and media studies, he analyzes films by queer Chinese-language filmmakers and discusses the creation of gay communities in cafes, queer film clubs, online social media platforms, and mobile social media. Thoroughly grounded in theory, Wei contributes new metaphors of stretched kinship and gated communities to understand movements of queer cultures and social practices. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter @LDickmeyer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest living species of owl, with larger females of the species weighing as much as ten pounds. It lives in the Russian Far East and Northern Japan. It is also endangered: global populations are estimated to be around 1500 owls in total. The story of one conservationist’s efforts to save these owls is told in Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2020), the first book by Jonathan Slaght. The book traces Jonathan’s many trips to the territory of Primorye in the Russian Far East, as part of his research into where the fish owls live and hunt. In the dead of the Russian winter, Jonathan and his Russian compatriots survey the forests, listen for fish owl duets, investigate nests and capture owls in an attempt to learn more about these creatures. Jonathan Slaght is the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he manages research projects on endangered species and coordinates avian conservation activities along the East Asia–Australasian Flyway from the Arctic to the tropics. You can follow him on Twitter at @JonathanSlaght. Owls of the Eastern Ice has won widespread acclaim, including being longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In this interview, Joanthan and I discuss his research project, and how he turned it into a book. We also delve a little deeper into the ways we think about conservation, and what else needs to be done.  You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Qing Empire from a maritime perspective, Ronald C. Po argues that it is reductive to view China over this period exclusively as a continental power with little interest in the sea. With a coastline of almost 14,500 kilometers, the Qing was not a landlocked state. Although it came to be known as an inward-looking empire, Po suggests that the Qing was integrated into the maritime world through its naval development and customs institutionalization. In contrast to our orthodox perception, the Manchu court, in fact, deliberately engaged with the ocean politically, militarily, and even conceptually. The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge UP, 2018) offers a much broader picture of the Qing as an Asian giant responding flexibly to challenges and extensive interaction on all frontiers - both land and sea - in the long eighteenth century within the Indian Ocean World. Dr. Ronald C. Po is an Associate Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The co-host Mohammed al-Sudairi is the Head of Asian Studies at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He tweets @MohammedSudairi. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This edited volume is the first book-length study of Buddhist tourism in contemporary Asia in the English language. Featuring chapters from diverse contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history, Buddhist Tourism in Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores themes of Buddhist imaginaries, place-making, secularization, and commodification in three parts. The first part, Buddhist Imaginaries and Place-Making features four interesting chapters on how Buddhism is marketed and promoted to domestic and international tourists, as well as how these imaginaries “sediments” over time. The chapters in Part II, Secularizing the Sacred, reveal interestingly that Buddhist tourism tends to create alliances with secular forces as strategies to promote their traditions and sacred sites. Part III of the volume shifts to discussions of commodification in Buddhism and its consequences. Here, contributors show that commodification is not necessarily at odds with Buddhism nor is it a new phenomenon. Covering a wide range of Buddhist sites across Asia and their multi-layered participants in Buddhist tourism, this book uses the unique lens of tourism to offer fresh perspectives on Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices. Courtney Bruntz is Assistant Professor, Philosophy & Religious Studies, at Doane University Brooke Schedneck is Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, at Rhodes College Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Fedman's Seeds of Control: Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) is hard to categorize. In a good way. Put simply, it is a broad but sharp look at the history of Japanese forest management in the Korean peninsula, 1910-1945. In this sense, Fedman’s book is an environmental history, to be sure, but also a material history of empire, science, and industry. It is a history of Japan and Korea, but also of transnational networks of knowledge and power. In other words, Seeds of Control is positioned at the intersection of environmental, imperial, and material histories, but it also contributes to studies in the history of science and other fields. Fedman problematizes the ideologies and practices of forest conservation and regeneration (“greenification”) within the asymmetric politics of colonial rule. Part 1 sets the stage with an overview of the institutional transformations of Japanese forestry across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide and the ways that Japanese “stories about the land… were mobilized in service of settler colonialism.” Part 2 begins with the reform of land rights under imperial rule. Fedman then delineates the histories of the Forest Experiment Stations, the timber industry (especially in the Yalu River basin), and the state-led project of civic forestry and the place of Forest Owners Associations. Finally, Part 3 looks at wartime (1937-1945), starting with the uses of “forest-love thought” as an “ideological lubricant” for mobilization and finally the spectacular denuding and exploitation of the Korean peninsula’s forests in support. Because of its transdisciplinarity, this book will appeal to a wide range of academic audiences. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2019) explains the variations in state building across the borderland area between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. It presents a comparative historical account of the state and nation-building processes in the ethnically diverse and geographically rugged borderland area where China meets Southeast Asia. It argues the failure of the Myanmar state to consolidate its control over its borderland area is partly due to the political and military meddling by its two more powerful neighbors during the Cold War. Furthermore, both China and Thailand, being more economically advanced than Myanmar, have exerted heavy economic influence on the borderland area at the cost of Myanmar’s economic sovereignty.  The book provides a historical account of the borderland that traces the pattern of relations between valley states and upland people before the mid-twentieth century. Then it discusses the implications of the Chinese nationalist KMT troops in Burma and Thailand and Burmese and Thai communist insurgencies since the mid-1960s on attempts by the three states to consolidate their respective borderland areas. The book also portrays the dynamics of the borderland economy and the dominance of both China and Thailand on Myanmar’s borderland territory in the post-Cold War period. It further discusses the comparative nation-building processes among the three states and the implications for the ethnic minority groups in the borderland area and their national identity contestations. Finally, the book provides an updated account of the current ethnic conflicts along Myanmar’s restive borderland and its ongoing peace negotiation process. Enze Han is an Associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at University of Hong Kong. Victoria 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 literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Goldin's book The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton UP, 2020) provides an unmatched introduction to eight of the most important works of classical Chinese philosophy--the Analects of Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Sunzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi. Combining accessibility with the latest scholarship, Paul Goldin, one of the world's leading authorities on the history of Chinese philosophy, places these works in rich context as he explains the origin and meaning of their compelling ideas. Because none of these classics was written in its current form by the author to whom it is attributed, the book begins by asking, What are we reading? and showing that understanding the textual history of the works enriches our appreciation of them. A chapter is devoted to each of the eight works, and the chapters are organized into three sections: Philosophy of Heaven, which looks at how the Analects, Mozi, and Mencius discuss, often skeptically, Heaven (tian) as a source of philosophical values; Philosophy of the Way, which addresses how Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Sunzi introduce the new concept of the Way (dao) to transcend the older paradigms; and Two Titans at the End of an Age, which examines how Xunzi and Han Feizi adapt the best ideas of the earlier thinkers for a coming imperial age. In addition, the book presents clear and insightful explanations of the protean and frequently misunderstood concept of qi--and of a crucial characteristic of Chinese philosophy, nondeductive reasoning. The result is an invaluable account of an endlessly fascinating and influential philosophical tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Yuen Yuen Ang, a Professor of political science and China expert at the University of Michigan. We spoke already in summer 2019 to discuss her previous book: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. In that book she anticipated the theme of this book: corruption. She explains that 'contrary to conventional wisdom, rich nations became rich by first eliminating corruption, the real history is that corruption was never eliminated, it changes in form and structure as an economy becomes richer.' We started our conversation with a definition of corruption and her typologies: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, access money. The argument in China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption (Cambridge University Press, 2020) has been widely taken out of context, as ‘corruption is good for growth’. I asked Yuen to clarify. She believes that not all types of corruption carry the same harm and have the same impact on growth. She explained this with the analogy of types of drugs. Corruption is a complex phenomenon. She argues that we fail to understand it when we adopt one-dimensional measures. Some countries appear free of corruption but instead they are just characterized by more sophisticated forms of corruption. Yuen gave us a short outlook on the state of research in the field of corruption and her contribution. The book, 150 pages organized in seven chapters, is rich of tables and pictures. Yuen created a database with hundreds of party leaders and bureaucrats, and their fate. We learn about tigers and flies, in the terminology of Xi’s campaign against corruption.  In your previous book, she described the strange case of China’s meritocracy. Despite absence of democracy and freedom of press, since Deng, in most cases, the Chinese Communist Party has been selecting a good ruling elite. Overall, the promotion of local cadres and their careers from village level to Zhongnanhai has been based on their ability to meet objective, measurable targets. To some extent, corruption is the opposite of the ideal of meritocracy. I have asked what is the interplay between the two in China. In the section Chinese Bureaucracy 101, Yuen argues that we commonly use public administration theories that are based on ahistorical and wester-centred principles. This is not helpful to understand China she concludes. The book ends with conclusions in the form of five questions. In fact, the very end is a final, timely, note on the risk of a new cold war between the USA and China. Yuen argues that stereotypes and misunderstandings are dangerously fueling commercial and political confrontation. Her study on corruption, and the parallel between China’s and the American Gilded age, is an example of how perhaps China is not that exceptional, exotic and hence dangerous to us.  This is a great new book that contributes to the study of corruption in two ways: with a methodological innovation and with a comparative historical analysis. It is a must have for the libraries of economists, sociologists, political scientists and much more. It is also accessible to non specialists and a pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How vulnerable can you be as a researcher? Why, in a commercially successful city like Wangqing, are Chinese Koreans more successful in their businesses than entrepreneurs from Korea who often have prestigious educational degrees?  These are some of the questions Sharon Yoon addresses in her powerful new book, The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography on Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing’s Koreatown (Oxford University Press, 2020). Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Korean Chinese mum and pop store, underground Korean Chinese church, South Korean megachurch, chaebol (conglomerate) company, and 800 migrant surveys, Yoon shows how hybridity of Korean Chinese people lead to their economic success, but at the emotional cost of belonging in middle-class and longing for gohyang (home). However, Yoon contests the romanticized idea of diasporic homeland by demonstrating how Korean Chinese feel alienated from their homeland (South Korea), while neoliberal restructuring lead to isolation within the ethnic enclaves like Wangqing as people draw ethnic boundaries. She examines how “ethnic boundary-making process" constitute "conflicting notions of class and morality justif[ying] who deserve[s] to belong” in Wangqing between Korean entrepreneurs, expatriates working in chaebol companies, and Korean Chinese (2). Yoon further analyzes how spatial divisions also disempower individuals from breaking the script of distrust and othering. Racialization intersects with gender, as ethnic Others (Korean Chinese)' labor is reduced to feminized and devalued work in chaebol companies. However, their cultural, feminized skills become crucial in the entrepreneurial successes they attain later in their career, which destabilize value embedded in gendered demarcation of labor in the first place. In this well-researched and nuanced monograph, Yoon makes major contributions to East Asian studies, migration studies, and critical race studies through her insights into how globalization is changing the meaning of ethnicity and boundary-making in the context of East Asia. Sharon J. Yoon is assistant professor of Korean studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include global and transnational sociology, qualitative methods, and race, ethnicity, and migration. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent book, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2019), Geoffrey Goble examines the emergence and early history of esoteric Buddhism in China. In contrast to earlier scholarship, Goble contends that it was really Amoghavajra (rather than the two patriarchs preceding him in the lineage) who systematized esoteric Buddhism into a somewhat internally coherent collection of texts and practices. Goble looks at why the Tang-period elite found Amoghavajra’s system so attractive (which was in part due to esoteric Buddhism’s military applications). He also explores the way in which esoteric Buddhism managed to neatly fit into a larger system that Goble calls imperial religion, and examines the reasons why there was some confusion after Amoghavajra’s death as to whether or not his teachings constituted a distinct tradition. This book delves into political, military, and intellectual history to give us an account of the period that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Tang-period Buddhism, and for anyone interested more broadly in the relationships between religious traditions and elite patronage systems. I hope that you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noel Pinnington's A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre: Noh and Kyōgen from 1300 to 1600 (Palgrave, 2019) traces the history of noh and kyōgen, the first major Japanese theatrical arts. Going beyond P. G. O'Neill's Early Nō Drama of 1958, it covers the full period of noh's medieval development and includes a chapter dedicated to the comic art of kyōgen, which has often been left in noh's shadow. Pinnington writes in a clear and accessible style, making this an ideal work for theatre students and Japanese scholars alike. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast Asia. Yet scholarship on the revolution and the turn of the twentieth century in Asia more broadly has largely approached this pivotal moment in terms of relations with the West, at the expense of understanding the East-East and Global South connections that knit together the region's experience. Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912 (Columbia UP, 2020) reconnects the Philippine Revolution to the histories of Southeast and East Asia through an innovative consideration of its transnational political setting and regional intellectual foundations. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz charts turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers' and revolutionaries' Asianist political organizing and proto-national thought, scrutinizing how their constructions of the place of Asia connected them to their regional neighbors. She details their material and affective engagement with Pan-Asianism, tracing how colonized peoples in the "periphery" of this imagined Asia--focusing on Filipinos, but with comparison to the Vietnamese--reformulated a political and intellectual project that envisioned anticolonial Asian solidarity with the Asian "center" of Japan. CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic's harnessing of transnational networks of support, activism, and association represents the crucial first instance of Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power. Uncovering the Pan-Asianism of the periphery and its critical role in shaping modern Asia, Asian Place, Filipino Nation offers a vital new perspective on the Philippine Revolution's global context and content. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford University Press 2020) is the first monograph in the English language to explore the transnationally connected history of modern Buddhist communities in China and Southeast Asia. Dr. Chia introduces the idea of “South China Sea Buddhism,” which allows Buddhist studies to move away from the “China-centered perspective” when studying overseas Chinese Buddhism. This maritime perspective of looking at Buddhism in transregional and transnational networks also invites scholars to rethink “Southeast Asian Buddhism,” which is often associated with Theravāda Buddhist majority on the mainland. Drawing on multilingual research conducted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Dr. Chia traces the movements of three Buddhists active in the South China Sea in the twentieth century. Through the stories of Chuk Mor, Yen Pei, and Ashin Jinarakkhita, Monks in Motion discusses how modern Buddhists negotiated and constructed cultural and religious identities in the South China Sea. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s. Rana Mitter’s newest book on modern China, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard University Press 2020), traces this transformation in the Chinese interpretations of the war from one marked by humiliation to one that celebrates victory. This change in the discourses surrounding the war began with a changing historiography led by Chinese academia in the 1980s, when research on a variety of previously forbidden areas of historical study was encouraged. Then, through local and public attempts at reviving and celebrating war memories through museums, TV, film, and the online space, WWII has been increasingly narrated in these different arenas as China’s “good war.” What came out of these new narratives, Mitter points out, is an attempt to rehabilitate Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists war efforts, which allows the PRC “to re-create an identity it was forging in the 1930s and 1940s, as a rising power that took a cooperative and powerful role at a time of immense global crisis…” In doing so, Mitter argues that China is able to create a subtle corollary, the idea that China is also a postwar state that is both one of the creators and protectors of the postwar international order.  Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering? In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR. He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking. Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.  John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anyone doing business with China will have been shocked by the speed with which political and economic relations with Western, and some other, countries – like India – have deteriorated in 2020, but especially the USA and the UK. A crucial issue for the future is whether this is a passing phase, caused by temporary shocks like the Pandemic and by the personalities of leaders in China and the USA. Alternatively, this could be the beginning of a new Cold War characterised by prolonged hostility on several levels, especially the economic. Sir Vince Cable was Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade in the UK's coalition government 2010-15, and before entering parliament he had an extensive career in government, international organisations, universities and business, latterly as Chief Economist of Shell. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at the LSE, Nottingham, Sheffield and St Mary’s and Birmingham City Universities. He has been at the heart of trade with China, and brings to this book a depth of understanding and a clarity of thought that is so important today when emotion and feelings dominate over facts, reality and sense. ] His analysis in China: Engage! - Avoid the New Cold War (Bite-Sized Books, 2020) is precise, forensic and clear and he brings to the debate about China realism and facts and this book is vital reading for all of us concerned with international trade and international relations. The march towards a cold war with China led by the US, and apparently supported by the UK, is dangerous and Sir Vince Cable's perspective is a corrective to many of the so-called "alternative facts" that are in circulation. This book is timely and important and vital for anyone concerned for the future of international trade. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in the mountains of inland China was built, which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from enemy bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. The Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of fifteen million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. In Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge UP, 2020), Covell Meyskens provides the first history of the Third Front campaign. He shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the global Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account of a critical period of world history, the interwar years, in which the world transitioned from postwar to the prewar and saw the disintegration of collective security and international institutions created after the First World War. Drawing on international history’s methodology of multi-archival research, Jankowski constructs an elegantly written and deeply researched narrative history of this decline by looking at both high-level diplomacy and the changing popular mentalities that influenced many of the decisions of policymakers. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.  Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in their recent book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSG Originals: 2020), which explores how rural China is not just adapting the technology used around the world, but innovating on it.   In this interview, we talk about the frontiers of technology that are being charted in rural China, and why China’s countryside may be the best place to understand how technology, capitalism and society will intersect in the coming years — often in not altogether positive ways. We also talk about some of the more recent developments in how Chinese technology is treated in the United States, with reference to their recent articles: "WeChat Has Both Connected Families and Torn Them Apart" in Slate and "How the Theatrics of Banning TikTok Enables Repression at Home" in The Nation. Xiaowei Wang is the creative director at Logic Magazine, whose work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. You can follow them on Twitter at @xrw. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Blockchain Chicken Farm. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a bustling city-center of Seoul, women in yellow vests protesting over the “final” resettlement between the Japanese and Korean governments every Wednesday is an iconic sight, testifying to the strength and resilience of the “comfort women” movement. In her award-winning book Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Elizabeth Son examines a long neglected aspect of the “comfort women” advocacy movement: embodied practices of the former “comfort women” and activists as they protest against the historical amnesia of sexual slavery. Through a transpacific framework, Son shows how the “comfort women” movement holds Asian American and Asian activists together as they collectively address America’s imperialist past and seek redress against militarized sexual violence. Son’s monograph takes the reader to the materiality, physicality, and aurality of the Wednesday demonstrations as the collective presence of former “comfort women” and activists refuse the label “post” of post-colonial, and counter the forced historical amnesia of “comfort women” history. Son further examines the testimonies of “comfort women” during the Women’s Tribunal, which was organized transnationally to highlight the failure of Tokyo Tribunal and other international organizations in recognizing sexual slavery as a crime. Transpacific redressive theater further critiques cultural amnesia, and transpacific memorials connect “comfort women” from formerly colonized nations as well as Japan to rise in solidarity against the universal atrocity of the war. In examining embodied aspects of transpacific redress of the “comfort women” movement, Son’s work asks important questions surrounding the limits/possibilities of transpacific alliances, historical erasure of sexual slavery and the violent legacy of militarized imperialism. Elizabeth Son is Associate Professor and the Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD) Program at Northwestern University. She was an inaugural Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society fellow, and was a scholar-in-residence at KAN-WIN: Empowering Women in the Asian American Community. She continues to partner with KAN-WIN as a crisis hotline volunteer and co-founding member of their “comfort women” justice advocacy team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, with exception of a 1,000-year occupation of northern Vietnam, China has rarely attempted to exercise control over Southeast Asia. However, in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silkroad project seek to build infrastructure throughout the region; Chinese investors have built casinos in Cambodia and Laos, drawing gamblers south; China’s navy has been building bases on tiny islands, shoals, and reefs in the disputed South China Sea; and citizens from the People’s Republic of China have started to move to Malaysia and Singapore to escape east China’s infamous pollution. Meanwhile, Sinophobia remains a potent force in Indonesian and Malaysian politics; Thai and Khmer social media is full of reports and rumors of bad behavior by Chinese tourists; nationalist mobs in Vietnam have attacked Chinese owned businesses; and Chinese dams are creating an environmental disaster for the lower Mekong Basin. Sebastian Strangio’s In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale UP, 2020) carefully dissects the People’s Republic of China’s complicated relationships with its southern neighbors. Sebastian Strangio is the Southeast Asia editor for The Diplomat. Since 2008, his work has been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, Forbes, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Phnom Penh Post, and many other publications. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, he has reported from the various ASEAN nations, Russia, South Korea, and Bangladesh. His first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia was first published by Yale University Press and Silkworm Books in 2014. It was named as one of the 2015 Books of the Year by Foreign Affairs. Yale University Press has just issued a revised and updated paperback edition of the book under the title Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen And Beyond. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a radical rereading of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi by bringing to light the role of nothingness in grounding the cosmological and metaphysical aspects of its thought. Through a careful analysis of the text and its appended commentaries, David Chai reveals not only how nothingness physically enriches the myriad things of the world, but also why the Zhuangzi prefers nothingness over being as a means to expound the authentic way of Dao. Chai weaves together Dao, nothingness, and being in order to reassess the nature and significance of Daoist philosophy, both within its own historical milieu and for modern readers interested in applying the principles of Daoism to their own lived experiences. Chai concludes that nothingness is neither a nihilistic force nor an existential threat; instead, it is a vital component of Dao's creative power and the life-praxis of the sage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greater interest in what is happening in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang in recent years has generated a proportional need for context, and especially insights into the politics and policies being enacted there and how these interface with local perspectives. For this reason and many others, David Tobin’s Securing China's Northwest Frontier: (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a vital contribution to our understanding of the PRC state-building and narrative-creation efforts which justify projects like the region’s vast network of detention camps. More than this, the book also delves into the lives of ordinary residents of Urumqi, the region’s capital, and how they respond to state efforts to craft a hegemonic vision of Chinese state- and nationhood. Moving smoothly from the promotion and performance of discourses of ethnic unity, to discussion of how Xinjiang’s Uyghur population is officially constructed simultaneously as integral to a process of ethnic “fusion” and irreconcilably “Other”, the book draws on textual analysis and fieldwork in the region to reveal a textured picture of a place and populations under immense stress. Urumqi residents of different backgrounds, Tobin shows, have differential abilities to voice alternative views of what identity and security mean, which in turn cut to the very heart of what “China” means and represents for its own citizens and, perhaps, for those beyond its borders too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Imagine you live in a freewheeling city like New York or London – one of the world’s leading financial, educational, and cultural centres. Then imagine that one of the world’s most infamous authoritarian regimes makes direct control over your city, introducing secret police, warrant less surveillance and searches, massive repression and the arrest of protestors, and aggressive prosecution… This is what just happened in Hong Kong” --Michael C. Davis It is difficult to understand the pace or extent of the changes in Hong Kong since the protests began in June 2019, however in his latest book, Michael C. Davis breaks down for both the uninitiated and expert alike, the political, legal and informal events that have shaped Hong Kong under China’s ever expanding controls. In recent years, Beijing’s increasing interference with Hong Kong’s autonomy has begun to erode the promised “one country, two systems” model. The tension between one country and two systems came to a head in 2019; the world watched Hong Kong’s widespread protests demanding the maintenance of Hong Kong’s autonomy, rule of law and basic freedoms. In an attempt to quell the resistance movement, in 2020 Beijing introduced a National Security Law which has had a chilling effect on society. In Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law (Columbia UP, 2020), Professor Davis contextualizes these events in Hong Kong’s political history, giving the reader unique understandings about the events of 2019 and 2020. Professor Michael C. Davis has taught human rights and constitutional law in Hong Kong for over three decades. Through that time, he has witnessed first-hand the changes from the period before the handover in 1997 under British Colonial Rule, including the events after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. He was instrumental in the organisation of the massive 2003 and 2004 protests, and witnessed first-hand the protests of the 2014 Occupy Central movement. He brings his unique insights to this book. Davis is the author of a number of books and his scholarship engages a wide range of issues relating to human rights, the rule of law and constitutionalism in emerging states. He is widely published in both academic circles and also popular news media. In 2014 he was awarded the 2014 Human Rights Press Award for his commentary by the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mongolia is sometimes seen as one of the few examples of a successful youth-led revolution, where a 1990 movement forced the Soviet-appointed Politburo to resign. In Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East (Penguin Random House SEA: 2020), Aubrey Menard profiles many of today’s young activists in Mongolia, in a wide array of different areas like pollution, feminism, LGBT rights, and journalism. In this interview, we discuss several of the activists profiled in her book, as well as discuss the development of Mongolia's democracy. We talk about whether we can think about young Mongolians as a "generation", and whether the country's experience supports or challenges normal democratic theory. We also touch base on what's been happening in Mongolia since she published her book. Aubrey Menard is an expert on political transitions, elections and democracy, working on democracy and governance issues in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Central America and the United States. She lived in Mongolia as a Luce Scholar from 2015 to 2016. You can follow her on Twitter at @AubreyMenard. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of Young Mongols. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2019) examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the transwar proletarian movement. More broadly, it outlines an ethical position known as persistence, which occupies the grey area between complicity and resistance: Like resilience, persistence signals a commitment to not disappearing—a fierce act of taking up space but often from a position of privilege, among the classes and people in power. Akamatsu grew up in a settler-colonial family in rural Hokkaido before attending arts college in Tokyo and becoming one of the first women to receive formal training as an oil painter in Japan. She later worked as a governess in the home of a Moscow diplomat and traveled to the Japanese Mandate in Micronesia before returning home to write and illustrate children’s books set in the Pacific. She married the surrealist poet and painter Maruki Iri (1901–1995), and together in 1948—and in defiance of Occupation censorship—they began creating and exhibiting the Nuclear Series, some of the most influential and powerful artwork depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. For the next forty or more years, the couple toured the world to protest war and nuclear proliferation and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. With abundant excerpts and drawings from Akamatsu’s journals and sketchbooks, The Art of Persistence offers a bridge between scholarship on imperial Japan and postwar memory cultures, arguing for the importance of each individual’s historical agency. While uncovering the longue durée of Japan’s visual cultures of war, it charts the development of the national(ist) “literature for little citizens” movement and Japan’s postwar reorientation toward global multiculturalism. Finally, the work proposes ways to enlist artwork generally, and the museum specifically, as a site of ethical engagement. Charlotte Eubanks is associate professor of comparative literature, Japanese and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She studies the material culture of books and word/image relations, with a focus on Japanese literature from the medieval period to the present. Her articles have appeared in Ars Orientalis, Book History, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, PMLA, Symposium, Word &Image, and a range of other venues. She is associate editor at the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From glove puppets of Chinese origin and Hakka religious processions, to wartime political theatre and contemporary choirs and dance groups, the diverse performance practices of ethnic Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia highlight the complexity of minority self-representation and sense of identity of a community that is often considered solely in socioeconomic terms. Each performance form is placed in its social and historical context, highlighting how Sino-Southeast Asian groups and individuals have represented themselves locally and nationally to the region's majority populations as well as to state power. In this episode, Dr Josh Stenberg talks to Dr Natali Pearson about Sino-Southeast Asian self-representation in performance arts, and challenges essentialist readings of ethnicity or minority. In showing the fluidity and adaptability of Sino-Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance and public display, Dr Stenberg enriches our understanding of Southeast Asian cultures and art forms, Southeast Asian Chinese identities, and transnational cultural exchanges. Dr Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. A scholar of Sino-Southeast Asian performance and literature, he examines the intersection of ethnic and political identity through the cultural performance of minority ethnic communities. He is the author of Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). In 2020, Dr Stenberg was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to conduct further research into the reception of China's state-funded cultural diplomacy initiatives among Overseas Chinese communities in multicultural societies. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I’m writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-chō in Edo—quite unexpectedly—and I ended up in so much trouble!” This letter, hidden in an archive in Niigata Prefecture, inspired Professor Amy Stanley to write her latest work: Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020). She traces Tsuneno’s life, from growing up in a rural community through her escape to the city of Edo, where she lives in the final decades of the Tokugawa Shogunate.  In this interview with Professor Stanley, we discuss her book: the life of its main character and its historical setting. We touch on how Tsuneno's life tells us more about life, especially the life of women, during this period of Japanese history. We also talk about what inspired her to write about this ordinary woman, and what the research process was like. Amy Stanley is a Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she is a historian of early and modern Japan, with special interest in women's history. You can follow her on Twitter at @astanley711. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Stranger in the Shogun's City. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired Chinese porcelains. Many of these were made in the kilns in and surrounding Jingdezhen. Found in almost every part of the world, Jingdezhen's porcelains had a far-reaching impact on global consumption, which in turn shaped the local manufacturing processes. The imperial kilns of Jingdezhen produced ceramics for the court, while nearby private kilns manufactured for the global market.  In The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge UP, 2020), Anne Gerritsen asks how this kiln complex could manufacture such quality, quantity and variety. She explores how objects tell the story of the past, connecting texts with objects, objects with natural resources, and skilled hands with the shapes and designs they produced. Through the manufacture and consumption of Jingdezhen's porcelains, she argues, China participated in the early modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain “veins” through which the Qing empire’s geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchange that celebrated his rule: garden tours, banquets, entertainments, and gift giving.  Stephen Whiteman's book, Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (University of Washington Press in 2020) draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court’s production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her interests delve into themes, such as Chinese state-society relations, space and memory, to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abe Shinzō is seen today through many lenses: as the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Japan; as a pragmatic leader with a consistent policy vision and a commitment to the art of statecraft; as a nationalist whose strong historical revisionist beliefs led him to make inflammatory moves that opened old wounds and antagonized Japan’s neighbors. In his new biography, The Iconoclast: Shinzō Abe and the New Japan (Hurst, 2020), Tobias Harris presents a painstakingly researched, engagingly written, and fair assessment of Abe’s political career and legacy. Beginning with Abe’s familial connection to the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, Harris show how the political dynasty linking Abe to his father Abe Shintarō and his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke played significant—and often controversial—roles in the political history of Japan dating back to the 1930s. Readers will witness Abe’s gradual rise through the ranks of the Liberal Democratic Party and his complex relationships with leading figures in both Japanese and US political circles. Harris skillfully analyzes the failure of Abe’s first premiership, the lessons he learned during his time in the political wilderness, and his path to reelection in 2012, which marked the beginning of his historic second administration. Harris’s balanced discussion of the Abe administration’s accomplishments and failures leaves no stone unturned, providing insight into everything from the Abenomics program and Abe’s efforts to revise the postwar constitution to an insider’s view of his diplomatic engagement with the Obama and Trump administrations and his attempts to improve Japan’s international relations. Readers predisposed to dislike Abe because of his revisionist perspective on Japanese history will be challenged to see him in a wider context, and Harris raises poignant questions about Abe’s missed opportunities for his champions to consider. Steve Wills is Associate Professor of History at Nebraska Wesleyan University and one of the hosts of the New Books in East Asian Studies series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) is a fascinating study of the transcultural underpinnings of Medieval East Asian Buddhist traditions with an emphasis on Shinra Myōjin, a deity integral to the institutional development of the Medieval Japanese Tendai faction, the Jimon. It demonstrates the linkage between continental Buddhist Culture and Buddhism in Medieval Japan through the intersectionality of various subjective and objective actors such as, traveling monks from Japan bound for China, merchants and other immigrants from the Korean peninsula, archetypal old man and pestilence deities, as medieval Japanese aristocrats and Shungendō practitioners in the theoretical space of the East Asian Mediterranean. For those interested in transcultural Buddhist studies, Tendai Buddhism, and the diffusion of Buddhism in East Asia, more broadly this interview with Sujung Kim, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University, should be an enjoyable and insightful listen. Trevor McManis is a novice monk in a branch of the Vietnamese, Línjǐ school at Phước Sơn temple in Modesto, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1990, the Japanese government introduced the Nikkei-jin (Japanese descendant) visa and since then it has attracted more than 190,000 Nikkei Brazilian nationals to Japan. In Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford UP, 2019), Dr. Ikeuchi points out that “Unlike Japanese migrants in early twentieth-century Brazil, Brazilian migrants in twenty-first-century Japan lack solid governmental support from their home country, sufficient socioeconomic capital, and birthright citizenship.” Trapped in a suspended time and space of the precariousness of unskilled labor, Dr. Ikeuchi argues that many Brazilian migrants turned to Pentecostalism, a religion that allowed these people who have been “putting aside living” and feeling “neither here nor there” in Japan to find temporal and cultural belonging. Suma Ikeuchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the past decade alone, more than ten million corpses have been exhumed and reburied across the Chinese landscape. The campaign has transformed China's graveyards into sites of acute personal, social, political, and economic contestation. In The Chinese Deathscape. Grave Reform in Modern China, three historians of China, Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Christian Henriot, and Thomas S. Mullaney, chart out the history of China's rapidly shifting deathscape. Each essay grapples with a different dimension of grave relocation and burial reform in China over the past three centuries: from the phenomenon of "baby towers" in the Lower Yangzi region of late imperial China, to the histories of death in the city of Shanghai, and finally to the history of grave relocation during the contemporary period, examined by Mullaney, when both its scale and tempo increased dramatically. Rounding off these historical analyses, a colophon by platform developers David McClure and Glen Worthey speaks to new reading methodologies emerging from a format in which text and map move in concert to advance historical argumentation. The Chinese Deathscape is published as part of Stanford University Press’ digital project series which aims to confer the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as academic print books receive. Innovative yet unostentatious, this platform sets new standards for combining interactive, scalable spatial exhibits with academic long-form narrative. Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among many other projects, he runs his own Youtube channel. Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Studies on marriage migration often portray marriage migrants as victims of globalization and patriarchy. Although there are intersecting oppressions among female migrant workers, the tendency to conflate marriage migration with sex trafficking among humanitarian organizations and scholars lead to erasure of divergent experiences. In her book, Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and "Multiculturalism" in Rural South Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), Minjeong Kim challenges this narrative by showing how the feeling of belonging eludes a simple binary between authenticity of love [read as inclusion] and exclusion. Through in-depth interviews with thirty-five Filipinas, twenty-five Korean husbands, and eight Korean community members, Kim explores emotional citizenship created between couples, in-law families, as well as the transnational network of Filipina migrants. As scholarship on citizenship and migration highlights the importance of emotions in creating communities and identities for migrants in their host countries, Kim shows how Filipina’s social identities, along with their locations, intersect with multiplicity of emotions to shape their belonging within diverse national, familial, and co-ethnic spaces. Through her rich ethnography of international marriage couples in rural South Korea, Kim reminds us of the danger of victim narrative that can flatten marriage migrants’ experiences, and offers us a new way of thinking about citizenship that is shaped by migrants themselves through a multiplicity of emotions. Minjeong Kim is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at San Diego State University. Her research areas include gender, family and international migration, as well as Asian American studies and the media. Da In Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include reproductive justice movement, care labor and migration, affect theory, citizenship, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains. Suvi Rautio is a Course Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her research seeks to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China to reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. She can be reached at suviprautio@gmail.com   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you mention Japanese War crimes in World War Two, you’ll often get different responses from different generations. The oldest among us will talk about the Bataan Death March. Younger people, coming of age in the 1990s, will mention the Rape of Nanking or the comfort women forced into service by the Japanese army. Occasionally, someone will mention biological warfare. Frank Jacob has offered a valuable service by surveying Japanese mistreatment of civilians and soldiers comprehensively. His book, Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence (Praeger, 2018), is short and doesn’t treat any event or issue in depth. But he offers a lucid and thorough evaluation of the literature and nuggets of additional insight. And he frames it with a thoughtful attempt to explain the conduct about which he is writing. If you’re looking for a deep dive into a particular topic, you’re not the audience Jacob had in mind. But this is a good place to come to grips with the broad picture of Japanese misconduct during the war. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ye Shitao was a Taiwanese public intellectual who rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. His encyclopedic A History of Taiwan Literature was published in 1987, the same year that the island’s decades-long period of martial law came to an end. The book provides a thorough overview of the major themes and representative works of each stage in the development of Taiwanese literature from the days of the Qing Dynasty through the Japanese colonial period and the postwar era up to the 1980s. Each chapter of the book discusses the historical context necessary to understand the concerns and influences shared by writers in each period, and Ye comments on both major and less prominent writers. Rather than a critical study driven by a particular theoretical approach or a central argument, the book is structured as a comprehensive reference work designed to be inclusive and accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Thanks to the skillful translation work of Christopher Lupke (Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, University of Alberta) this valuable resource is now available in English for the first time. In addition to the main text, Lupke also includes voluminous footnotes contributed by two Japanese scholars who specialized in Ye Shitao’s work. Lupke’s introduction adds contextual information about Ye Shitao himself, and the translator’s epilogue traces developments in the literature of Taiwan from the time of the book’s publication in 1987 to the present. A History of Taiwan Literature (Cambria Press, 2020) is an important resource for anyone interested in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of East Asia. Steve Wills is Associate Professor of History at Nebraska Wesleyan University and one of the hosts of the New Books in East Asia series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political scientists Alan Chong and Quang Min Pham bring with their edited volume, Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), originality as well as dimensions and perspectives to the discussion about the Belt and Road that are highly relevant but often either unrecognized or underemphasized. The book is about much more than the material aspects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, various chapter authors use the Belt and Road to look at perhaps the most fundamental issue of our times: how does one build a global world order and societies that are inclusive, cohesive and capable of managing interests of all stakeholders as well as political, cultural, ethnic and religious differences in ways that all are recognized without prejudice and/or discrimination? In doing so, the book introduces a moral category into policy and policy analysis. That is an important and commendable effort even if it may be a hard sell in an increasingly polarized world in which prejudice and bias and policies that flow from it have gained new legitimacy and become mainstream in various parts of the world. Nonetheless, it allows for the introduction of considerations that are fundamental to managing multiple current crises. One just has to look at the pandemic the world is trying to come to grips with, the need for a global health care governance that can confront future pandemics, and the world’s environmental crisis to realize the relevance of former Singaporean diplomat and public intellectual Kishore Mahbubani’s description of the nation state system as a boat with 193 cabins and cabin administrators but no captain at the helm. In his contributions to the book, Chong looks for answers in the experience of ancient Silk Road travellers. That may be a standard that a Belt and Road managed by an autocratic Chinese leadership that is anything but inclusive would at best struggle to meet. That does not detract from the book being an invaluable and unique contribution to a vast literature on the Belt and Road. Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He is also a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, a globally syndicated column and blog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On July 1, 2020, China introduced a National Security Law into Hong Kong partly in an attempt to quell months of civil unrest, as a mechanism to safeguard China’s security. In this new book, China’s National Security: Endangering Hong Kong’s Rule of Law? (Hart, 2020), Cora Chan and Fiona de Londras bring together a host of internationally renowned authors who question whether a national security law will challenge Hong Kong’s rule of law, and the liberal ideals safeguarded in its legal system, which have become a mark of national identity and pride for many Hong Kongers. The book examines the question in three parts. Firstly, it considers whether national security poses a threat to Hong Kong’s rule of law, in particular, under the unique ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model. In the second part of the book, there is an examination of the sources of resilience in Hong Kong’s politico-legal culture, which may provide resistance to the erosion of the rule of law. In particular, authors examine administrative law, the judiciary, the legislature, and civil society. In the final section of the book, authors examine the limits and scope of national security legislation in Hong Kong, and consider how it should be interpreted in line with Hong Kong’s common law traditions. To understand the current political unrest in Hong Kong, this book is a must read. It is also essential for understanding China’s security concerns, and what this means for the rest of the world. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small-business entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem of contemporary rural Japan. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan has been experiencing an unprecedented decline in population that is expected to accelerate over the coming decades. Rural areas, in particular, have been at the cutting edge of this demographic transition as young people often out-migrate to urban areas to pursue education and career opportunities and to explore spaces and lifeways viewed as cosmopolitan and international. At the same time, some urbanites have decided to either return to the rural climes of their upbringing or move there for the first time to start small businesses. And rural communities have attempted to attract large projects, such as the International Linear Collider, that it is hoped will draw in new people, prevent younger people from out-migrating, and bolster local economies. A combination of individual and institutional entrepreneurial activities is changing the social and geographical landscape of rural Japan and reinventing that space as one that blends perceptions and experiences of the urban and rural, cosmopolitan and rustic. While there has been considerable research on rural Japan and numerous studies that focus on entrepreneurs, only limited attention has been paid to the intersection of entrepreneurial activities in rural Japan and the ways in which entrepreneurs more generally are contributing to the re-formation of rural space and place. This ethnographic study develops the concept of cosmopolitan rurality as a social and geographical space that cannot be characterized as either urban or rural nor as specifically cosmopolitan or rustic. In the "rural" Japan of the early twenty-first, as in many other parts of the industrial world, we see the emergence of a new type of social context forming a hybrid space of neo-rurality that brings together people and ideas reflecting local, national, and global frames of experience. One of the key drivers behind this hybrid space is expressed in entrepreneurial activities by locals to generate an entrepreneurial ecosystem that it is hoped can attract new people and ideas while retaining ideational and geographical elements associated with traditional values and spaces.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For seventeen years, Chris Fenton served as the president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a multi-billion-dollar global media company headquartered in Beijing. He has produced or supervised twenty-one films, grossing $2 billion in worldwide box-office. In his new book, Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business (Post Hill Press, 2020), Fenton shares not only his journey from waiting tables at the Olive Garden to producing some of the most recognizable Hollywood blockbuster movies. And, in the process, he discovers his diplomatic mission: connecting the US and China through commerce and culture: I felt a sense of mission that went far beyond box-office numbers. US-China relations were on the line. We all knew it. We had to make it work. But as an American, something bigger was at stake. We were pulling a rival country’s culture into our own. We were doing more than opening a market or making nice with China. We were bridging a cultural gap, making the world smaller, more stable, less contentious, and much safer. Failure would surely result in the opposite effect. Fenton conveys not only the regulatory obstacles that U.S. movies face when entering the Chinese market but also the cultural barriers. For the media to be successful in China, it needs to be relevant to Chinese audiences. But, while facing challenges in Asia, DMG also found trouble in the U.S. when the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of their dealings in China Like the blockbuster movies Fenton produces (and talks of a cinematic adaption of Feeding the Dragon are underway), this book has broad appeal. It is a gripping page-turner, a glimpse into the regulatory complexity of the Chinese entertainment market, and an introduction into what Fenton calls “film diplomacy.” Punctuated by succinct chapters, the book is an easy read, mixing a compelling story with rich insights. Like the blockbuster movies Fenton produces (and talks of a cinematic adaption are underway), Feeding the Dragon has broad appeal. It is a gripping page-turner, a glimpse into the regulatory complexity of the Chinese entertainment market, and an introduction into what Fenton calls “film diplomacy.” Punctuated by succinct chapters, the book is an easy read, mixing a compelling story with rich insights. Nick Pozek is Assistant Director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia University and a host of New Books in Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Takeshi Morisato is a book that brings together the work of two significant figures in contemporary philosophy. By considering the work of Tanabe Hajime, the Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School, and William Desmond, the contemporary Irish philosopher, Takeshi Morisato offers a clear presentation of contemporary comparative solutions to the problems of the philosophy of religion. Importantly, this is the first book-length English-language study of Tanabe Hajime’s philosophy of religion that consults the original Japanese texts. Considering the examples of Christianity and Buddhism, Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy focuses on finding the solution to the problem of philosophy of religion through comparative examinations of Tanabe’s metanoetics and Desmond’s metaxology. It aims to conclude that these contemporary thinkers - while they draw their inspiration from the different religious traditions of Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism - successfully reconfigure the relation of faith and reason. The book marks an important intervention into comparative philosophy by bringing into dialogue these thinkers, both major figures within their respective traditions yet rarely discussed in tandem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As far back as we can see in the historical record, Buddhist monks and nuns have offered services including healing, divination, rain making, aggressive magic, and love magic to local clients. Studying this history, scholar Sam van Schaik concludes that magic and healing have played a key role in Buddhism’s flourishing, yet they have rarely been studied in academic circles or by Western practitioners. The exclusion of magical practices and powers from most discussions of Buddhism in the modern era can be seen as part of the appropriation of Buddhism by Westerners, as well as an effect of modernization movements within Asian Buddhism. However, if we are to understand the way Buddhism has worked in the past, the way it still works now in many societies, and the way it can work in the future, we need to examine these overlooked aspects of Buddhist practice. In Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages (Shambala Publications, 2020), van Schaik takes a book of spells and rituals–one of the earliest that has survived–from the Silk Road site of Dunhuang as the key reference point for discussing Buddhist magic in Tibet and beyond. After situating Buddhist magic within a cross-cultural history of world magic, he discusses sources of magic in Buddhist scripture, early Buddhist rituals of protection, medicine and the spread of Buddhism, and magic users. Including material from across the vast array of Buddhist traditions, van Schaik offers readers a fascinating, nuanced view of a topic that has too long been ignored. Olivia Porter is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her research focuses on Tai Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar and its borders. She can be contacted at: olivia.c.porter@kcl.ac.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight the “agency of the intangible.” The contributors of this edited volume approach spirits and animism in contemporary Japan from diverse perspectives. Satō Hiroo opens the book with a chapter on the transformation in Japanese visions of the afterlife, the status of the dead, and regional traditions of memorialization. Andrea De Antoni looks further into the ontology of spirits via an investigation into recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki, hyōi) that is treated at the Kenmi Shrine in Shikoku. Jason Josephson-Storm traces both the European and Japanese genealogies of theorizing “primitive” civilizations and their beliefs in spirits, magic, and an animated nature. In Fabio Rambelli’s chapter, a unique type of epistemological system for understanding the existence of spirits is introduced: Minataka Kumagusu’s “Minakata mandala,” which involves Buddhist philosophy, Western science, and an awareness of the Japanese folk tradition all at the same time. In Ellen Van Goethem’s chapter, she explores how and why there were widespread assumptions about how the city of Kyoto was animated by invisible agencies such as guardian spirits and the flow of qi (Jp. Ki). Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by drawing our attention to “power spots” (pawā supotto) and “healing” forests as recent developments in contemporary Japanese religiosity. Focusing on the role of media in the public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic positions, Ioannis Gaitanidis shows how the media paradoxically both helps to normalize animism as part of “traditional” Japanese culture while chastising animistic NRM’s egregious behaviors. Concerning spirits in modern Japanese fiction, another type of powerful media in contemporary Japanese society, Rebecca Suter identifies in her chapter a “fantastic hesitation” that authors take on, which opens doors to the “undecidability of reality” that seems to be a main gateway to the spirit world. Centering on the media arts scene in Japan, Mauro Arrighi in his chapter highlights how animism serves as one of the main creative sources for contemporary artists. Then, Jolyon Thomas turns our focus to anime and their depictions of humanity’s connection with nature. In doing so, he invites us to reflect on the term “animism” and how the spirits of anime are really rooted in late capitalist modernity with its attendant pleasures and woes. In the closing chapter, Andrea Castiglioni points out a growing tendency in recent Japanese films to focus on violent spirit entities (araburugami), rather than benign figures. He argues that this perhaps is related to the emergence of a new kind of national identity for Japan as a country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability of nature and malignant invisible agencies. In this podcast episode, I spoke with the editor of this edited volume, Dr. Fabio Rambelli. Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully researched book shows how, in the early People’s Republic, the Communist Party expanded consumerism and built ‘state capitalism’, and the ferocity of consumer impulses and behaviors that followed. Challenging, provocative, and precisely written, Unending Capitalism is sure to appeal to anyone interested in modern Chinese history and histories of capitalism, as well as any readers looking for a book that uses some really fascinating sources to complicate the dominant narrative of China’s ‘socialist’ history. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu language books and book history and loves anything with a good kesike in it. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History at McGill University in his new book Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab–Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s. While not everyone will necessarily agree with all aspects of this at times hyper-revisionist account of the conflict that we call the Cold War, scholars and lay person alike will be ultra-impressed by the wide range of this narrative history, as well as the breath of research displayed by Professor Luthi. In short this is a book that is required reading for anyone interested in, or specializing in the Cold War. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. 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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While Tibetan Buddhism continues to face restrictions and challenges imposed by the state in contemporary China, it has in fact entered mainstream Chinese society with a growing middle-class and even celebrity following at the same time. In Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese: Mediation and Superscription of the Tibetan Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Society (Lexington Books, 2020), Dr. Joshua Esler sheds light on this recent development in Sino-Tibetan Buddhism that is gaining increasing momentum in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Drawing from more than eighty interviews with diverse interlocutors such as Tibetan Buddhist teachers, Han practitioners, and lay Tibetans, Dr. Esler shows how Tibetan Buddhism has been “superscribed” with new religious meanings and “re-mandalized” to include regions outside of geographical Tibet. Joshua Esler is a lecturer and researcher in Asian Studies at Sheridan College, Perth, Australia. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shanghai’s status as a bustling, international place both now and in the past hardly needs much introduction, although the centrality of horse racing to the earlier incarnation of the city’s cosmopolitanism is less known. Taking activities at the erstwhile Shanghai Race Club as a lens through which to examine life in the city, Jay Carter’s Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (W W Norton) offers a rich and revealing portrait of multiple colourful lives lived in ‘Old Shanghai’, and their demises. Carter’s narrative moves elegantly between trackside life and events and characters in the wider city, depicting the colourful lives of Shanghai’s colonial settlers, Chinese residents and the dynamics of racism and exclusion as well as hybridisation which existed between them. The Champions Day races, it turns out are also not the only landmark event to transport us into worlds of these people, and by focusing our attention on a single day –12 November 1941 – Carter also gleans a wealth of detail from a posthumous birthday celebration for the founding father of Chinese nationalism, and a funeral procession for china’s wealthiest woman. Occurring on the same day as the marquee races, all these events in the author’s deft hands are windows into a world soon to disappear in a maelstrom of global events. James Carter, professor of history at Saint Joseph’s University, is the author of two previous books on Chinese history and is a Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations. 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 northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In China, chiles are everywhere. From dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, Chinese culture and the chile pepper have been intertwined for centuries. Yet, this was not always the case. In The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography (Columbia University Press, 2020), Brian Dott explores the evolution of the chile pepper from an obscure foreign import to a ubiquitous plant regarded by most Chinese as native to the land. He details the myriad uses of chile peppers in late imperial China, not just as a central ingredient in Sichuanese cuisine, but also as a miraculous cure for (get this…) hemorrhoids. By the turn of the 20th century, the chile pepper had transformed itself into a powerful symbol of prosperity, virility, and passion. Brian joins us to discuss, among other things, the challenges of translating classical Chinese, the difficulty of locating primary sources and what the chile pepper meant to Mao Ze Dong. Brian R. Dott is associate professor of history at Whitman College. He is the author of Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China (2004). Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. Almost 70 million people depend either directly or indirectly on the Mekong for their livelihoods. It is the world’s largest inland freshwater fishery. It’s also a place of great ecological and human diversity. Until recently, the Mekong was one of the world’s least tamed rivers, but that has rapidly changed. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong (Zed Book, 2019), Bryan Eyler documents the huge disruption, both to the Mekong’s ecosystem and to the lives of the people who depend on it, caused by rampant dam construction, tourism development, pollution, not to mention climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In June of 2019, a proposed amendment to Hong Kong’s Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, sparked widespread protests across the region. Protestors saw in the bill a threat to the judicial independence that Hong Kong has enjoyed since its return to China from the United Kingdom in 1997. The Special Administrative Region plunged into turmoil as disaffected youth combined the ideology the Arab Spring with their fluency in emerging digital tools to organize and mobilize a seemingly leaderless movement. The demonstrations which continue into 2020 have challenged the city’s government, universities, and communities and even test families and friendships. On the first anniversary of the beginning of this wave of anti-government protests, South China Morning Post released a new book Rebel City: Hong Kong's Year of Water and Fire (World Scientific, 2020) Rebel City presents some of the most comprehensive coverage of Hong Kong’s political unrest. Editors Zuraidah Ibrahim and Jeffie Lam masterfully weave together the perspectives gathered by the intrepid reporters of Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. The book is not only a carefully curated selection of contemporaneous news coverage, but it also offers thoughtful reflections and penetrating insight into a pivotal moment for Hong Kong. Nick Pozek is the Assistant Director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia University in the City of New York and a host of New Books in Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on Ainu identity and settler colonialism in Japan. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Ainu communities and organizations with museum and archival research, Dr. Lewallen shows how Ainu women engage in the “self-craft” of identities and cultural viability through clothwork. Through the embodied ancestral knowledge of clothwork, Ainu women are able to transition from “being Ainu” to “becoming Ainu,” empowering themselves through the “semiotic weight” of cloths in the face of state regulation and assimilation campaigns. Dr. Lewallen argues in this book that, using cultural production as an idiom of resistance against Japanese settler colonialism, Ainu women have enabled network-building with indigenous women globally, however challenging Japanese and Eurocentric models of feminist discourses via an indigenous Ainu feminism at the same time. Ann-elise Lewallen is Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s new episode, we speak with Sean Roberts about his brand new book The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program at George Washington University. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Southern California and has been studying the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, for some 30 years, including for his Master’s and PhD thesis research. In this book, Sean Roberts argues that China’s violent campaign against the Uyghur Muslim population is linked to the broader, U.S-led global war on terror, showing that China appropriates the message of the war on terror as justification for persecuting this ethnic minority. Roberts provides a detailed historical account of the current crisis, of China’s settler colonialism in the Uyghur homeland, and of the ways that China relies heavily on the war on terror to imagine Uyghurs as its enemy. In today’s discussion, Roberts addresses questions about who the Uyghurs are and what their relationship with China has been like historically; how China’s systematic campaign to erase Uyghur identity and culture is linked to the global U.S.-led war on terror; the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies and how it contextualizes Uyghur responses to China’s violent policies; some suggestions for responding to this human tragedy; and his own experiences meeting and talking with Uyghurs and doing this research. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the discourse on the war on terror and terrorism, Islam and Muslims in China, genocide studies, Chinese Studies, history, and generally anyone who wants to understand what’s happening with Uyghurs. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and interreligious marriage. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvnmSeZ5t_YSIfGnB-bGNw She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō) is the masterwork of Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist collections, composed during a period of remarkable religious diversity and experimentation. The text is complex and compelling, famed for its eloquent yet perplexing manner of expressing the core precepts of Zen teachings and practice. Readings of Dōgen's "Treasury of the True Dharma Eye" (Columbia University Press) is a comprehensive introduction to this essential Zen text, offering a textual, historical, literary, and philosophical examination of Dōgen’s treatise. Steven Heine explores the religious and cultural context in which the Treasury was composed and provides a detailed study of the various versions of the medieval text that have been compiled over the centuries. He includes nuanced readings of Dōgen’s use of inventive rhetorical flourishes and the range of East Asian Buddhist textual and cultural influences that shaped the work. Heine explicates the philosophical implications of Dōgen’s views on contemplative experience and attaining and sustaining enlightenment, showing the depth of his distinctive understanding of spiritual awakening. Readings of Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye will give students and other readers a full understanding of this fundamental work of world religious literature. Steven Heine is professor of religious studies and history and director of Asian studies at Florida International University. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often lose out to larger-than-life figures like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. A book that combines a look at the history of the Sino-Russian border with a focus on the experiences of everyday borderlanders is thus very valuable, and this is exactly what is offered by Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton University Press). Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Urbansky’s book draws most of its insights from a particular region of steppe – the Argun river basin – around the point where today Russia and China also converge with the eastern end of Mongolia. As well as giving a sense of the border’s formation over 300 years, Urbansky’s biperspectival look from both Russian and Chinese sides shows how the inter-state boundary took shape as a result of actions by local people, whose lives have in turn been transformed by existence next to a geopolitical faultline. Sören Urbansky is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. 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 northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar's original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center (Duke University Press) Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents' assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar's older denizens as key to understanding Beijing's recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China's economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history. Harriet Evans is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster and Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her research delve into themes including Chinese state-society relations, space and memory in efforts to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. She can be reached at suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press), Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases. Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement. Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy. Mary Augusta Brazelton is University Lecturer in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and After the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2016), Adam Broinowski analyzes the emergence of Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) in the context of America’s de jure and then de facto occupation of Japan following the Second World War. Broinowski traces the evolution of Butoh from the work of early practitioners like Hijikata Tatsumi to later groups like Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction), demonstrating the intimate links between 20th century Japanese history and Butoh. His work analyzes themes of trauma, memory, and war in a work that combines scholarly rigor with an artist’s passion for his chosen form. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores legal history at Princeton University   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As much of the world’s population is currently discovering, living through a historical cataclysm is a more common fact of human existence than one might think. Perhaps one reason why this is easily forgotten is the fact that it is hard to make the empathetic leap between oneself and other people from other times and cultures. For this and many other reasons, Xiaoqiao Ling’s Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center) offers readers a richly revealing window into sensory worlds at a particularly cataclysmic time, showing how Chinese literati dealt with the traumatic transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, and the Manchu conquest of the Han world which brought this about. Exploring writing in numerous genres from plays to memoirs and erotic novels, and translating extensively from these captivating works, Ling demonstrates the striking level of embodied intimacy that these men professed as they wrestled with commitments to community, family and selfhood in their own era of political and social upheaval. Xiaoqiao Ling is Associate Professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. 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 northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Centering on the Tibetan Muslims (the Khache) from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 (University of California Press, 2018) questions the popular portrayals of Tibet as isolated, ethnically homogenous, and monolithically Buddhist. Revealing in this monograph previously inaccessible and unknown accounts of the Khache in Tibet’s history, Dr. Atwill challenges standard Indian and Chinese narratives of the region which often paint the Khache as “foreign, separate, and mutually unrecognizable rather than as indigenous, integrated, and familiar.” Highlighting Tibet’s responses to newly delineated territorial, religious, and national identities in the twentieth century, this book also places the Tibetan Muslim experience within the broader postcolonial Asian experience shaped by complex postcolonial historical trends that swept across Asia after WWII. David G. Atwill is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University where he teaches a broad range of courses on China, Tibet, and world history. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How could a peasant in Shandong in the Qing dynasty come to know enough about a specific law that he felt confident enough to kill his own wife and his lover’s husband and think that he could get away with it? As Ting Zhang’s new book, Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China (University of Washington Press, 2020) shows, there was a whole range of ways: he could have read the entire statute himself, in either an official or a commercial edition of the Qing Code, or found a simple explanation of it in a popular legal handbook. He could have heard a community lecture on it, or seen the statute dramatized on stage. The state might have intended or tried to control the popular dissemination of legal information, but thanks to commercial printing and a thriving book market, legal knowledge circulated and disseminated far and wide in the Qing – right down to a peasant with murder on his mind. Circulating the Code is a beautiful combination of legal history and print culture history. Comparing different official and commercial editions of the Qing Code, handbooks for litigation masters, and manuals for community legal lectures, it explores the production, circulation, and reception of legal knowledge in Qing China, shows how the dissemination of legal information transformed law, and challenges assumptions about the state monopolization of accurate legal knowledge in the Qing. Wonderfully detailed, lucidly written, and packed full of fascinating books, this is a must-read for anyone interested in legal history, the history of the book, and in thinking about comparative histories of print culture and commercial publishing. Ting Zhang is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu books and Manchu translations and loves anything involving a good kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s begins a new set of podcasts from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT. Lilly Goren and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments that engage their scholarship. In a podcast devoted to the concerning political developments in China, four scholars -- from political science, history, and particle physics(!) -- provide insights into the devastating effects of new security laws in Hong Kong, the nuances of China’s censorship and surveillance, the essential connection between science and politics, distinguishing racism and geo-political threat, resisting self-censorship, and genocidal atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Recorded on July 30, 2020, the podcast provides a primer for those who have not had the bandwidth to follow the developments in China but also a chance for specialists to hear an interdisciplinary panel of top scholars bring their research expertise to contemporary events that evolve each day. All of these scholars have recent articles in outlets that we commonly access like The Guardian and the New York Times. Links to both their popular public and scholarly work are provided below for all readers (and students!) -- and also their generous recommendations of other great sources of insights on Chinese politics and U.S.-China relations. Dr. Yangyang Cheng is an accomplished particle physicist, postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University, and member of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Dr. James Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Margaret Roberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego.  Dr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.  Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Follow her on Twitter, @SusanLiebell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nozomi Naoi’s Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length English-language study of one of Japan’s iconic twentieth-century artists, Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934). While he is most famous for portraits of beautiful women and stylish graphic design―which remain enormously popular and ubiquitous in today’s Japan―Yumeji’s output was not only prolific but also diverse. He began as an illustrator for socialist magazines, was a key figure in the revival and reinvention of the woodblock print as a modern medium, and produced astute and evocative portrayals of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated the Tokyo area. He was also a mentor to young artists and writers, and as Naoi shows, Yumeji created not just a recognizable style and brand, but also an alternative space of artistic production in the early twentieth century. Naoi situates Yumeji’s career within the evolving social, artistic, and technological contexts of his time, drawing our attention to his involvement with new reprographic technologies and commercial design. Additionally, by the inclusion of a substantial body of primary sources―including his 21-part earthquake reportage―in both the original and English translation, Naoi’s book is both an outstanding and accessible art history book, but a resource for future research. And because podcasts are not the ideal visual medium, check out the links below to see some of Yumeji’s artwork and learn more. Nozomi Naoi on “Yumeji Modern” and finding the “moon-viewing” moment Envisioning East Asian Art History, Highlights of Yumeji Modern (2 videos)   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others? Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters (University of Chicago Press) illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates. Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding. The datasets Daniel mentions in the podcast are available here. Daniel P. Aldrich is director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University. You can find him on twitter @DanielPAldrich Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful” place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso, 2020), historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China’s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a “return,” but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today’s capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China’s successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her interests delve into themes including Chinese state-society relations, space and memory in efforts to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. You can reach Suvi at suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Mountains to the Cities A History of Buddhist Propagation in Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), written by Mark A. Nathan, is a history of P’ogyo (Buddhist Propagation) on the Korean peninsula from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 21st that switches its focus to South Korea beginning with the Post-Korean War period. Nathan’s history is woven with the themes of geography, law, and media, which serve to elucidate how Buddhism in Korea transformed from a religion that was geographically-isolated by law during the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910), as well as perceived by Korean Buddhist reformers, such as Han Yong’un (1879-1944) as disconnected from the common people into a religion heavily organized in accordance with spreading it’s doctrines and practices to the masses in order to compete with various Christian and Buddhist traditions across the decades. Law is the most emphasized theme in this history. Nathan explains that the introduction of religion as a legal category during the late Chosŏn Dynasty, with propagation as one of its defining components was perpetuated by other laws across time, such as the Temple Ordinance (1911) of the Japanese Colonial period (1910-1945). He posits that these laws indicate why and how Korean Buddhist communities and institutions became what they are today. Spanning just over a century, his work includes a variety of other fascinating details, like the development and history of several media formats used to propagate Buddhism, the influence of presidents on Buddhist propagation, the development of international Seon centers, historical in-fighting among monastics over the issue of celibacy, and descriptions of the efforts made by outstanding Buddhist propagators, such as the well-known monk, Pomnyun (1953-present) and members of the Minjung Buddhist Movement (1980’s). Mark A. Nathan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and director of the Asian Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences at The State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to F r om the Mountains to the Citie s, he also co-edited the volume, Buddhism and Law: An Introduction from University of Cambridge Press (2014). Trevor McManis is a recent graduate of the Geography Program at California State University, Stanislaus, and an aspiring Buddhist Studies Scholar. His research interests include Buddhist material and intellectual culture in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Contributors to Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and semantics of the Chinese language with philosophy of language, from the classical Chinese and contemporary analytic Anglophone traditions. The result is an anthology which explores what Mou calls “the constructive-engagement” model for doing philosophy. In this wide-ranging interview, we talk about the book’s contributions, which includes essays on the famous “White Horse” paradox of Gongsun Long, Heidegger and Zhuangzi on the ineffable, pluralism about truth in Chinese thought, and the relationship between Davidsonian philosophy of language and methods in Chinese philosophy. Bo Mou, Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Rochester, is Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University, USA, and editor of the journal Comparative Philosophy. 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

In Re-enchanting Modernity: Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press, 2020), Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ways in which states and empires spy on and study one another has changed a great deal over time in line with shifting political priorities, written traditions and technologies. Even on this highly diverse global background, however, the long process of licit and illicit familiarization between Russia and China as Eurasian neighbours is a particularly compelling story, one told in engrossing detail in Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press). Moving from the first engagements between seventeenth-century Muscovy and the Qing imperium, through the reformist era of Peter the Great, and up to nineteenth-century Russian annexation of late-Qing territory, the author tells dozens of richly-sourced tales of envoys, agents and missionaries and the worlds of information they wove. As well as making us look in new ways at how knowledge is authored and acted upon politically, Spies and Scholars is a trove of insights into the centuries-long entanglements which have shaped Sino-Russian relationships up to the present. Gregory Afinogenov is Assistant Professor of Imperial Russian History at Georgetown University and Associate Editor at Kritika, the leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation. Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press) offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change. Eugenia Lean is professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures and current director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The key question in The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge, 2020), is to what extent political activists in these three domiciles have made progress in their quest to liberalize and democratize their respective polities. Taking a long historical perspective, the book compares the political trajectory in the three regions from the 1970s until the present. Key political events are analyzed for their strategies, tactics, success and lessons learned. An assessment is made as to how these significant political events have informed the key actor’s struggles for democracy, and also the wider democracy trajectory. Crucially, by drawing on key events, Andreas Fulda demonstrates how the Chinese Communist Party uses “sharp power” to penetrate the political and information environments in Western democracies, and manipulate debate and suppress dissenters living both inside and outside China – with the intent of strengthening its own political position. The book explores the effectiveness and consequences of this sharp power, and the rise of the security state within mainland China. The book makes an argument that this policy has been counterproductive in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where sharp power practices have stimulated the growth of civil society, campaigns for democracy and the flourishing of religion. Fulda’s book makes an essential and timely contribution. It is wonderfully written and absorbing; a must read for anyone seeking to understand political events in the region, and China’s rise to prominence in the world. Follow Andreas Fulda on twitter @AMFChina . Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality and criminal law. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did Buddhist women access religious experience and transcendence in a Confucian patriarchal system in imperial China? How were Buddhist practices carried out in the intimate settings of a boudoir? In Dr. Yuhang Li’s recent monograph, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press), the answers to these questions can be found in creative usages of “women’s things” and the female body. Dr. Li shows in this book that through expressive depictions of Guanyin, or the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in various media such as painting and embroidery, and through embodiments of the deity via jewelry and dance, Buddhist women in Ming-Qing China were able to forge personal connections with the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Dr. Li argues that this connection was made possible through “mimetic devotion,” which allowed the faithful devotees to use their own bodies and material things to “become” the feminized form of the popular Buddhist deity. Yuhang Li is an assistant professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional networks of Buddhism connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and Imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Korean War, a war that, as Baik reminds us, has not officially ended. How are the particularities of the Korean War, as an unended war, expressed in the lives of survivors and their descendants? This work explores how violence is narrated and framed in the lives and works of diasporic subjects, utilizing the concept of durational memory to attend to how the past prevails in the present. Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2020) joins a growing list of Asian American and Korean American scholarship that interrogates the impact modern warfare has had on memory, trauma, and healing but does so by engaging with a variety of diasporic works such as oral histories, live performances, media installations, and monuments. Through a close reading of these aesthetic practices and the events surrounding them, Baik offers a new analytic, the process of reencounters, to account for the ways in which the Korean War has transformed the social lives of those within the Korean peninsula and without. Included in this discourse are the powerful works of transnational Korean adoptees and a reevaluation of the politics of Jeju Island, a contested space of colonialism, militarism, and sovereignty. Reencounters provides a new perspective not only on the aftermaths of war but on the diverse states of being that form our understanding of diaspora and diasporic memory. Crystal Mun-hye Baik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Laura Ha Reizman is a PhD candidate in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, we talk to Takashi Miura, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, about his book Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan, (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). The book examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of “world renewal” (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), a number of entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as “gods of world renewal.” These included disgruntled peasants who demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich. In the modern period, yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in 1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new religion Ōmoto predicted an apocalyptic end of the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god. Using a variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of research focused on religious professionals, their institutions, and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as practiced in communities. He also problematizes the association frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the modern period and within the context of new religions such as Ōmoto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope of world renewal, in other words, changed over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a continental landmass encompassing multitude of different language families and groups. Indeed, what is even meant by “Chinese” is unclear when one considers the huge range of related but mutually unintelligible linguistic varieties – from Cantonese to Shanghainese and many other lesser known ones. The story of how the Beijing-derived language today known – at least in English – as “Mandarin” became the standard is thus a highly complex one. In Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Gina Anne Tam takes us through the ways that people in China have navigated the country’s complex linguistic landscape while also negotiating profound questions over the meanings of modern Chinese identity itself. Moving smoothly from the late imperial period up to the Maoist sixties and indeed beyond, this book is a rich source of insight into how states standardize language, and along the way explores the linguistic debates underlying many vital projects, from educating a nation, to writing novels, organizing socialist revolution, performing opera, and indeed dissing foreigners in rap tracks. Gina Anne Tam is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Trinity University, Texas. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dynastic book looks at how Chinese approaches to knowledge changed during the Ming and Qing as state-commissioned pharmacopeias dwindled, amateur investigations into the knowledge of things soared, and, ultimately, as natural history was de-medicalized, all while commercialization, monetization, long-distance trade, and empire flourished. This exceptionally rich and intimately text-based study introduces readers to a number of fascinating bencao (materia media), makes a compelling case for studying Chinese history through the lens of pharmacy, and demonstrates that Chinese pharmacy itself has a rich and vibrant history—all with stunning ease. This is both an essential and a joyful read for China historians, while still accessible for non-specialists interested in reading about the early modern world, medicine, the history of knowledge, and stories of strange drugs and the even stranger men who dispensed them. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. She is interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bringing attention to the importance of li (an articulated system of social domination and political legitimization, consisting of rituals, ceremonies, and rites) as the foundation of the Qing political system, Macabe Keliher’s book The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China (University of California Press, 2019) challenges traditional understandings of state-formation and helps us rethink how we tell the story of the founding of the Qing. Focusing on how rituals and other practices of legitimization emerged, formed, and were then codified, the book is a deep dive into the early years of the dynasty. Using Chinese and Manchu-language archival materials, including edicts, memorials, legal codes, and court records, Keliher emphasizes how concerned with li the Qing really was, and in turn how very different from the Ming the Qing ended up being. Covering all aspects of ritual, from court ceremony to sumptuary greetings, clothing regulations, and how members of the imperial family were dealt with, this is a lucidly written and wonderfully detailed book that will be of interest to those who work on the Qing—as well as anyone interested in ritual, state formation, early modern empires, and systems of domination more broadly. Macabe Keliher is a historian of early modern and modern China. He is assistant professor of history at Southern Methodist University. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in the History and East Asian Languages program at Harvard University. She in interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change. – Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World The biggest question of the twenty-first century is: What does China want? China is without question the rising power of the age. What that means for the current global order, crafted and led by the United States since the end of World War II, is the topic of think tank studies, Congressional hearings, vats of newsprint, and dinner conversations from Washington to Tokyo. What exactly will China do with its new power? Will China become a partner to the West and its allies, or will it wish to change the world, to promote new values, institutions, and patterns of trade and finance? Will it play by our rules, or write new ones? … The answer to these questions is, at its heart, quite simple: China wants what it always had. China was a superpower for almost all of its history, and it wants to be a superpower again. This comes from the first chapter of Schuman’s Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World (Public Affairs Press, 2020). A perceptive and interesting selective historical narrative that identifies China’s exceptionalism and points out key moments in its long-standing existence as a superpower – militarily, economically, and culturally. A key and recurring theme is how China’s own perception of itself has changed over the centuries and should prove helpful to anyone trying to better understand our current historical moment. Schuman’s purpose is to help readers better develop a more nuanced background concerning China’s role in the world today and the future, as well as the West’s relationship with this Confucian-based civilization. Nicely written with a critical and cohesive theme linking back to his opening notion that ‘there is so such thing as world history – at least not one that holds the same meaning for everyone.’ Available in Audible, Kindle, and hardcover versions. Michael Schuman has been a journalist based in East Asia since 1996 and writes extensively about the region’s history and current affairs. Formerly a correspondent with The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine he now writes for The Atlantic and Bloomberg Opinion – this is his third book. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Charlotte Bruckermann about her new book Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China (Berghahn Books, 2019). Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her interests delve into themes, such as Chinese state-society relations, space and memory, to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity. In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of baseball in Taiwan. He argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese and different groups of Taiwanese people. He considers Taiwanese baseball transnationally within the larger frames of the Japanese imperial nation-state and the Kuomintang’s retrocession Sinicization project. He shows how and why indigenous Taiwanese players travelled the empire, young Japanese and ethnically Chinese Taiwanese people competed in the same international high school baseball competitions, and postwar Japanese students won the Little League World Series. His discussion of Taiwanese identity encompasses the islands diverse populations throughout the twentieth century. He focuses less on baseball as resistance and instead is interested in the way that baseball helped to produce lasting connections between Taiwan and Japan. In the postwar, Chiang Kai-Shek responded ambivalent to the Taiwanese game. Baseball offered the regime ties to the United States and opportunities to compete internationally, but it also threatened to produce Taiwanese nationalism that would undermine their argument for continued rule of the mainland. Taiwan’s post-imperial connections with Japan remained important as Taiwanese baseball remained linked with the metropole. Taiwanese players competing in Japan and Japanese news regularly appearing in their erstwhile colony. Although Harney’s work proceeds largely chronologically, he balances between two periods: the era of Japense colonialism (1895-1945) and the postwar period (1945-1968). Within each section, his work moves thematically, engaging with related issues of Taiwanese nationalism, Japanese educational systems, race under empire, the Cold War, and the trans-Pacific histories of sports. Empire of Infields will appeal to readers interested in Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese history as well as people fascinated by international baseball. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the countryside where, seven and more decades ago, a rural revolution brought the new state into people’s lives, and new people under the state’s stewardship. Brian DeMare’s highly engaging Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2019) tells the story of this revolution, and indeed shows how the process was itself a story. Key to the psychological, political and economic transformations which unfolded in China’s million villages in the 1940s and ‘50s was a powerful narrative impulse – a Maoist “script” for revolution which gave shape to often chaotic and violent events. Untangling this script – and the relationship between the “literal and the literary” as DeMare puts it – is key to interpreting this formative cataclysm of the PRC’s recent past.  Professor Brian DeMare specializes in modern Chinese history. A cultural historian studying the Communist Party's great enterprise, Professor DeMare researches how Chinese citizens have negotiated with the politicization of their everyday lives. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century. The translations in Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic. (Stone Bridge Press, 2020)--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to global literary modernity. Frederik H. Green is an associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and culture of the Qing dynasty and the Republican Period, Sino-Japanese cultural relations, post-socialist Chinese cinema, and contemporary Chinese art. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University and an MPhil and PhD in Chinese literature from Yale University. He is a translator of Chinese and associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. TB was a plague of epic proportions in industrializing Japan, particularly affecting young women workers in the new textile factories. These marginalized laborers, many from rural villages, were not a priority for Japan’s first modern administrations, who focused their energies elsewhere and left the welfare of tuberculosis patients to the private sector. The opening left by this choice was filled by American evangelicals, who saw an opportunity to advance their missionary work in Japan. Perelman identifies a kind of twinned moral entrepreneurship, arguing that a tacit agreement was hammered out between the two sides, with the government accepting the evangelical groups’ assistance with this public health emergency in exchange for noninterference in their efforts to spread Christianity. The history of TB in Japan is well studied and understood, but American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan breathes new life into this old story by its attention to different actors and dynamics. It will be of interest not only to scholars of Japanese and East Asian history and culture, but also to historians of science, medicine and public health, and Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common themes, styles, motifs, and even pigments that circulated across the continents. Drawing on visual as well as textual sources from eight unique locations that spanned between Siena in Italy and Quanzhou in China, Roxann Prazniak maps out in Sudden Appearances an elaborate thirteenth-century network of cultural and commercial exchanges that “produced an ascendant materialism and intervisuality that emphasized human agency.” Join me as I discuss Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art (University of Hawaii Press 2019) with Dr. Prazniak. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to the Republic of China, Tibet, and the Empire of Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities. Focusing on themes of reform, political Islamism, Sufism, gender, as well as a rich array of material culture (such as sacred spaces and art), the book maps the development of Islam in Asia, such as in Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. It considers both transnational and transregional ebbs and flows that have defined the expansion and institutionalization of Islam in Asia, while attending to factors such as ethnicity, linguistic identity and even food cultures as important realities that have informed the translation of Islam into new regions. It is the “convergence and conversation” between the “local” and “foreign” or better yet between the theoretical notions of “centre” and “periphery” of Islam and Muslim societies that are dismantled in the book, defying any notions of Asian expressions of Islam as a “derivative reality.” The book is accessibly written and will be extremely useful in any undergraduate or graduate courses on Islam, Islam in Asia, or political Islam. The book will also be of interest to those who work on Islamic Studies and Asia Studies. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca . You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Yasuhara Miho’s Branding Japan’s Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores historical and contemporary practices of place branding through food in Japan. The book’s narrative centers on the event that precipitated its writing, namely, the 2013 addition of “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year” to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The authors argue that the definition of washoku in the UNESCO nomination is part of a longer history of manipulative place branding in Japan that has its roots in the premodern period. Contemporary Japan’s penchant for and success at gastrodiplomacy is well known, but Cwiertka and Yasuhara place this national-level soft-power branding strategy within a centuries-long history of business practices that fabricated connections between products (many of them food products) and locations. Those stories are told through the book’s other two protagonists, meibutsu (famous products associated with a particular region) and omiyage (travel souvenirs), many of which are edible these days. Meibutsu and omiyage are central to the travel experience in contemporary Japan, and many of the fictional narratives associated with various edible souvenirs have become part of the national collective memory. Branding Japan’s Food is in part a warning about how quickly and effectively these branding strategies, especially when associated with the pleasures of food and travel and national pride, can overwhelm historical realities. This, Cwiertka and Yasuhara argue, is not just a pedantic matter for academics, but a question about the value of culture and heritage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country. The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiessen argues, such a vision of development was appealing to a broad range of actors: both the left(ish) Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, in power from 1952-1964, as well as the (often) right wing military governments that succeeded it, were deeply concerned with developing Bolivia through colonization of of the lowlands. Starting in the 1970s, however, as the state started to pull back from the day to day operations of such projects, it opened up space for NGOs and what Nobbs-Thiessen calls, "faith-based development practitioners," many of whom were connected to settler projects. Nobbs-Thiessen shows how each of these different communities came together after World War II, and each, for a time, came to play an important role in the development of Santa Cruz and the lowlands as a regional powerhouse in Bolivia and the Amazon region. By situating Andean migrants and development practitioners alongside other subnational migratory communities, Nobbs-Thiessen offers an exciting contribution to Latin American Studies, Migration History, and Environmental History. Nobbs-Thiessen’s wide-ranging work is attuned to the dynamics of both settler colonialism and internal colonialism as forms of migration, and contributes to a body of literature that refuses to provincialize Bolivian history. Several chapters would work well as standalone, teachable articles: The book begins with a chapter exploring the imagined frontier, through pamphlets and films and ends with the growth of the Mennonite-dominated soy industry in the transborder Amazonian region some have called the United Republic of Soybeans. Nobbs-Thiessen’s Landscape of Migration offers important background for both the devastating wildfires of 2019 and the Santa Cruz-led uprising that overthrew president Evo Morales in the months that followed. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg. Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social construction of territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia. In his analysis of Japan’s rows over the “Northern Territories” (with Russia), the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (China), and Takeshima/Dokdo (Korea), Bukh reveals in detail how the nonstate actors that he calls “national identity entrepreneurs” manufacture and maintain national salience for what are often militarily, economically, and geographically relatively unimportant territories, moving them from the national margins to the core in times of crisis. Bukh follows an often colorful cast of civil society actors as he places each dispute within the macro-level geopolitical climate of its times as well as the micropolitics of national crises and tensions between national regions and capitals. By marshaling a broad range of sources and compiling the histories of these disparate but interlinked disputes, These Islands makes a significant and welcome contribution to international relations and security audiences as well as specialists in the East Asian region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? Diana Fu’s nuanced ethnography of Chinese labor organizations demonstrates how grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) mobilize under repressive political conditions. Instead of facilitating collective action through public protests or strikes, Fu demonstrates how Chinese activists innovatively coach citizens to challenge authorities – in private spaces. Activists work with individual workers to help them understand and assert their rights in labor negotiations. Activists use individual conversations with workers to create a sense of belonging to a larger community of migrant workers. These “pedagogies of contention” foster collective identity and consciousness: mobilization without the masses. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is divided into two parts. First, Fu examines the structural conditions of above and underground groups in Beijing and the Pearl River Delta. She reveals and interrogates how the CCP’s policy of “flexible repression” provided opportunities for mobilization without the masses. Second, she looks at the tactics that allowed activists to inspire participants to take individualized and discursive action. Throughout, she describes the contours of a remarkable political compromise in which local authorities do not fully repress activisists (for fear of driving them further underground) yet attend to the PRC’s goal of stability and fear of collective action. The books demonstrates that Chinese civil society organizations can and do play an active role in shaping state-society relations – more than delivering social services or providing policy consultation – by coaching participants to make rights claims against the state. The podcast concludes with a brief discussion of Dr. Fu’s recent article in Foreign Policy regarding the challenges that COVID19 poses to the CCP’s concerns with social stability. Mobilizing Without the Masses was awarded the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book on Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association International Political Sociology Section’s Best Book Award, and the American Sociological Association’s Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award (co-winner). Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast was recorded on May 21st, 2020 – the same day that the Chinese government proposed new national security laws that would give China greater control over Hong Kong. What motivates these laws and what is at stake for Hong Kong, China, and the rest of the world if they go into effect? In the podcast, Wasserstrom draws on examples from modern Chinese history and politics – such as the role of local press in reporting on SARS – to connect on the ground reporting in Hong Kong and the exercise of rights by the Hong Kong people with practical policy-making during a pandemic. He offers both stark realism and optimism about the ability of the public, heads of state, and policy makers to fully comprehend the meaning of political protest – and the freedom it represents – in Hong Kong. Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) provides a nuanced yet accessible overview of the struggle between Hong Kong and China over self-governance and civil liberties. This historical and political context is essential for understanding why – and how – 2 million people (in a country of 7 million) took to the streets in 2019 and 2020 to protest against Chinese control over Hong Kong in what was promised to be “one country, two systems.” Wasserstrom’s “history of the present” provides insights into sovereignty, colonialism, rule of law, national security, freedom of the press, authoritarianism, and the politics of protest. This beautifully written – and remarkably short – book provides the political background necessary for concerned citizens, engaged students, and scholars of modern China. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Challenging the popular image of Buddhism as a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment, Dr. John Elverskog’s new monograph, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), demonstrates that Buddhist institutions across Asia have actually been intimately connected to the accumulation of wealth, the consumption and exploitation of natural resources, and urbanization. What drives these acts, Dr. Elverskog argues, is a prosperity theology that is central to the Buddha Dharma, which regards wealth as a sign of positive karma. Calling into question the stereotypical understanding of Buddhism as an ascetic, apolitical, and contemplative tradition, this book investigates not only monks but also how the laity and the Buddhist states participated in the generation of wealth for religious merit. Dr. Elverskog points out that The Buddha’s Footprint is not “arguing that Buddhism and environmental thought and action are antithetical or that Buddhism cannot be used to promote environmental action.” In fact, many efforts across the contemporary world have shown the opposite. Instead, by reconceptualizing Buddhism as an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources, Dr. Elverskog contends, it enables us to bring Buddhism and religion “more deeply into discussions of Asian history and environmental history.” Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that were connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Julia C. Strauss is a comparative study of regime consolidation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) after 1949. It examines the ways in which bureaucratic and campaign modalities were deployed in the regime consolidation of the PRC and the ROC by focusing on three paired case studies: state personnel, terror unleased by the state against domestic enemies, and land reform. Throughout it shows that while there were striking similarities in what policies the PRC and ROC implemented, how the polices were conveyed and above all how they were performed differed radically. Meticulously researched and wonderfully nuanced, it is both a fascinating read and an elegant model for how to do comparative history. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the History and East Asian Languages program. She is interested in translation, Manchu books, and anything with a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations accused of human rights violations. The PRC has emphasized the norm of sovereignty and rejected external interference in its own internal affairs. Yet they have supported UN intervention when states have been accused of mass human rights abuses. Why has China acquiesced and supported intervention? Neither realism or liberalism offer complete explanations for China’s seeming inconsistency. Courtney Fung finds that social constructions by way of public discourse of regime change matter when embedded in wider material conditions. She argues that anxieties about loss of status help explain China’s choices. In her new book China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford University Press, 2019), Fung explores three cases involving mass atrocities: Darfur (2004-2008), Libya (2011-2012), and Syria (2011-2015). China’s focus on status requires thinking about China’s twin statuses as both a great power and a developing state. China focuses on recognition from its intervention peer group: the Western, permanent members of the UN Security Council, US, UK, and France (P3). But China is also concerned with the Global South, which includes geographic-specific regional organizations and often the host state. Fung urges political scientists (and foreign policy experts implementing policy) to take “status triggers” in both peer groups seriously. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One can’t understand modern Thailand without understanding the role of the ethnic Chinese. And one can’t understand the role of the ethnic Chinese without understanding the history of their relationship to the Thai monarchy. This is exactly what Wasana Wongsurawat has documented in her new book, The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation (University of Washington Press, 2019). The book explores this remarkable relationship against a backdrop of tumultuous changes in Thailand, Southeast Asia, and China: the Opium Wars, the European colonization of Southeast Asia, the rise of Chinese nationalism and the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the 1932 Revolution in Siam, Japanese imperialism, World War II, and the Cold War. While the relationship between the ethnic Chinese, the Thai monarchy, and China, has experienced stresses and strains throughout this long period, it has endured intact. And, arguably, today, it is stronger than ever. According to Wasana, this relationship lies at the heart of the Thai nation-state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What recourse did you have in Ming China if your very excellent local official was leaving your area and moving on to a new jurisdiction? You could try to block his path, you could wail and tear your hair out – or you could house an image of him in a temple, make offerings before it, and create a ‘living shrine.’ In Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), Sarah Schneewind explores every angle of this practice, covering everything from what living shrines looked like and how many there were, to how they functioned as both expressions of gratitude and (more importantly) ways through which Ming subjects could speak out publicly. Beautifully written and elegantly built, this book not only tells you everything you never knew you wanted to know about living shrines, it makes reading about them a joy. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the History and East Asian Languages program. She is interested in translation, Manchu books, and anything with a kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A century ago it wasn’t a virus whose spread was eliciting reactions around the world, but an idea. As Russia’s 1917 October Revolution distended itself across north Asia and reverberated globally, socialism acted – not unlike today’s pandemic – as a Rorschach test revealing divisions in societies and politics, and to some offering cautious hope for a new world which might be constructed in the aftermath. Tatiana Linkhoeva’s meticulously detailed Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Cornell University Press, 2020) shows that Japanese responses to Soviet socialism during the 1920s and 30s were no exception to this. Indeed given the country’s situation at the time, the diversity of views on the revolution held by various government factions, the military, and society at large was especially diverse. But whether seeing this moment as an ideological or a geopolitical cataclysm, a threat or an opportunity for Japan’s growing imperial domain, or a fillip for the leftist ideas percolating through intellectual circles at this time, every Japanese observer of ‘Red October’ and its aftermath revealed something vital about Japan itself at this pivotal time. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the spatial and ideological formations of modern Japan in its first seven decades or so as a nation-state and empire, especially vis-à-vis China. The slippage between the individual and collective/national (geo)body is a critical theme as Ambaras highlights the roles of both media and government narratives in defining a shared national vision of Japan, and the powerful alchemy of pride and anxieties around the transgression of its borders. With case studies on human trafficking, international marriage, middlebrow literature, and a pirate queen (!), this study of marginalized people on the margins throws new light on Japan and maritime East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts. During a time of contention between the the doctrinal (敎) and meditation (禪) schools, Ŭich’ŏn traveled to Song (宋), China (960-1270) to study with the Huayan (華嚴) master, Jinshui Jingyuan (晉水淨源) (1011-1088). During his fourteen-month stay in China, he became well-acquainted with monks of the Huayan, Tiantai, Vinaya, Chan, and Consciousness-only schools. Upon his return to Koryŏ, he compiled the "New Catalog of the Teachings of All the Schools," the first comprehensive catalog of essays and commentaries that reflects a pan-East Asian tradition. Ŭich’ŏn has been historically associated with abandoning his affiliation with the Huayan school, and founding the Ch’ŏnt’ae (Tiantai, 天 台) order of Korean Buddhism. Despite this, letters to Master Jinshui Jingyuan, in combination with addresses to novice disciples reveal that Uicheon did not abandon Huayan thought,but advocated that all forms of doctrinal knowledge be thoroughly understood in an age of declining dharma. Trevor McManis is a student at California State University, Stanislaus, who specializes in cultural geography with an interest in applying geographic thought to the study of East Asian Religions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the streets, in shopping malls, in residential buildings. Driven by Hong Kong’s young people with their ‘Be Water!’ strategy, the pro-democracy movement grew into a massive force, receiving support from all demographics – from the ‘silver-hairs’, to mothers, from healthcare workers, to journalists and bankers, the ongoing protests polarized the community and changed the urban city space, likely forever. In City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong (Scribe, 2020), Antony Dapiran builds on his previous work City of Protest. He explores the 2019 protest movement, how it has changed the city and what Hong Kong means for the world. Dapiran gets you as close to the action as you can be, without having to experience the direct effects of being tear-gassed. This is a must read for anyone interested Hong Kong, China, democracy and human rights. It is a lesson in policing, in protest, and the power of political mobilization. It is a page turner that is essential to understanding Hong Kong’s ‘revolution of our times.’ Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality and criminal law. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it. Chris Courtney’s The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gregory A. Scott's Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the first major work in any language to address the topic of Buddhist monastery reconstructions. This book focuses on reconstructions of Buddhist monasteries in modern China that took place in the period from 1866 to 1966, beginning with the Taiping War in the late Qing and ending with the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China. Making extensive use of Chinese Buddhist periodical sources and incorporating Digital Humanities techniques to collect and analyze data, this monograph argues that the building of Buddhist revival in modern China was done in part through the reconstruction of Buddhist monasteries. Building on and engaging with Holmes Welch’s The Buddhist Revival in China (1968), Dr. Scott provides a new framework for understanding the revival of Buddhism in modern China, that “while Buddhist monastery reconstruction in China operates under the guise of a return to the past, it is in fact a confident, energetic step into the future.” Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that were connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history. Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) sheds unique light on the operation of what she calls China’s culture of ‘public secrecy’. Focusing on the storied afterlives and artistic re-purposings of photographic images from key junctures of China’s twentieth-century – the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests – Hillenbrand shows how they expose the subtle contours of what it is permissible and what impermissible to know. The book’s highly original and at times haunting exploration of photographic afterlives in art, literature and online offers up a nuanced but also forceful picture of how secrecy reigns in the PRC, and indeed beyond.  Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Korean Buddhist nun, Kim Iryŏp’s life and philosophy, which takes place from 1896-1971. Park eclectically references philosophers, feminists, and Buddhists from a variety of traditions as the context for the events that led to Iryŏp’s transition from a well-known feminist, and writer to a Buddhist nun. More than a story of Kim Iryŏp’s life, Park’s work sees to provide a platform for Kim Iryŏp’s to speak, and answer the questions, “How and why do women engage with Buddhism?” Trevor McManis is an undergraduate student in the Geography program, at California State University, Stanislaus and an aspiring Buddhist Studies Scholar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of Global Japanese Studies) brings to life more than a century of ideas by examining how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or - as was more often the case - how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious beliefs? These are some of the questions the book tries to answer, in a tour de force that takes the reader from the Meiji Restoration to the contemporary period. And in doing so, the book makes a significant contribution to two of the most debated topics in the history of evolutionary theory: religion and the political legacy of evolution. Since the introduction of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals - including Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, and Christian thinkers - struggled to formulate a meaningful worldview after Darwin. They often had opposing agendas, and so the debate was quite heated and long-lived: as Godart argues in his book, it took a hundred years of appropriating, translating, thinking, and debating to reconsider the natural world and the relation between nature, science, and the sacred in light of evolutionary theory. Eventually, the drive to find goodness and the divine within nature and evolution shaped much of Japan’s modern intellectual history and changed Japanese understandings of nature, society, and the sacred. Roman Paşca is Assistant Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters, Department of Japanese Philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A beloved Japanese anime move released in 1988, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, as they deal with the separation from their mother who is in the hospital, and their adventures with the forest creatures they meet called the Totoro. In Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro Soundtrack (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Kunio Hara analyzes the film’s score and image song collection composed by Joe Hisaishi. The movie’s catchy theme song, along with the rest of the music, contribute to the film’s nostalgic exploration of children’s inner lives and the power of imagination to combat the very real traumas of childhood. Part of the 33 1/3 Japan Series, this short book explores the collaboration between Hisaishi and Miyazaki Hayao, the film’s creator and director. Hara considers his subject from a variety of perspectives, from a musical analysis of key sections of the score and image album to an investigation of the film’s importance as an icon of Japanese pop culture. Kunio Hara is an Associate Professor of Music History in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina. His research centers on nostalgia, exoticism, and Orientalism in late Romantic opera and music in post-war Japan. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eunuchs. Nobody liked them, everybody seems to have hated them, but, even so, they were an essential part of many states – even in the Qing. Norman A. Kutcher's book Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule (University of California Press, 2018) looks at these little-acknowledged eunuchs, focusing on how the first Qing emperors managed their eunuchs, and in turn what their various management styles reveals about them. Drawing on case reports of crimes committed by eunuchs, official documents, and imperially-commissioned works, Kutcher explores both the rhetoric and reality of eunuch management, revealing countless gaps between the two. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book expertly reveals all that this gap tells us about eunuchs and the emperors who tried to rule them, and in this interview, Norman provides a look at some of the inspirations and moments that went into the crafting of it. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She is interested in translation, Manchu language books, and anything that involves a good kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrinsically destabilizing to the international order. In her new book The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (Oxford UP, 2020), Michelle Murray counters that political actors and scholars of politics should focus on how the actions of rising powers are interpreted or perceived by other nations. Murray encourages us to see power transitions as struggles for recognition: social constructs aimed at forming identities. Social uncertainty shapes the struggle for recognition – especially misrecognition by other nations. Murray contrasts two case studies – Germany’s naval build-up before WWI and the United States’s expansion of power after the Spanish-American War of 1898 – to argue that military capabilities do not adequately account for why Germany was viewed as a threat by European powers but the United States was welcomed by Great Britain as a friendly power. Murray looks at the ways in which establishing and maintaining identity is uncertain because these identities are unpredictably perceived (or mis-perceived) by other powers. Her research explores the many ways in which states navigate identity formation under conditions of anarchy. The podcast includes interesting reflections on how China’s identity – as an ally or threat – might be shaped in the future. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the arguments in favor of social hierarchies? Are there differences in how hierarchy is viewed and valued in China compared with other countries? Which forms of social hierarchy are morally justified and how can they be promoted in the future? Drawing on a wide range of philosophical arguments, historical examples, and social science evidence from various cultural traditions, Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei have developed their argument that different hierarchical principles should govern distinct kinds of social relations with chapters devoted to citizens, countries, animals and machines. In Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World (Princeton University Press, 2020) the authors take aim at the egalitarian ideal of individual rights as being too narrow, and not necessarily the right one for all societies. Available in hardcover and Kindle editions ‘Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.’ Daniel A. Bell is dean of the school of political science and public administration at Shandong University, and Wang Pei is an assistant professor at Fudan University’s China Institute. Currently, both are working on the Chinese translation of their book. The interview was conducted in Shanghai about two months after the initial outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using diverse sources well beyond the colonial archive such as photographs, postcards, and even headstones, Dr. Kirsten L. Ziomek reveals the stories of colonial subjects in the Japanese empire in Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples (Harvard Asia Center, 2019). The book focuses on four groups of colonial subjects in the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s, namely, the indigenous people of Taiwan, Micronesians, the Ainu of Hokkaido, and Okinawans. Challenging conventional narratives of Japan’s colonial history that often centered on sites of dominance and oppression, Lost Histories “reverse engineers” these narratives to focuses on the experiences of Japan’s colonial subjects, which reflected local power structures and provide different understandings of the empire. Through these varied perspectives of the colonial experiences reconstructed from materials within and beyond the colonial archives, Dr. Ziomek argues that Japan actually depended on its colonial subjects to enact its rule, and ethnoracial differences among colonial subjects were used to the advantage of both colonial administrations and colonial subjects. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shanghai’s role in shaping modern China and indeed the very idea of what modernity is in China can hardly be overstated. Much of this long-lasting influence can be seen in how the city itself came into being as a complex product of Chinese and colonial forces, and as Cole Roskam shows us in Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019), it is in the very material actions of architects and town planners that this is most obvious. Accompanied by a rich array of archival photos, maps and designs, Roskam’s book takes us down to street level, showing up close how the competing influences of Chinese, British, French, American and other governance and architectural regimes interacted and shaped the urban landscape. As Shanghai has again become an arena where global markets and design innovations collide, appreciating this tangled legacy is key to understanding this metropolis and indeed China as a whole. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) is the first monograph published in English on the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has inhabited northeast Asia for centuries. Since the seventeenth century, the Orochen has settled in the region of Manchuria that became the eastern borderland between China and Russia after the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk. In this book, Loretta E. Kim shows that the Orochen, while sandwiched between these two empires and later republics, reinforced the legal division of the territories and served as human markers that substantiated the demographic demarcation outlined in treaties and other legally binding agreements. Through detailed analysis of Qing official documents, Ethnic Chrysalis reveals that the Orochen, like Manchuria’s other natives, played important roles in the development and maintenance of the Qing borderland not just as its inhabitants but also as economic and cultural intermediaries between officials and commoners on both sides of the interstate border. What emerges is a clear agency in these indigenous people and their capacities to instigate changes that they needed in policies and institutions to preserve their economic, social, and cultural interests. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded. With thousands of scholars across the country, it is surprising then that there is relatively little understanding of the research and contributions of Chinese folklorists to the discipline. This despite the fact that Chinese folklorists are well-acquainted with many of the latest advances in folkloristics research globally. As the first English language attempt to discuss the historical development, current situation, and theoretical contributions of Chinese Folklore studies to the discipline of folklore more broadly, Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice (Indiana University Press, 2020), edited by Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, attempts to rectify this situation. The volume’s five essays point out different issues relevant to folklore studies, including urban folklore studies, studies of women’s folklore, folksong, myth and belief, and intangible cultural heritage. This unique contribution not only introduces folklore of China, but also will certainly prove vital in encouraging and framing future international collaborations. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebgong, in the Northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (China’s Qinghai Province), is in the midst of a ‘Battle for Fortune.’ That is, a battle to both accumulate as much fortune, but also a battle to decide which definitions of fortune are going to dominate Tibetan society: a material fortune based in ‘authoritarian capitalism’ or a Buddhist form of ‘counterdevelopment’ based in traditional ideas about language, landscapes, and compassion. In The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China (Cornell University Press, 2018), Charlene Makley, Professor of anthropology at Reed College, intermixes these tensions while also exploring her own experience attempting to conduct fieldwork immediately before and after a series of demonstrations rocked Tibet in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Using a form of multi-sited, ‘dialogic ethnography’ from linguistic anthropology, Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as a historically situated interpretive politics, in which people negotiate the presence or absence of moral and authoritative persons and their associated jurisdictions and powers. Because most Tibetans view the active presence of deities and other invisible and autochthonous beings as the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes, Makley also takes divine beings as some of the important interlocutors for Tibetans. The Battle for Fortune, therefore challenges readers to grasp the unique reality of Tibetans’ values and fears in the face of their marginalization in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in rural China leads him to conclude that civil society offers officials leverage over citizens that strengthens the state’s coercive capacity. In his book The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Mattingly argues that civil society can encourage contributions to public goods like roads, schools, and charities, civil associations increase the prestige and authority of local elites who can help insure political compliance. Civil society groups help officials in rural China tamp down protest, requisite land, and enforce mandatory birth quotas. Instead of focusing on oppressive formal institutions such secret police or the military, Mattingly looks to the ways in which civic associations may be used to apply hidden pressure on citizens through informal institutions. Mattingly’s extensive field work, experiments embedded in face-to-face surveys, and datasets from villages point to three ways in which the state uses civil society to coerce. First, the state collects information and tracks behavior – such that the presence of a temple or lineage associations leads to more land requisitions and few protests. Second, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) coopts local elites by including them in political bodies. These local officials understand which citzens have grievances and are the most likely to mobilize against the state. Last, the state creates infiltrating institutions with street level agents are able to spy, coax, or snitch. This rich book combines detailed qualitative case studies with clear prose. Mattingly provides details for those well-versed in Chinese political systems and translates for political scientists seeking a more nuanced understanding of authoritarianism and civil society. Mattingly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, two antipodal ideologies vied for control of China's military. The first, advanced by Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), maintained that the military was little more than an organ of the KMT party apparatus. As such, the Chinese army was a "party-army," beholden to the KMT's will, and subservient to KMT demands. Opposing the "party-army" ideology was a cadre of nationalistic, cosmopolitan Chinese officers, who sought to fashion the army into a professional, technically proficient, and independent institution, loyal not to any one party, but to the Chinese nation. The dynamic of this previously unexamined struggle is the subject of Eric Setzekorn's erudite study, The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps: The Republic of China Military, 1942-1955 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). Between 1942 and 1955, Setzekorn argues, professionally-minded officers within the KMT leveraged their military partnership with the United States to build China's first truly national army. Exemplified by General Sun Li-jen, these officers promulgated and defined a professional identity and ethos, forged technological and intellectual bonds with the armed forces of the United States, and nurtured Chinese aspirations to great power status. The "party-army" concept reached its nadir during this period, but it was not forgotten. Defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, combined with a substantive shift in Sino-American security arrangements, allowed "party-army" adherents to reassert control. From 1949 to 1954, Setzekorn observes, KMT leaders began the process of re-politicizing the army; a process that culminated with a purge of key professional officers in 1955. Informed by a wealth of Chinese-language sources, military journals, and previously unavailable archival materials, Setzerkorn offers valuable insight into the cultural and professional development of China's officer corps in the Republican era. At the same time, Setzerkorn's work adds to our understanding of the United States's post-Second World War "army-building" program in east Asia. The Republic of China army, Setzerkorn argues, provided the blueprint for subsequent Cold War military partnerships with Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The term ‘Manchuria’ conjures up all manner of evocative associations for people interested in East Asian and world history, from the Manchu founders of China’s last imperial dynasty, to Russian railroads and Japanese empire on the Asian mainland. Up to now, however, there hasn’t really been a particularly obvious place to look for a satisfying source of information about these and other aspects of the region’s fascinating past and present. Mark Gamsa’s Manchuria: A Concise History (I. B. Tauris, 2020) therefore meets a significant need, deftly weaving together the many diffuse strands which make up the history of what we now call northeast China. Conveniently broken down into easily digestible chunks, each dealing with a key historic juncture and the parties involved, the book sheds light on both known and overlooked aspects of Manchurian life. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of “religion” before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the “sacred” to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ching-yuen Cheung's and Wing-keung Lam's edited volume Globalizing Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline (V&R Unipress, 2017) is a collection of essays written by scholars of Japanese philosophy from all over the world, from Asia to Europe to the Americas - as is appropriate for a book whose aim is to reflect on the potential and enjeu of Japanese philosophy within the global context. The book is divided into two parts, namely, “Japanese Philosophy: Teaching and Research in the Global World,” and “Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline.” The first part contains practical reports about the current situation (and challenges) of teaching and research in the field of Japanese philosophy. The areas discussed are Japan, Canada, France, Spain and English-speaking regions. The second part consists of essays on various topics, texts and thinkers, from Nishida Kitaro, Kuki Shuzo, and Tanabe Hajime to contemporary philosophers such as Sakabe Megumi. In the interview with Ching-yuen Cheung, one of the editors, we touch upon the most important points of the book while at the same time digressing (philosophically, of course) to various other themes, from the practice of teaching philosophy to the advantages and dangers of English as a lingua franca. Roman Paşca is Assistant Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters, Department of Japanese Philosophy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A trade war with China has dangerous implications for the global economy. What began more than a year ago with President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs has become an unpleasant economic reality for many businesses. Recently, the U.S. labeled China a “currency manipulator.” But an even larger long-term threat comes from China’s aggressive espionage offensive that is playing out in behind-the-scenes as of the U.S. and China struggle for global dominance. Our guest is Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow and director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Her most recent book, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinpeng and the New Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2018), explains the background to recent dramatic changes inside China. She is among a distinguished group of China specialists who once favored engagement with Beijing, but are now calling for the United States to take a more forceful approach as China attempts to undermine democratic values. We discuss the best ways to navigate this relationship. "Managing this relationship is essential," says Elizabeth. "It cannot allowed to it to spiral down too far." Richard Davies and Jim Meigs are the host of the terrific podcast “How Do We Fix It?,” on which they talk to the world’s most creative thinkers about, well, how to fix things. Lots of things. Important ones. Highly recommended. You can find “How Do We Fix It” on Apple Podcasts.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea (State University of New York Press 2019) explains how as king Chŏngjo governed not as a weak ruler but as an absolute monarch. Lovins situates this within modern definitions of absolutism, showing how their conceptualizations apply to Chŏngjo just as effectively as they do to such period rulers as the Chinese emperor Qianlong and the French monarch Louis XIV. Motivated by the experiences with court factionalism that he blamed for the death of his father, Chŏngjo drew upon Confucian thinking to strengthen his position ideologically. These arguments he used to centralize power in his hands, most dramatically in his strengthening of the traditionally weak Korean army. Though many of Chŏngjo’s changes were undone after his death in 1800, Lovins makes the case that Chŏngjo’s legacy should be considered separate from the failings of his successors rather than as part of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1901 and World War II, up to half of all U.S.-born Chinese Americans relocated to China in search of better lives due to the discrimination they faced in the United States. Charlotte Brooks tells the story of these emigres in American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949 (University of California Press, 2019). Initially, Chinese American dual citizens found unprecedented professional opportunities as merchants and government officials in their ancestral homeland. However, shifting political conditions in China and hardening exclusionary policies in the U.S. narrowed their options in a world where they were considered neither Chinese nor American enough to receive the protection or respect of their governments. Faced with these constraints at a time of global depression and war, Chinese Americans made agonizing choices that led them down surprising paths—including, in some cases, as collaborators during the Japanese occupation of China. American Exodus challenges well-worn mythologies in the U.S. of upward mobility for immigrants, as well as celebratory and nationalist narratives in China about the overseas Chinese. 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

“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part of the human community.” In her new book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 2019), Sandra Fahy gives a thorough and compelling analysis of testimonies and reports on North Korea. Fahy explores the United Nation’s report as well as North Korea’s response to the report. The book also tackles issues of famine and hunger, information control, movement within the country and outside it, in addition to other pertinent issues. The book is full of detailed reporting on the issues but is still written in an accessible way in order to help readers understand more about North Korea and its people. Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybernetics, film studies, literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and beyond. Liu’s meticulously researched and crisply written book takes us from the heady days of China’s “qi gong craze” and notions of the human body as a transparent medium through which “information waves” could pass, through investment and research into “a theory of metasynthetic wisdom” that could lead to a “global human-machine intelligent system,” the evolution of “expert systems” to provide knowledge and guidance in the absence of human experts, the novel deployment of Ross Ashby’s theory of “ultrastability” to describe China’s supposed resistance to modernization, information aesthetics within a new rising tide of advertising and market activity, and much, much more. All of this combines to a reveal a China after Mao, vigorously employing the theoretical tools of cybernetics to, not only re-configure its socio-political image on a national scale, but to actually craft a new post-socialist subjectivity at the scale of the individual citizen. Illustrating the profound impacts of, and reactions to, these efforts through provocative samplings from Chinese literature, film, and popular culture writ large, Liu manages, in the words of Oxford’s Margaret Hillenbrand to “entirely reconfigure our understanding of the media landscape in 1980’s China." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji). Ayo Wahlberg book Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (U California Press, 2018) explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various potential socialist allies during the Cold War to dispel this impression. There is, moreover, another equally important case in which people linked to ‘China’ were involved in transnational affairs at this time – namely that of overseas Chinese populations throughout the world. And, as Taomo Zhou’s fascinating Indonesia-centred account shows, in Southeast Asia the Chinese outside China were intimately entangled in a vast among of what was going on at this time on the diplomatic and political level. Drawing on a trove of archival and fieldwork-derived material from multiple locations, Zhou’s Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) presents a rich account of the Indonesian-Chinese population’s involvement in regional and global affairs, mainly between the 1940s and the 1960s but also either side of this tumultuous window of time. As entertaining as it is rich in new insights, the book nimbly moves between China and different parts of Indonesia’s vast archipelago, in doing so painting a picture of the limitless diversity to migrant and diasporic experience and, in the process, helping us see apparently monolithic events like the Cold War in very human terms. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and local institutions. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world. I started our conversation asking a short introduction on her background and the origin of the book. We mentioned the influence on her research of the work by C.K. Lee and particularly the book Against the Law. Miriam explained how she ended studying the Ethiopian case and road construction over other sectors. We then moved to her findings on the resistance and agency of African workers and the ‘hopes and bitterness’ of the Chinese workers. We discussed how it is possible to identify different classes among Chinese workers in Ethiopia (as well as in China) and the varieties of migrants, each with different background, ambitions, working conditions and destiny. We concluded our conversation addressing the controversial topic of China’s presence in Africa and whether this should be defined as neo-colonialism or not. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism. Miriam also told us about her new project as she is about to move to Ethiopia for another year of fieldwork. Thanks to her bright anthropological skills and her ability to communicate in both Amharic and Chinese, it will be yet another amazing scholarly contribution. Miriam Driessen is an anthropologist and a writer of literary nonfiction in English and her native Dutch. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the China, Law and Development Project, hosted by the University of Oxford China Centre. Miriam completed a DPhil at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford (2014/15), and held a fellowship at Peking University (2014–2016). She has also been a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) and a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Befitting an art history book, Erin Schoneveld’s Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Brill, 2018) is a beautifully packaged analysis of the early twentieth-century Japanese modern art collective Shirakaba and its eponymous coterie magazine (1910-1923). Shirakaba, which means “white birch,” is recognized as the most significant art movement of the period, and had a lasting impact on the discourse and practice of art in modern Japan. The group’s journal was among the first and most important Japanese art magazines to include the works of prominent European artists, and doing so shaped the contours of the art world of twentieth-century Japan. Schoneveld shows how Shirakaba arose in opposition to the statist art of the young Meiji state, the strategies deployed to promote its artistic agenda, how the group established sometimes tangible and direct personal, artistic, and ideological connections to the European artists who represented the ideal of individualism, and how the movement changed over time from an avant-garde bastion to become central to the mainstream of the Japanese art scene in the early 1920s. In addition, the book reveals dynamic tensions between statism and Shirakaba’s individualism, between the group’s ethos of individualism and the realities of being a collective, between being avant-garde and establishment, and between different generations of Shirakaba artists themselves, as well as between virtual and physical exhibition spaces and the status of original versus reproduced art. Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism is an important contribution not just to Japanese art history, but to rethinking the global spread, reception, and adoption and adaptation of modernity and modernism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration. This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to the first. She is, judges her biographer Lian Xi, the only Chinese citizen to have openly and steadfastly opposed Mao and his regime–denouncing lies such as those conveyed in the “Great Leap Forward” poster, reproduced above. From her cell, Lin wrote long poems and essays, some written in her own blood, denouncing those who had brought China into such a condition of misery and oppression. Eventually she was judged incapable of re-education and executed. Her family was billed (as was typical) for the cost of the bullet that ended her life. But Lin Zhao’s writings survived: Totalitarian societies are also bureaucratic ones, strangely loath to destroy even the evidence of their own tyranny. When Lin Zhao’s sentence was commuted during the rule of Deng Xiaoping, her family gained access to her work. In 21st-century China, these writings have made her a prophet of change and a voice denouncing oppression. They have also made her as much an opponent of the current government as she was of Mao’s dictatorship. This may be the most important, and also the most moving, conversation I’ve have had the privilege of hosting. Recorded in Lian Xi’s office at Duke Divinity School, he and I discuss his new book Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China (Basic Books, 2018), Lin Zhao’s life and times, the survival of her writings, and her growing influence in modern China. Please listen, and share with others interested in history, China, human rights, and the triumph of the human person over tyranny. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is Charles B. Jones, Associate Professor and Director of the Religion and Culture graduate program in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. He will be speaking with us about his new book Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice, just published in the Pure Land Buddhist Studies series with University of Hawaiʻi Press. Jones is the author is several articles and books, including Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660-1990, which was a foundational work in the field and the first history of its type to be published in any language. Now, Jones is once again breaking new ground with this study of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, which is the first book in any western language to provide a comprehensive overview of the Chinese Pure Land tradition, a notably understudied area in western-language Buddhist Studies scholarship. In this work, Jones explores many of the core doctrines, practices and controversies of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, situating them historically and in the modern period, drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined primary sources, many of which he is making available to readers in English translation for the first time. This book challenges readers to rethink many longstanding assumptions about Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, including the nuanced relation of self-power and other-power as conceived in the Chinese tradition, the notion of Pure Land as a so-called “easy” path appealing to non-elite practitioners, debates about the nature of the Pure Land itself and how it is thought to exist in the world, the multifaceted practice of nian fo (念佛, nembutsu in Japanese or “buddha-recollection”), as well as the deeply fraught question of the historical development of the lineage of Pure Land “patriarchs”. This work will be of interest to all scholars of Buddhist Studies, and a valuable classroom resource for teaching Pure Land Buddhism, Buddhist Studies and Chinese Religions. Lina Verchery is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies at Harvard University. She specializes in the study of modern Chinese Buddhist monasticism, with a secondary focus in Religion and Film. She can be reached at linaverchery@fas.harvard.edu or via her website www.linaverchery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art through the story of renowned curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918-2008). This book provides one of the first forays into post-war North American collecting and exhibiting, carefully reconstructing the rise of the USA as the scholarly hub on Chinese art, in many ways displacing Europe’s dominance in this area. As such, Separating Sheep from Goats, contributes hugely to the historiography of the field of East Asian art and gives sense of individuals and their contributions, rather than institutions. Relying on extensive archival research, Noelle Giuffrida shines light on the so-called ‘Monuments Men’ and namely their time in East Asia in this engaging and lavishly illustrated book. In this podcast, Noelle and I talk about we talk about the archival research that went into writing this book, the generosity of scholars, such as James Cahill, who shared notes and documents before passing away as well as Sherman E. Lee’s unique role as curator and museum director, his relationship with the ‘old guard’ of Harvard-educated scholars who came before him, the fascinating yet barely-known history of the ‘Monuments Men’ in East Asia, as well as the need for connoisseurship and contextual scholarship in the study and understanding of Chinese painting. Ricarda is an Assistant Curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Asian Department, East Asia section. She is also a part-time PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art looking at Chinese court art from the first half of the nineteenth century. Find out more via Twitter @RicardaBeatrix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, but with strong family, educational, and indeed emotional connections to China. In his new memoir, Home Is Not Here (NUS, 2018), he recollects his upbringing in British Malaya at a time of great political turmoil, which included the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of Malaya. Following World War II his studies in China at the National Central University in Nanjing were cut short by the imminent victory of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war. This book is an intimate reflection on the themes of family, education, language, Chinese identity, and the search for a sense of home during a tumultuous period in Southeast Asian and Chinese history. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a case study to explore aspects of Japan’s modern history including historical memory, cultural heritage, and state-civil society and national-regional relations. The authors show that although castles entered the modern era as a symbol of the dark “feudal” past Japan hoped to leave behind, they quickly took on a diverse set of functions and meanings. According to Benesch and Zwigenberg, urban castles in particular—such as those in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya—were important to the formation of both national and regional identities, playing key symbolic and practical roles as parks, military garrisons, representations of various collective pasts, etc. Especially as society was militarized in the 1930s, castles came to be celebrated as a unification of modernity and tradition, the imperial and local, military and civilian. Though the political climate and the valences of Japan’s recent and more distant pasts were thrown into upheaval with war and defeat, even after 1945 castles retained a literally and figuratively large footprint in Japan. The authors explore the divergent histories of castles including Hiroshima, Kanazawa, and Kokura and the “castle boom” of the early postwar decades to illustrate ongoing tensions between visions for individual regions and Japan itself in the period of national rebuilding that followed World War II, and conclude with reflections on the significance of the current wave of castle reconstructions with “authentic” materials and techniques in the context of growing global interest in cultural heritage as a kind of intellectual property that conveys both soft power and hard currency. Whether dismantled or garrisoned or transformed into munitions factories or parks, and whether original, bombed, rebuilt, or conjured up as roadside attractions, Benesch and Zwigenberg show that the shifting circumstances and meanings of castles can teach us much about Japan’s modern history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What to make of the fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party which detains and arrests people studying Maoism, organising workers, or campaigning for women’s liberation is a difficult task. All the more so when that same Party continues to speak in the language of socialist construction, mass organization and Leninist control of the ‘commanding heights’. This is one reason why the compendium Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (Verso & Australian National University Press, 2019), edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere, is such an invaluable project. Through 53 pithy chapters which deal with key ideas from class struggle to thought reform, and trace rich thematic strands linked to affect, aesthetics, internationalism, tradition and the state, this book offers a vast lexicon of fresh approaches to the dizzying world of change and consistency which characterize today’s China. Furthermore, the collection is a highly readable account of recent Chinese history which should prove indispensable in working out where the country is going next and, in the spirit of the radicalism which is the book’s subject matter, it is also open access and free to download from the ANU Press website. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) looks at the development of railroads in China from the late 19th century to the post-Mao reform period. Treating railroads as institutions, Elisabeth Köll charts how railroads and railway management companies were constructed and developed, how railway lines were disrupted by war, and then how they were re-organized and re-structured – often by re-packaging pre-1949 ideas – in the Communist period. Throughout Köll is attentive to historical continuities and disruptions, paying particular attention to the tensions that existed between centralization and decentralization, which, as she shows, ultimately created a system where regionally autonomous railroad bureaus exist within a centralized hierarchy. By drawing on sources that range from archival materials to oral testimonies, Köll has created not only the first comprehensive history of railroad operation in China, but also a book filled with fascinating details, including the absurdities of railroad accounting practices in semi-colonial China, what you learn when you look at the rate of railroad accidents during the Great Leap Forward (spoiler alert: as you will hear in the podcast, the rates are definitely not good!), and much, much more, all of which will be of interest to historians and railfans alike. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at Harvard University. She is interested in translation, Manchu language books, and anything that involves a good kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael Mandelbaum examines that remarkable quarter century, describing how and why the peace was established and then fell apart. To be sure, wars took place in this era, but less frequently and on a far smaller scale than in previous periods. Mandelbaum argues that the widespread peace ended because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to it with aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions. The three had a common motive: their need to survive in a democratic age with their countries' prospects for economic growth uncertain. Mandelbaum further argues that the key to the return of peace lies in the advent of genuine democracy, including free elections and the protection of religious, economic, and political liberty. Yet, since recent history has shown that democracy cannot be imposed from the outside, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth has a dual message: while the world has a formula for peace, there is no way to ensure that all countries will embrace it Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University Ricky W. Law examines the cultural context of Tokyo and Berlin’s political rapprochement in 1936. This study of interwar German-Japanese relations is the first to employ sources in both languages. Transnational Nazism was an ideological and cultural outlook that attracted non-Germans to become adherents of Hitler and National Socialism, and convinced German Nazis to identify with certain non-Aryans. Because of the distance between Germany and Japan, mass media was instrumental in shaping mutual perceptions and spreading transnational Nazism. This work surveys the two national media to examine the impact of transnational Nazism. When Hitler and the Nazi movement gained prominence, Japanese newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, nonfiction, and language textbooks transformed to promote the man and his party. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of Hitler and his regime created a niche for Japan in the Nazi worldview and Nazified newspapers, films, nonfiction, and voluntary associations. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Larry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, and it’s easy to admire China’s growth while looking past things like increasing surveillance and lack of respect for norms and the rule of law. We’ve wanted to do an episode on China for a long time, and we are very excited to have Larry Diamond with us to discuss it. China plays an integral role in his new book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Penguin, 2019) and he’s studied the region and its politics for decades. Larry is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its subjects no religious freedom—that, despite the legal provision in the Meiji Constitution of 1890 affirming freedom of worship, “State Shinto” was the law of the land—and that it was the American-led occupation which finally granted freedom of conscience and worship to the benighted Japanese. Thomas shows first that this vision of history obscures internal debates about religious freedom in both Japanese and American circles, but also that while the narrative in which religious freedom was bestowed upon Japan by the US was in fact strategic and deeply embedded in a particular historical moment and geopolitical context, it has had a long tail of consequences for our understandings of religion after 1945. Faking Liberties is divided into two deliberately paralleled parts, the first treating what Thomas calls the Meiji Constitutional Period (1890-1945), the second examining the occupation (1945-1952) and the long-term consequences of the rhetorical moves made by the occupiers for the way that religion has been understood in the postwar period. The book argues that the particular political circumstance of the Japanese occupation was instrumental in defining the religious-secular and “good-bad” religion binaries, as well as the idea of religious freedom as a human right that has become hegemonic in much of the postwar West. Faking Liberties is a challenging intervention into not only the historiography of modern Japan, but religious studies more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Land borders in East Asia have played just as big a role in the region’s social transformations as their more recently debated maritime counterparts, and the boundary between China and Korea offers particularly telling insight into how society, identity and geopolitics have shifted over time. Nianshen Song’s Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines a tumultuous period in the history of this vital northeast Asian border, showing how it took shape before and during the era of Japanese empire. Drawing on a vast trove of multilingual archives in China, Japan, Korea and elsewhere, the book both transports us into the local worlds which overlapped along the Tumen a century ago, and reveals how interactions among them were central to wider questions of sovereignty, borders, memory and ‘modern’ senses of Chinese, Korean and Japanese nationhood which endure to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How was the Taiwanese identity constructed? Dr. Evan N. Dawley, an associate professor of history at Goucher College, explores this question in his new book Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s(Harvard University Press, 2019). Dawley traces the waves of newcomers to Taiwan beginning with Qing dynasty transplants from the southeastern coast of China. He then largely focuses on the Japanese colonial period and the first decade of ROC rule in Taiwan, relating significant encounters involving social organizations, religion, and social work. Dawley’s focus is the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung), which was a key site of Japanese modernization on the island due to its harbor and orientation toward Japan. Drawing from rich research conducted in Taiwan and Japan, Dawley highlights the practices of Japanese and Taiwanese local elites who acted as community gatekeepers, and in the process, uncovers how Taiwanese identity developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapore’s struggle to insulate itself from global trends as well the impact of the rise of ultra-conservative attitudes in its majority Muslim neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, but also increased difficulty in balancing rival powers China and the United States. If that were not enough, Singapore is juggling multiple issues at a time that it is transiting to a new generational leadership faced with the challenge of ensuring that Singapore remains relevant to its neighbours as well as the international community at large. To do so, Singapore’s leadership will have to upgrade if not reinvent its relevance to its neighbour as well as the international community at large given tectonic geopolitical and technological shifts among which first and foremost artificial intelligence. Walton argues convincingly that complacency may be one of Singapore’s greatest challenges. Generational change involves not only a new generation of leadership but also a generation that was born into a wealthy welfare state, lacks the older generations’ sense of being pioneers and takes things for granted. It is a challenge that is likely to have consequences for a rethink of Singapore’s education system, considered one of the world’s best. In portraying the miracle of Singapore’s success and the challenges it faces, Walton brings a strong sense of history, keen observation and a journalist’s ability to paint with words an incisive picture of a country that has turned its lack of resources into an asset. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The warmth of China and Russia’s present-day relationship is sometimes said to reprise 1950s ties between Mao’s PRC and the Soviet Union, even if that remains a poorly understood period in both countries. Still less understood, moreover, is the deep Soviet cultural influence on China which accompanied this era of socialist alliance, and this in part is why Yan Li’s China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (Routledge, 2018)is such an invaluable book. Presenting a fascinating compendium of insights into the ways that Soviet fashion, literature, architecture, language and many other things washed over China during the mid-20th century, Li offers a sophisticated argument that this all fed into an entire framework for socialist modernity which China sought to adopt at this crucial period in its history. This was not always a one-way street, and this book also highlights instances where Chinese people were hesitant to embrace Soviet ways of doing things. But even as we look at this earlier ‘Chinese Dream’ from a temporal remove of over six decades, there can be little doubt that it left a mark on China that is still palpable today, and therefore deserves our attention. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discussions of China’s 21st-century ‘rise’ often focus on the country’s dazzling megacities and the dizzying pace of urbanization which has propelled their development over the past 30 years. But how and why all these cities have grown in the ways and the places that they have is not always an easy question to answer in a place as large and diverse as China. This is why Kyle Jaros’ China's Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development (Princeton University Press, 2019), a book which examines the urban developmental trajectories of several lesser- and better-known parts of China, is so valuable. Focusing on the how competing local claims, national priorities and economic conditions shape urbanization processes across the country, Jaros argues that provincial-level planning offers the key to understanding how preferred sites for development – ‘winners in space’ as he calls them – emerge. From provinces which focus all their energy in a single provincial capital to those whose efforts appear more evenly spread, we get a rich sense here of how megacities and urban clusters take shape and of the often-opaque operations of the Communist Party on multiple levels. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017). Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amy Olberding’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a joy to read, both entertaining and rich in ideas. The Wrong of Rudeness asks a key question for our times how do we interact with each other, especially in politically contentious situations? Olberding addresses this and related issues by bringing our moderns challenges into dialogue with thinkers from early China. Weaving together modern cultural references with innovative readings of classic Chinese texts, Olberding makes the argument that acting with good manners and civility is the way we practice core human values in everyday life. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in recent years, few scholars have attempted to thoroughly understand the reverse—how Qing envoys conceptualized the West. This is the starting point for Dr. Jenny Huangfu Day (Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College) in her new book, Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China. By studying the lives, careers, and writings of six Qing diplomat-travelers (Binchun, Zhigang, Zhang Deyi, Guo Songtao, Zeng Jize, Xue Fucheng) during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, she explores their heterogeneous efforts to understand and represent the West. Drawing from communication studies and literary analysis, Day offers a fresh take on Qing diplomacy that traces significant changes such as the establishment of the Zongli Yamen, permanent legations in Europe, and the use of the telegraph for diplomatic communications. In this interview, she provides a clear, accessible introduction to this new work. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization, Soka Gakkai (Society for the Creation of Value) and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) claims to have 12 million members in 192 countries around the world. Founded in the 1930s by a group of teachers focused on educational reform, Soka Gakkai has since evolved from its grassroot origins as a movement inspired by Nichiren Buddhism to a highly significant source of influence in contemporary Japanese education and politics. In Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of A Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Levi McLaughlin argues that Soka Gakkai comprises a great deal more than Buddhism and is instead best conceived as the product of “twin legacies” – lay Nichiren Buddhism and modern Euro-American humanist imports. Drawing on nearly two decades of archival and non-member fieldwork in the Soka Gakkai communities in Japan, McLaughlin offers a comprehensive study of the new religious movement and suggests a new framework which understands Soka Gakkai as mimetic of the nation-state in which it took place. To demonstrate this argument, McLaughlin traces in his book Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution the history of the movement from intellectual collective to religion and examines their creation of new religious canon, such as Ikeda Daisaku’s The Human Revolution, as well as pedagogy in the movement through standardized education and the Soka Gakkai idea of women as Good Wives, Wise Mothers. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. She mainly researches on Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Her research interests also include the role Buddhism plays in modernity, colonialism, and transnational/transregional networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law from its conception until the early years of the 1940s. The law, which began as a state effort to tamp down radicalism and “dangerous thought” (mostly Marxism) and preserve and protect imperial sovereignty, spawned a massive apparatus populated by both state and nonstate actors dedicated to ideologically converting and rehabilitating thought criminals. In addition to being a case study of the nature and ideology of punishment and repentance for thought crimes in late Imperial Japan—and the way in which the emperor functioned as a “ghost in the machine” animating the pursuit of political repression—Ward’s book also provides insight into the policing of ideological threats and its relationship to national identity politics. Thought Crime follows the evolution and transformation of the Peace Preservation Law and its attendant social and institutional structures from interwar attempts to repress dangerous thought to a system of mass ideological conversion, and finally to the consequences of its integration into practices of total mobilization during wartime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected the technology of the “Golden Urn,” a Qing-era tool which involves the identification of the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks by drawing lots from a golden vessel. Why would the Chinese Communist Party revive this former ritual? What powers lie in the symbolism of the “Golden Urn”? Why was this tradition invented? Using both archival sources in the Manchu language and chronicles of Tibetan elites, Max Oidtmann answers these burning questions and reveals in Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet(Columbia University Press, 2018) the origins of the Golden Urn tradition, as well as its implication in modern and contemporary geopolitics of Asia. In the book, Oidtmann highlights the original polyglot conversations that existed in the Qing era and suggests to see the Qing as colonial: that there was a deliberative process that lay behind the invention of the Golden Urn in 1792 by the Qing empire to possess a monopoly over diverse forms of divination and prognostication practiced at the crossroads between China, Tibet, and Mongolia. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. She mainly researches on Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Her research interests also include the role Buddhism plays in modernity, colonialism, and transnational/transregional networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With China’s northwestern and southern edges justifiably being sources of global attention at present, Martin Fromm’s Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambridge University Press, 2019) has much light to shed on how the country’s ruling Communist Party refashioned its relationship with its frontiers at an earlier point in history. Examining a trove of documents produced mostly in the 1980s in the country’s far northeastern Heilongjiang province, Fromm reveals the processes, policies and personal stories undergirding the new understandings of China which emerged after the death of Mao Zedong. As the nation emerged from the catastrophic policy failures and ideological excesses of the Mao years, the Party deftly encouraged ordinary people to narrate their experiences of the tumultuous recent history of the region in new ways and according to new historical frames. Their stories, collected in documents known as wenshi ziliao, reappraised the Russian and Japanese roles in the northeast’s past, its indigenous residents and the history of Han migration in ways which, in Fromm’s telling, are highly revealing of the narratives by which the Party sought to maintain its role as a governing power. If Hong Kong and Xinjiang today show that the Reform era, whose dawn this book expertly documents, is now transitioning to something else, then the understanding we gain from this book of how the Chinese Communist Party acted an earlier time of crisis could not be more pertinent. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fashioned a postwar municipal identity through their promotion of what Oda calls transpacific urbanism. Though the Japanese American presence in prewar San Francisco had been minor, it boomed as Japan came into vogue during the early Cold War. The Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was the apotheosis of urban redevelopment to attract Japanese capital and sell Japanese culture. Oda traces the conflicts and collaborations between a diverse set of stakeholders, including municipal planning officials, local merchant-planners, Japanese American professionals, Japanese-Hawaiian bankers, and African American neighborhood organizers. San Francisco’s rise as a major business and cultural hub in the postwar Pacific World benefited the Japanese Americans who called the city home even as it reinscribed their status as perpetual foreigners in American life. 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

In Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017), Sabine Frühstück shows how children and childhood have been used in twentieth century Japan as technologies to moralize war, and later, in the twenty-first century, to sentimentalize peace. Through examining Japanese children’s war games both in the field and on paper, Fruhstuck explores in the first half of the book how “children’s little wars” are connected and interacted with the “grand game” of the Imperial Army and Japan’s wars in Asia. In the second half of the book, Fruhstuck investigates various modes of “queering war”, as well as directing our attention to a move from the infantilization of war to the infantilization of peace in twenty-first century Japan. As one of the few books that looks into the role of affect in modern Japanese militarism, Playing War exposes the “emotional capital” that has been attributed to children and the “use value” of their vulnerability and innocence in both times of war and in times of peace. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. She mainly researches on Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Her research interests also include the role Buddhism plays in modernity, colonialism, and transnational/transregional networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent ethnography, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū (University of Hawaii Press, 2019),  Prof. Jessica Starling invites us into the daily lives of the bōmori, the spouses of priests in the Japanese Jōdo Shinshū, or True Pure Land, tradition. Focusing on domestic religion, Prof. Starling shows us how the bōmori create community by cleaning the temple altar, how they express gratitude for their salvation by carefully managing temple donations, and how they inspire faith by serving a cup of tea. This is truly a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of one of Buddhism’s most overlooked figures, the temple wives. You can reach Starling via Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. It questions how mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks and how can one understand its general refusal of liberalism? Daniel argues that the Party-state poses a challenge to our understandings of politics, globalization, and even progress. To be illiberal is not necessarily to be reactionary and vulgar but to be anti-liberal and to seek alternatives to a degraded liberalism. The book analyses the history of liberalism within China, the forces of the New Left, and some of the sites of struggle such as Wukan and Hong Kong. Today I spoke with Daniel about his new book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularly relevant. Betsy Perabo’s book Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) is a unique and important contribution to this area of inquiry, representing a rare contemporary academic exploration of just war theory within Russian Orthodoxy in the context of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Perabo examines the conflict through the concept of an “interreligious war” between Christian and Buddhist nations, paying particular attention to the writings of Nikolai of Japan, the Russian leader of Orthodox Church in Japan, as well as Russian soldiers, chaplains, military psychologists, and missionary leaders. In this interview we discuss the genealogy of Christian just war theory, the Russian Orthodox mission in in the late 19th-early 20th century the Japanese and Russian perception of religious motivations and divine influence in the 1904-05 war, and the implications of this history for Russian militarism today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Danny Orbach’s Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press, 2017) provides new insights into the origins of the insubordination that plagued and characterized the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s. Orbach identifies the causes of insubordination in both the political culture of the military dating back to the Meiji Restoration itself and a series of systemic “bugs” that infected the modern political system but that were in themselves the result of mostly reasonable solutions to challenges Japan faced early on in its blitzkrieg modernization. By assembling a series of mostly well known events into a coherent narrative from the 1860s to the 1930s, Orbach shows how insubordination in the name of the emperor rotted the Army from its core and destroyed civilian control in the process, culminating in the military governments of the Second World War period. The book is not only a convincing reevaluation of the history of the Army and modern Japan, but also a refreshing antidote to persistent misconceptions about the roots and timeline of Japan’s imperial ambitions. Instead of a geopolitical imperial strategy with roots in the 1870s, in which there is a continuity of aggressive expansionist purpose, what we come away with is a story about the continuity of structural/systemic “bugs” and their long-term unintended consequences. This podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, Melissa McCormick discusses all of the fifty-four paintings by Tosa Mitsunobu and calligraphies in the album, thus providing a unique companion to Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century masterpiece of prose and poetry, The Tale of Genji. Ricarda Brosch is an Assistant Curator at the V&A’s Asian Department, East Asia section. You can follow her on Twitter: @RicardaBeatrix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined throughout the world. But as Nancy S. Steinhardt notes in Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019), many iconic edifices such Beijing’s Forbidden City or Shanxi’s temples share features in common with the humblest ordinary dwellings which people in what we now call China have inhabited for centuries. Steinhardt here draws on decades of exhaustive reading and tireless fieldwork to tell the story of Chinese building practices, principles and techniques across space and time, from the earliest archaeological traces of construction right up to the present day. Both highly accessible and richly illustrated with hundreds of colour photographs, as well as intricate technical diagrams, this extraordinary treasure trove of a book is much more than an architectural compendium. The countless insights Steinhardt offers into the wider worlds of art and urban planning, and the political, economic and religious contexts in which Chinese buildings have been built for thousands of years, will serve as an engrossing and materially-rooted account of Chinese ‘civilisation’ for anyone with even a fleeting interest in the country. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO working for decades in Mynamar. OISCA is intriguing in its own right, with roots in a postwar new religion (Ananaikyō) and connections both to right-wing politics in Japan, and with commitments both to a kind of new Shinto-derived global environmentalism and also to a Japanist/culturalist social reform agenda. Becoming One is especially significant as an object of study given not just the NGO’s unusual pedigree, but also the historical relationship between modern Japan and Burma-Myanmar and the ways in which OISCA forces us to reexamine the politics of international aid and development. Watanabe’s book is attuned to the “muddy” (dorokusai) processes of making people (hitozukuri) and constructing a shared sense of home (furusato) that animate the everyday workings of OISCA, as well as the tensions that these goals create on the ground in the training camps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be remembered that things were of course never so straightforward. As Jeremy Friedman shows in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, the 1960s-1980s Sino-Soviet Split(UNC Press, 2018) generated a much more fractious and divided global situation than today’s nostalgia would imply. Taking ideology seriously as a component of socialist foreign policy, Friedman’s new and compelling analysis shows how deep Moscow and Beijing’s disagreements ran, and argues that the division was based at heart on two quite different revolutionary agendas. Drawing on archives all over the world in multiple languages, Shadow Cold War traces the origins of these agendas in revolutionary experience in each of Russia and China, and reveals how these continued to manifest themselves as Soviet and Chinese interests competed in the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century. With China in particular now a major player in many of the locations discussed here, this book should be indispensable reading for anyone seeking clarity about how we got to where we are today. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Harris — writer, scientist, and extreme cyclist – talks about the trip she made with her friend Mel, tracing Marco Polo’s route across Central Asia and Tibet. The journey is the subject of Harris’s book, Lands of Lost Borders: a Journey on the Silk Road (Dey Street Books, 2019). Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore—the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth of diverse materials to demonstrate and explore the social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and religious impacts of whales on the world of Tokugawa Japan. In doing so, Arch argues powerfully for a historical vision that locates Japan within a larger global environment and also understands the fundamental interconnectedness of land and sea in particular. It is, as she writes, “nonsensical” to draw a clear dividing line between the archipelagic and the pelagic. Arch traces the history of whaling from its recorded origins in the late sixteenth century across the stretch of the Tokugawa period and into the modern period. In doing so, Bringing Whales Ashore not only contributes broadly to Tokugawa and environmental history, but also engages with the modern and contemporary politics of whaling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is classical Japanese poetry something to be enjoyed in private, an object of study for scholars, or an item of public life teeming with hints about how to understand and deal with our past and our future? In Japanese Poetry and its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima (Routledge, 2018), Dean Anthony Brink, Associate Professor at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, argues that certain forms of Japanese classical poetry (especially tanka and senryū) have remained central to public life in both Japan and its former colony of Taiwan. Brink analyzes poems published in regular newspaper columns and various blogs, examining the way in which they reflect specific historical moments and exploring how they can be used for (and in) politics. Brink’s conclusion is that poetry has an ambivalent function, as it can serve on the one hand to justify and support colonialism and imperialism, and on the other hand to present a medium of resistance and protest. Roman Paşca is Assistant Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters, Department of Japanese Philosophy, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Hundred Days’ Literature, Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910 (Brill, 2019), Lorenzo Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the utopian novel, casting new light on some of its most peculiar yet often overshadowed literary specimens. The wutuobang or lixiang xiaoshuo, by virtue of its ideally totalizing perspective, provides a one-of-a-kind critical tool for the understanding of late imperial China’s fragmented Zeitgeist. Building upon rigorous close reading and solid theoretical foundations, Hundred Days’ Literature offers the reader a transcultural critical itinerary that links Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Wu Jianren’s Xin Shitou ji via the writings of Liang Qichao, Chen Tianhua, Bihe Guanzhuren, and Lu Shi’e. The book also includes the first English translation of Cai Yuanpei’s short story “New Year’s Dream.” The completion of this book has benefitted from Lorenzo joining the collaborative research project “East Asian Uses of the European Past” supported by the HERA network and led by Professor Joachim Kurtz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With thorny topics in Asian international relations, sovereignty, territory and borders in the news more or less daily, understanding what is at stake in this vitally important region, and why there are so many disagreements here, has never been more important. But while it is widely known that ‘modern’ bounded sovereign statehood is a pretty new and a historically contingent phenomenon in much of the world, the afterlives of the political orders that came before this are usually less appreciated. Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag and Miek Boltjes’ part co-edited, part co-authored book Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) thus fills a vital gap. Multidisciplinary and vast in scope, this uniquely structured volume presents writing from the junctures of history, international relations, international law and many other adjacent subject areas, arguing forcefully and in rich detail for the relevance of longstanding Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and other political practices to the contemporary world. Appreciating the enduring relevance of layered, relational and non-exclusive ties which dominated this part of Asia before the arrival of Euro-derived political ‘modernity’ may help us see what is afoot when the Chinese Communist Party intercedes in matters of Buddhist reincarnation. Still more optimistically, such an understanding may also help to resolve some of the globe’s most intractable and consequential conflicts. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I spoke with Dr Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She published in 2016 a great new book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016). This is a very original and non-conformist book on China. It is also an important contribution to political economy and to development economics. We started with the origin of her book and a brief definition of ‘poverty trap’. Her book explains what went right in China and how other developing countries could follow a similar approach to reform and institutional transition. We discussed why traditional contributions such as those by Acemoglu and Robinson cannot explain the success of China’s reform. On the one hand, the fail to understand Chinese reforms, including political ones under Deng, on the other hand, they are biased. They were developed looking at traditional western development paths that cannot and should not be treated as a universal recipe for any other country in the world. We discussed about property rights, transitional institutions and the performance evaluation system of local cadres. The author defines China as an ‘autocracy with democratic characteristics’ and, since Deng, the systematic evaluation of local political leaders worked well as a proxy of democratic control. We also discussed how China avoided the mistakes of the Russian transition. And we learnt how China traditionally is not monolithic in its economic policy because allows decentralization and experimentation. The book is very strong in its theoretical framework but is also based on an extensive fieldwork across three provinces that exemplify the diversity within the Chinese sub-continent and the act of balancing between uniformity and variety, center and periphery. We concluded talking about the challenges ahead for China and the next books being prepared by prof. Yuen Yuen Ang. A great book, and I hope a good podcast too. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Cristopher Rea's China’s Chaplin (Cornell University Press, 2019) introduces the imagination of Xu Zhuodai (1880–1958), a comic dynamo who made Shanghai laugh through the tumultuous decades of the pre-Mao era. Xu was a popular and prolific literary humorist who styled himself variously as Master of the Broken Chamberpot Studio, Dr. Split-Crotch Pants, Dr. Hairy Li, and Old Man Soy Sauce. He was also an entrepreneur who founded gymnastics academies, theater troupes, film companies, magazines, and a home condiments business. While pursuing this varied career, Xu Zhuodai made a name for himself as a “Charlie Chaplin of the East.” He wrote and acted in stage comedies and slapstick films, compiled joke books, penned humorous advice columns, dabbled in parodic verse, and wrote innumerable works of comic fiction. China’s Chaplin contains a selection of Xu’s best stories and stage plays (plus a smattering of jokes) that will answer the questions that keep you up at night. What is a father’s duty when he and his son are courting the same prostitute? What ingenious method might save the world from economic crisis after a world war? Who is Shanghai’s most outrageous grandmother? What is the best revenge against plagiarists, thieves, landlords, or spouses? And why should you never, never, never pull a hair from a horse’s tail? Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Someday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union at its height. With a deep if partially contrived sense of national destiny, the Chinese Communist Party is guiding a country of 1.4 billion people towards what it calls "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," and, with it, the end of an American-led world. The order which since 1945, has insured the greatest period of peace and prosperity in world history. Will this generation of Americans witness the final act for America as a hegemonic superpower? Can American ingenuity, confidence, and will power outcompete the long-term strategic thinking and planning of China's Communist Party? These are the challenges that will shape the next decade and more. Dr. Jonathan D. T. Ward’s China's Vision of Victory (Atlas Publishing, 2019) brings the reader to a new understanding of China's planning, strategy, and ambitions. A China specialist, with a doctorate from Oxford, where we studied with well-known China scholar, Rana Mitter, Dr. Ward’s provides what the Financial Times calls a ‘stimulating’ and “powerful” narrative which explores with unusual depth and insight the dangers to world peace of a Peoples Republic which is becoming completely unmoored to the peaceful regulation of international relations. “From seabed to space, from Africa to the Arctic, from subsurface warfare to the rise of China's global corporations", this book will illuminate for the reader the new great game of our lifetimes, and how our adversary sees it all. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, London, demonstrates the importance of South Korea is both an example in comparative cultural policy, and as a fascinating case study in its own right. The book offers historical analysis, as well as a major theoretical contribution in the form of the ‘new patron state’. The book charts the development and changes in cultural policy, from the project of national ‘modernisation’ to the Korean Wave. Thinking through questions of state theory and neoliberalism, as well as the role of culture in democracy, the book will be essential reading across the arts and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free speech and academic freedom. In addition to this, much of the scholarly work on Confucius Institutes analyzes policy documents. Anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert seeks to ask more complex questions and in-depth research in her new book China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). She considers what China’s soft power efforts look like in implementation, in addition to policy, and what this can tell us about China’s changing place in the world. Over the course of five years (2011-2016), Hubbert conducted transnational, multiscalar, multisited ethnographic and archival research in Confucius Institutes in the United States and on Confucius Institute-sponsored travel-study trips to China. She observed and interviewed students, parents, teachers, and administrators about their perceptions of Confucius Institutes and the Chinese state. Ultimately, she concludes that the soft power of the Confucius Institutes is intended to present China as a modern, globalized country not only for Americans and other international audiences but also to a domestic audience in China. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is “Chinese dance,” how did it take shape in during China’s socialist period, and how has this socialist form continued to influence Post-Mao expressive cultures in the People’s Republic of China? These are the questions that Emily Wilcox, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, takes up in Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018). Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source-based history of dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Dr Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people.  He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running south into South East Asia and then turning west into South Asia and the Middle East.  This zone received a huge percentage of aid and support from the superpowers.  This zone saw by far the most military interventions by the superpowers.  And this zone saw millions of people die in conflicts tied to the Cold War. Chamberlin reminds us that these conflicts were not simply instigated and propelled by the superpowers.  Instead, the Cold War intersected with colonial and post-colonial conflicts in complicated and nonlinear ways.  Similarly, he argues that the nature of these conflicts changed dramatically over time, from Maoist people's revolutions to conflicts driven by sectarian struggles. By making the broader contours of this period clearer, Chamberlin is able to put genocides in Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and others into a common framework.   In doing so, he's written a book that is not explicitly about genocide, but says a great deal about genocidal violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serious and casual scholars and readers interested in the Pacific War would do well to commit reading Marc Gallicchio’s and Waldo Heinrich’s massive study of the conflict’s last two years, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2017).  The two authors, both masters in the field, take on the monumental task of offering a civil-military synthesis of the war against Japan that covers both the home front and the campaigns in exacting detail.  Along the way, they introduce readers to a wide range of new and interesting interpretations that both validate and challenge long-held presumptions that have dominated the American historiography since the 1950s.  In our conversation, Marc Gallicchio offers several insights into the book, particularly with regard to civil-military relations in time of global total war, the US Army’s role in clearing the Philippines, the problems with the FDR and Truman Administration’s unconditional surrender policy, and the decision to use the atomic bomb.  At the same time, Marc shares several interesting insights and anecdotes about the war from the perspective of average Americans – including his co-author’s experiences and observations as a veteran of the 86th Infantry Division – that make this authoritative book so accessible and relevant for the contemporary reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A series of stories ranging from two-page narrative excerpts to 90+ page novellas, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019), translated by Columbia PhD student Christopher Peacock, with a contribution from Lauran Hartley, masterfully introduces the work of contemporary Tibetan author Tsering Döndrup. One of the most popular and critically acclaimed figures of Modern Tibetan literature of the post-Mao period, Tsering Döndrup is known for his earthy humor and his unflinchingly satirical portrayals of Tibetan life. Resisting the urge to romanticize Tibetan life, Tsering Döndrup’s stories relentlessly satirize both those in power—including clerics and government officials—and those without. Stories describe emergent social problems like gambling and long-standing folk institutions of violent feuds alike. The narratives compiled in The Handsome Monk could only be written by someone intimately familiar with Tibetan life over the last fifty years, and by placing many of his stories together, this volume evocatively portrays resilience and the problems of Tibetan culture. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Chinese landscape is dramatically changing. Modernization has drastically altered Chinese infrastructure, urban zones, waterways, and even rural spaces. These changes have also affected Chinese burial practices and the resting places of the deceased. In The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2019), collaborators explore the various histories of the modern loss of Chinese burial space. The edited project is part of Stanford University Press’ commitment to Digital Humanities, which are cutting edge peer-reviewed born digital volumes. Contributors combine narrative analysis, visualized data, and dynamic maps with exceptional ease to introduce readers to infant burial practices in late imperial China, grave and cemetery relocation in Shanghai from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and grave relocation during the contemporary period. In my conversation with editor Thomas S. Mullaney, Professor at Stanford University, we discuss common Chinese burial practices, the logics behind grave relocation, using historical data with interactive maps, the pre-history of absence, the importance of Stanford University Press and its digital humanities efforts, and the relationship between researcher and developers. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official version of history initially advocated by both states was similar in its adherence to a strategy of silencing critics and relativizing or denying the massacre, but Dixon shows how the two governments’ narratives of their dark pasts have diverged. The book draws on a combination of extensive fieldwork and archival research to present a holistic picture not just of the narratives themselves but of the domestic and international factors influencing when and how those historical myths about such large-scale atrocities change over time. Dark Pasts argues that while international pressures exerted on state actors like Turkey and Japan can produce change in the official versions of events, it is domestic factors that shape the content of the new versions. Dixon’s work should be of interest to audiences not just in East Asian or Middle Eastern studies or political science, but also to those with particular concerns with historical memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Bryson, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, centers gender as an analytical framework in the study of Buddhism. The benefit of this approach is vividly demonstrated in Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016), which uncovers the transformation of the goddess Baijie over several centuries. Bryson’s research explores the various social and historical contexts of the Dali region in Southwest China where the deity was shaped by local expressions of the Buddhist tradition. Baijie was depicted as a Buddhist goddess, the mother of Dali’s founder, a widowed martyr, and a village divinity. Bryson combines the exploration of historical sources and ethnographic encounters with contemporary Baijie worshippers to offer a nuanced and far-reaching portrait of the goddess. In our conversation we discussed Chinese and Indian formulations of Buddhism, the Buddhist history of the Dali region, how local Dali elites narrativized the goddess, stories of dragons, Han migration, the Ming and Qing gendered social norms and expectations, and how notions of “religion” and “ethnicity” shape recent interpretations of Baijie. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters. Tracing its subject through the difficult history of early 20th-century China, and taking account of Civil War, invasion, world war, and revolution, The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church (Palgrave, 2016) reveals the ways in which very significant cultural changes in Chinese society were reflected in an indigenous congregation as it gradually discovered its own identity. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects. Observing that the “materialities of media transform people, institutions, and societies,” Yasar traces the early histories of sound reproduction in modern Japan and their consequences. Electrified Voices examines the development of media technologies—including the telegraph and telephone, phonograph, broadcast radio, and film—and their attendant oralities, auralities, and effects on language, nation, the performing arts, and even intellectual property law. As Yasar shows, sound reproduction changed language and attitudes about language, collapsed time and space, and shaped both individual and collective identities and practices. The impact of these technologies is indispensable to a clear understanding of modernity, and Yasar’s book is a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on not just Japan, but histories of media and modernity as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outcastes and other marginalized groups—participated in the administration and regulation of society in Tokugawa Japan. Within this context, the book focuses on self-governing occupation-based and other status groups and explore their roles making Tokugawa Japan tick. The title, Give and Take, is part of Ehlers’s argument about the ways in which their relationship to government was one of reciprocity between ostensibly benevolent rulers and dutybound status groups. Within this, Ehlers evinces a special interest in marginalized groups and in poverty, especially “beggar bosses” and blind guilds. Through a detailed examination of an extraordinary collection of primary sources from the castle town of Ōno (Fukui prefecture), Ehlers uses the case study of approaches to the problems of poverty to enrich our understanding of the complex dynamics of interconnectivity and reciprocity that characterized Japan under Tokugawa rule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have elevated her to something akin to ‘rock star’ status in China itself. As Lisa Rofel discusses in this podcast, and in her introduction to After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke University Press, 2018), Dai interrogates the truly historic events unfolding in today’s China to ask what these mean for history itself. Vital analyses of the politics of memory and gender also pervade this collection of expertly translated essays. In particular Dai is interested in the post-Cold War entry of China into a Euro-American neoliberal world order and what this means for how the country sees its historical course. How are recent and more distant pasts invoked or ignored in conversations about this? What do erasures of past experience mean for the possibility of imagining alternative futures, as seemed possible in the twentieth century? In a searing analysis of recent Chinese films in their wider socio-political context, Dai critiques present-day historical myopias and the consequent marginalisation of those most buffeted by the storms of neoliberal capital: active female protagonists and the erstwhile socialist ‘masses’. Especially urgent in this year of key anniversaries for China, this work has much wider implications for understanding our entire global present, and for perceiving the ominous reality that “China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future” (p. 22). Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Despite the title, it is not strictly a book on China or Italy. It is a visionary contribution to both economics and political theory that reflects on the crisis of the West and the paradoxical success of China. Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic and technological pressures and increase their level of prosperity? While the West seems to have stagnated in an environment of political mistrust, increasing inequality and low growth, the rise of the East has shown that it may not be liberal democracy that is best at accommodating the social mutations that technologies have triggered. The cases of China and Italy form the research focus as two extremes in growth performance. China is the star of globalisation in the East, while Italy is the laggard of globalisation in the West and a laboratory of creeping political meltdown now shared by other major Western economies. But is this forever? Introducing the ‘innovation paradox’ as the main challenge to the West and the notion of ‘knowledge democracy’ as key to sustainable growth, this book presents a new side to the debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or fifth as the authors argue). It is a vital reading for all those questioning what kind of democracy positively impacts innovation as the force whose speed and direction transforms societies and economies. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Professor Black, offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimension in each period. A must read for anyone interested in this time period of military and indeed global history. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th centuries, Cheng deepens our understanding of racial formation by demonstrating how race and gender are conceived not only in relation to the body, but inorganic ornamentation as well. Anne A. Cheng is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University. Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do management consultants do, and how do they do it? These two deceptively simple questions are at the centre of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China (Duke University Press, 2018), the new book by Kimberly Chong, a lecturer in anthropology at University College London. The book uses an in depth and immersive ethnography of a global management consulting firm to explore the rise of management consultancy in China, engaging with key issues- financialization and commensuration- that are at the heart of understanding contemporary global capitalism. The book is rich with fascinating, and at times hilarious, examples of the contradictions and ambivalences, along with successes, of management consulting systems adapted to and applied in China. It will be essential reading across the social sciences and area studies, as well as for anyone interested in our globalised economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conventional portrayals of early Ryukyu are based on official histories written between 1650 and 1750. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Gregory Smits makes extensive use of scholarship in archaeology and anthropology and leverages unconventional sources such as the Omoro sōshi(a collection of ancient songs) to present a fundamental rethinking of early Ryukyu. Instead of treating Ryukyu as a natural, self-contained cultural or political community, he examines it as part of a maritime network extending from coastal Korea to the islands of Tsushima and Iki, along the western shore of Kyushu, and through the Ryukyu Arc to coastal China. Smits asserts that Ryukyuan culture did not spring from the soil of Okinawa: He highlights Ryukyu’s northern roots and the role of wakō (pirate-merchant seafarers) in the formation of power centers throughout the islands, uncovering their close historical connections with the coastal areas of western Japan and Korea. Unlike conventional Ryukyuan histories that open with Okinawa, Gregory Smits' Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650 (University of Hawaii Press, 2018) starts with the northern island of Kikai, an international crossroads during the eleventh century. It also focuses on other important but often overlooked territories such as the Tokara islands and Kumejima, in addition to bringing the northern and southern Ryukyu islands into a story that all too often centers almost exclusively on Okinawa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing on new archival resources, and opening up an entirely new research agenda in the field, David Woodbridge has written an outstanding new book. Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China (Brill, 2019) focuses on a small but very significant evangelical community, the so-called Plymouth Brethren, and documents the attempts made by their missionaries in China during the first half of the twentieth century to balance their theological commitment to primitivism – the belief that contemporary church practice should be aligned as closely as possible with that of the New Testament – with their responsibility to engage with a very politicised and rapidly changing social and cultural environment. Woodbridge shows how difficult this task could be, and how Brethren missionaries remained susceptible to criticisms made by some of their Chinese converts that they were never primitivist enough. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of Zawa Damdin, one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject. Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019) takes up the perspective of the Mongolian polymath Zawa Damdin (1867–1937): a historian, mystic, logician, and pilgrim whose life and works straddled the Qing and its socialist aftermath, between the monastery and the party scientific academy. Through a rich reading of his works, King reveals that modernity in Asia was not always shaped by epochal contact with Europe and that new models of Buddhist life, neither imperial nor national, unfolded in the post-Qing ruins. The first book to explore counter-modern Buddhist monastic thought and practice along the Inner Asian frontiers during these tumultuous years, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood illuminates previously unknown religious and intellectual legacies of the Qing and offers an unparalleled view of Buddhist life in the revolutionary period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast, I speak with Prof. Jane Caple about her recently published book, Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). The revival of mass monasticism in Tibet in the early 1980s is one of the most extraordinary examples of religious resurgence in post-Mao China. Caple argues that in order to understand the shape that this revival has taken, we need to look beyond the Chinese state and take into account the multiple competing moral terrains that monastics must navigate in order to develop their institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fact that Korea’s experience of Japanese imperialism plays a role in present-day Japan-Korea relations is no secret to anyone. Questions of guilt, responsibility and atonement continue to bubble below, and occasionally break through, the surface of ties between two countries which otherwise have much in common culturally and in terms of interests. Addressing many of these complexities, Christina Yi’s Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2018) adds greatly to our understanding of imperial experience and its personal, linguistic and political legacies. In this ‘discursive history of modern Japanese-language literature from Korea and Japan’ (xvi), Yi forges a narrative which is itself expressive of colonialism's tangled and irresolvable traces. Led nimbly back and forth between the Japanese metropole and the colonies and postcolonies, we enter deep into the worlds of writers considered both 'Korean' and 'Japanese' based in both past and present incarnations of 'Korea' and 'Japan.' If it is difficult to pin any single identity - other than shared use of Japanese language - on these figures and their works, then this very fact is an invitation to broaden our understanding of Japanophone literature beyond today's troublesome nation states. As Yi makes poignantly clear, issues of identity and voice are still shaped by imperial experience even long after the formal end of empire in 1945. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British empires are the source of all the problems in the world, past and present?  Do you not regard Sir Winston Churchill and other heroic figures of the recent and not so recent Anglo-American past as villains and racists to boot? If so University of Exeter Professor of History, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day has the very book that you are looking for, Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter Books, 2019). Professor Black, in his usual mandarin style, shows the reader how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today as well, and the selective manner in which certain countries are castigated or not castigated. Imperial Legacies is a wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, almost total ignorance of history and historical knowledge. All from a past master of the historical art form. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954-55 and 1958 occurred at the height of the Cold War. Mao’s China bombarded Nationalist-controlled islands, and U.S. President Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons. These were dramatic events, and it can be a difficult to disentangle military and political posturing from the real concerns of the three involved powers. Using newly available sources, Pang Yang Huei reexamines the Taiwan Strait Crises and concludes that China, Taiwan, and the United States were much more aware of each other’s concerns than previous studies have indicated. Strait Rituals: China, Taiwan, and the United States in the Taiwan Strait Crises, 1954-1958(Hong Kong University Press, 2019) traces the role of ritual, symbols, and gestures in the tacit communication between Beijing, Taipei, and Washington. Ultimately, this detailed history contributes to a better understanding of the history of the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With questions over how ideas are translated across borders and between languages as acute as ever today, it is sometimes easy to forget that our efforts to understand each other are mediated through many accreted layers of previous translations. Pu Wang’s The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) takes us deep into this world of past linguistic and cultural interpretations, shedding invaluable light on broad questions how ‘history’, 'the people', 'revolution' and many other ideas have emerged as products of exchange between East Asian and European contexts. But this book is much more than this, being the first study of the whole life of Guo Moruo, the ‘writer, poet, dramatist, Marxist historian, paleographer… revolutionist and cultural fighter’ (p. 5), as Deng Xiaoping eulogised him. Wang skilfully weaves together an analysis of Guo’s extraordinarily diverse written works – from translations of Goethe to autobiography and interpretations of oracle bone inscriptions – with a rich account of the man's personal life and events in China at large. As a poet and translator himself, Wang is uniquely positioned to tell this richly creative story which is at once personally intimate and vast in scope. As difficult to encapsulate in a short blurb as the tumultuous life of Guo himself, this book offers us a portrait of a deeply complex and controversial figure and a picture of Chinese culture in the age of revolution which emerged in dialogue with innumerable historic voices. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about transnational crime one of the themes will be about how globalisation has made it easier for organized crime groups to operate. You will also see another chapter about how large mafia style groups are spreading outside their traditional domains. But there have been very few studies, other than individual case studies, of how this occurs and what circumstances help or hinder this expansion of operation. Federico takes a rigorous approach to try and answer these questions. He not only looks at how groups expand but also compares successful expansion to unsuccessful cases. He asks what features of the social environment allowed one group to succeed and another to fail. His answers are surprising and they reveal some cumbersome characteristics of large, structured organised crime groups which make it difficult for them to expand their operations to new environments. This is a very enjoyable book to read as it combines detailed stories with strategic data. Federico has clearly put many years of research into this work and the result adds significant new insights for organized crime research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, five activists were detained by the police in China for their plans to distribute anti-sexual harassment stickers. Although such detainments usually last 24 hours, these women were detained 37 days, the legal limit for detention without bringing charges. Dubbed the Feminist Five, news of the women spread rapidly through social media. The author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, Leta Hong Fincher, uses the stories of these women to explore a much larger issue—that the subjugation of women is a key component of the authoritarian state. Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso, 2018) examines censorship and social media; the trauma of detention and its aftermath; the history of feminism in China; the feminist fight against sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence; and, ultimately, the remarkable ways that feminist thinking spreads under the circumstances. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late second century BCE, a series of trading route developed between China in the east and Rome’s empire in the west. Craig Benjamin’s Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE-250 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2018) describes the emergence of these routes and the roles the empires of the era played in their development. Benjamin credits the pastoral nomadic tribes of the Xiongnu and the Yuezhi, with playing a key role in catalyzing the Silk Road, as their presence led the Chinese to undertake expeditions westward that brought them into direct contact with the peoples of the region. As both a commodity and a currency silk played an important role in the process of developing these links, and the fabric gradually made its way westward until the Romans in western Asia came into contact with it. Their fascination with silk ensured a continuous flow of commerce and ideas across Eurasia, until the problems faced by the Parthians and Kushan empires disrupted the trade in ways that brought the first Silk Roads era to an end in the 3rd century CE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Press (2017) addresses the history of Cantonese Opera performed in Chinatowns in cities across North America with a primary focus on San Francisco, New York City, and Vancouver during the 1920s. Using a wealth of archival material, including extensive records from the U.S. Immigration Service, Rao provides an enormous amount of information about the theaters, companies, performers, and repertoire of this operatic genre. She contextualizes the performance of Cantonese Opera within the cultural life of Chinese communities, explains the print materials and recordings that circulated the music, and details the significant impact that exclusionary governmental immigration policies had on this theatrical tradition and Chinese immigrants in Canada and the United States. Rao’s book not only offers information about this performance tradition that has never been published before, it also provides a model for the kind of work that still needs to be done on musical and theatrical entertainment in many other ethnic communities in North America. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America has been awarded the 2019 Association for Asian-American Studies Performance and Media Studies Book Award, the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music for the best book published in 2017, and the 2018 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a professor of music at Rutgers University where she is the Head of Music Theory. One of the leading scholars in the study of Chinese American music, her work has appeared in many journals including the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music Theory Spectrum. She has received an NEH Research Fellowship and ACLS Scholar in China Fellowship to support her work on the intersections between China and the West, particularly in contemporary Chinese music. In 2007, she won the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music for an essay on the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does music link people across time and space? How do singers modulate their repertoires to forge links with audiences both within and across local, regional and national borders? What are the consequences of these developments? In Song King: Connecting People, Places and Past in Contemporary China (University of Hawaii Press 2018), Dartmouth College Assistant Professor Levi S. Gibbs seeks to answer these and other questions through an examination of the life and music of Wang Xiangrong, the Folksong King of Western China. As a folksong king, Wang is both folk and elite, and in this capacity he simultaneously is tasked with representing the local, the regional, and the national both in performances within China, and—in the case of one chapter looking at his performance at the Dow Chemical Plant in Midlands Michigan—around the world. Born and raised in a rural area of Northern Shaanxi Province, Wang grew up listening to shamanic songs and bawdy songs, but grew into other contexts in which he now represents his region and his nation in ways that require him to modulate his repertoire to bring together audiences, performers in the performance event. At the end of the book, Gibbs considers how the concept of song kings and queens might find application to and help understand about folksingers around the world, in doing so, Song King provides new and innovative ways of considering issues of folksong traditions and their performers in contemporary China and beyond. All recordings mentioned in the volume are also available on amazon. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Given its expanding multimedia presence in Asia and around the world for many years now, K-pop is a phenomenon that is hard to ignore. This “animal that thrives on excess,” as Suk-Young Kim puts it (p. 6) is more than just music, however, as it offers us a way of looking at a host of fascinating and important subjects in politics, economics, anthropology and performance studies. Suk-Young Kim's book K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (Stanford University Press, 2018) transports us into K-pop's dizzying world of production, consumption, participation and neoliberal commerce. As well as navigating the geopolitical and technological conditions that have enabled K-pop’s emergence and success, Kim takes us up close to the fans and stars themselves through her ethnographic work at gigs, conventions and TV recordings. Combining all the passion of a true fan with clear-headed analysis of postmodern subjects' interactions with big business and the state, this is a must-read for anyone curious about contemporary Korean cultural history, digital technologies, or how BIGBANG perfect their dance moves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017),  was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy" by The New York Review of Books, and The Economist, who included the book on its Best of 2017 list, said the book, "Shows how a resurgence of faith is quietly changing the country." The Guardian said the book is "full of moving encounters with Chinese citizens ... Johnson succeeds in having produced a nuanced group portrait of Chinese citizens striving for non-material answers in an era of frenetic materialism." I just finished the book myself and was stunning in its portrayals. If you hope to understand the trajectory of modern China, arguably the fastest-rising international superpower, understanding the religious Taoist, Christianity, folk religion, and Islam of China will be helpful, if not essential. 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. Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sayaka Chatani’s Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018) tackles the fraught question of how and why young men in marginalized and rural areas of Japan and its colonies became emotionally invested in the project of Japanese nationalism and militarism. Why did so many rural youth, especially in colonial Taiwan and Korea, actively participate in Japanese imperial and wartime programs, including volunteering as Japanese soldiers? Nation-Empire explores the role of the seinendan (village youth associations) in youth mobilization within the Japanese empire, focusing on a comparison of villages in Okinawa and Miyagi prefectures, Japan; Xinzhu province, Taiwan; and South Ch’ungch’ŏng province, Korea. Chatani’s translocal study highlights the local social dynamics of the creation and mobilization of rural youth and rural modernity within Japan’s national empire. In particular, she unearths the subjectivity of these young men as they used the new category of youth—and rural youth in particular—to advance their own interests vis-à-vis their elders and the national-imperial society in which they lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series, is a genealogy of “psychiatric modernity,” of the invention and reinvention of modern mental illness in Beijing, 1901-1937. Focusing on the pivotal roles of the city’s police-run municipal asylum and the Peking Union Medical College, Baum chronicles the transition from eclectic but largely family-centered premodern apprehensions and treatments of “mad behaviors” to a more unified, biomedical, institutionalized view of madness that was intimately linked to questions of social control, political legitimacy, and the rubric of “mental hygiene.” Along the way, this history of neuropsychiatry’s penetration of the administrative and social fabric of modern China examines topics including disjunctures between state and civil actors concerning new understandings and practices around mental illness, as well as the “psychiatric entrepreneurs” who profited from—and sometimes helped to invent or define—new psychiatric conditions. Baum’s careful unearthing of these tensions and innovations sheds informative light on the ways in which madness was invented not just as a top-down administrative or biomedical-neuropsychiatric project but in negotiation with a wide range of actors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted booksellers or PRC Mainland integration plans, most of this news has revolved around a common theme - namely questions over Beijing's ruling Chinese Communist Party and its influence in Hong Kong. On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong University Press, 2018) is an indispensable guide to the Party's approaches to Hong Kong over time. As a former-lawmaker in the city’s Legislative Council, founder of the think tank Civic Exchange, and many other things, Loh makes the most of her unique vantage point on contemporary CCP affairs, as well her invaluable access to insights from the her hometown's colonial past. This book sets its analysis of how the Party seeks to maintain supremacy in Hong Kong within all-important historical context, and consequently will be a vital resource for anyone wishing to understand the questions of political culture, power and influence which are pivotal to the future of East Asia and the world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on the war has perhaps distorted our understanding of modern Vietnam. Christopher Goscha’s award-winning new book, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016), brilliantly paints a picture of an ancient, diverse, and complex country which had already begun to modernize before the arrival of the French (let alone the Americans) and which was itself an imperial power. In Vietnam: a New History Ho Chi Minh and the communists were not the only anti-colonial nationalists, but rather one of a number of groups fired by the radical new idea of republicanism.Vietnam: a New History takes us beyond the bitter divide in Vietnamese historiography between the “orthodox” and “revisionist” interpretations of Vietnam’s modern history. Goscha provokes the reader to become aware of the haunting possibility that Vietnam’s modern history could have been different – which in turn stimulates the reader to think of new possibilities for a future Vietnam. Listeners of this episode might also enjoy listening to: Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (Harper, 2018)Ken Maclean, The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (U of Wisconsin Press, 2013)Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View (World Scientific Publishing Co. 2019) explores the complex interaction of several forces shaping the current world economic situation. Alfredo Toro Hardy analyzes the leadership of China and the economic strength of Asia, transnational companies, and international organizations like the IMF as forces in favor of globalization, while populism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are part of the anti-globalization trend.  By giving a worldwide context, the author situates Latin America as a region that is facing several challenges in order do be part of a phenomenon that is developing with uncertain outcomes. Toro Hardy also provides some of the paths the region could follow in the near future.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement (State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’s short stories edited and translated by Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani and Michael Monhart, with assistance from Southwest University’s Carl Robertson and INALCO’s Francoise Robin. Along with a translator’s introduction and author’s preface, the 10 short stories selected with input from the author himself range from the realistic to the fantastic.  For the more realistic stories, lovingly playful descriptions of everyday Tibetan life bring a relatively apolitical look at contemporary Tibetan experience that defies simplistic interpretation. In the more fantastic stories, some of the same issues appear through descriptions that are stubbornly not realistic. Throughout the stories a narrative style and thematic influences from Tibetan oral traditions, his portrayal of media within media, and his tendency to use conclusions that do not lend a sense of finality to the stories create a reading experience that mirrors, in many ways the author’s unique cinematic storytelling style. This first ever English translation of Pema Tseden’s short stories provides a new way of approaching contemporary Tibet through the eyes of one of its most impressive storytellers.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a considerable period of time. Among the most important dimensions of this are the changes that have occurred in the kind of information North Koreans have access to, and this is the subject of Jieun Baek's excellent North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press, 2016). Based on interviews with North Koreans who have settled in the South, Baek shows how everything from television programs to foreign affairs coverage and fashion has made its way into the country from the outside world. DPRK citizens today live in a much more informationally open society than the all-too-common ‘hermit kingdom’ label would imply. As well as getting a rich sense of the very personal stories that often underlie the movement of information, goods and cash into the country, we also come from Baek's work to understand the elaborate networks of smugglers, traders and intermediaries who facilitate its passage. Appreciating all of the complexity around North Korea's involvement in global flows, and how the Pyongyang government is responding to this, will surely be crucial whatever course this state and its people take over the coming months and years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first major conflict after the 1949 Geneva Conventions, POW repatriation during the Korean War became a new battleground for the recognition of state sovereignty and a larger tool for political propaganda. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press, 2019) opens with a captured Korean solider who must navigate what identities and documentation to leverage depending on his captor. The extraordinary stories of everyday people involved in the Korean War illustrate how the effects of war span past and future conflicts.  The thoroughly researched book is full of fascinating stories and sheds light on lessons from the Korean War that are still relevant today. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018) is an absorbing look at the multiple and changing ways that waste—of resources, possessions, time, money, etc.—has been conceptualized in Japan since 1945. More than a history of garbage and waste disposal, Waste is a look at the aspirations and discontents of a rapidly changing society in which waste has been everything from an existential threat to a critical part of the “bright,” good life of the affluent and aspirational middle classes. Siniawer is attentive to the socioeconomic contexts of waste, from the poverty of the first postwar decade to the boom years of the 1960s, from the traumatic oil shocks of the 1970s to the roaring and opulent bubble years of the 1980s, and then into the post-bubble reckoning with waste in a slow-growth era and beyond. The book ranges widely, beginning with early postwar admonitions against waste, following the development of an ideology (and economy) of leisure and “affluence of the heart,” and tracing both the rise of ecological consciousness and Japan’s progressive recycling and solid waste management systems and the coming of the post-2000 decluttering movement. Peppered throughout with delightful and illustrative examples from period sources and always conscious of historical continuities and discontinuities, Waste is not just a story about waste consciousness in postwar Japan, but a story about the ways that we make meaning in our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly fringes. Andray Abrahamian’s North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018) does precisely this, comparing and contrasting North Korea’s and Myanmar’s long careers as ‘pariah’ states during the 20th and 21st centuries, and offering a convincing account of how one – Myanmar – has to some extent managed to emerge from its ‘pariah’ position in recent years, whilst the other – North Korea – remains largely excluded, whatever recent signs of detente across the 38th parallel. Abrahamian's work on each place is based on years of firsthand experience in these ‘outposts of tyranny’, as former-US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice dubbed them in 2005 (p. 2), and he is thus able to offer us vital context for both the latest warming in inter-Korean relations and Myanmar's recent slide back into partial outcast status amidst the horrifying Rohingya crisis. For anyone interested in these countries or in the very idea of an international community of nations, this is a compelling read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the traditionally dominant role in international oil markets of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers is changing as a result of the United States having become more or less self-sufficient, China replacing the US as the Gulf’s foremost export market, and members of the Organization of Oil-Producing Export Countries (OPEC) becoming increasingly dependent on non-OPEC producers like Russia to manipulate prices and regulate supply demand. Fulton’s book is also a timely contribution to discussion of the changing global balance of power as Gulf states increasingly see the United States as an unreliable and unpredictable ally. In describing China-Gulf relations as one of “deep inter-dependence,” Fulton charts with three case studies – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – the rapid expansion of the region’s economic relations with China and its importance to China’s infrastructure and energy-driven Belt and Road initiative even if the Gulf has not been woven into the initiative’s architecture as one of its key corridors. The fact that the Gulf is not classified as a corridor suggests the potential pitfalls of China’s determination to avoid being sucked into the region’s multiple conflicts, including the Saudi-Iranian rivalry and the 18-month old Saudi-UAE-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar that has so far failed to subjugate the Gulf state. Acknowledging that even though Gulf states welcome China’s refusal to interfere in the domestic affairs of others and hope that it can secure its interests through win-win economic cooperation China may not be able to sustain its foreign and defense policy principles, Fulton makes a significant distribution by not only charting and analysing the deepening China-Gulf relationship but suggesting that Chinese policy is in effect putting the building blocks in place to ensure that it can respond to situations in which it ultimately may have to become politically and perhaps even militarily involved. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since the Korean Armistice Agreement. Jackson argues that the 2017 nuclear crisis was a product of a gradual hardening of U.S. policy towards North Korea, as well as the particular characteristics of the current leadership of both countries. The book provides an excellent overview of U.S. policy towards North Korea and provides new, contemporary scholarship on the Obama and Trump administrations. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s global rise has been analysed from many perspectives in recent years. But pressing questions over how understandings of gender – and particularly masculinity – have been changing amidst increasing mutual contact between China and the wider world have been asked less often. Derek Hird and Geng Song are among the foremost contributors to a steadily growing body of work in this area, however, and their new edited volume The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age (Hong Kong University Press, 2018) offers a brilliantly diverse range of perspectives on Chinese men and their global entanglements. There is something for everyone here as specialists in media, language and literature, gender studies and anthropology join forces to discuss Chinese masculinity as represented and as practiced. From domestic film and televisual portrayals of globe-trotting Chinese men, to the experiences of Chinese migrant fathers working in Ethiopia, Chinese students studying abroad in the United States, or Chinese male gangsters appearing on German or Japanese TV, readers will get a rich sense of how masculinity figures throughout rising China’s global engagements. At once deeply thought-provoking and entertaining, this book is sure to help us all appreciate the importance of this still-overlooked subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to foist their wares and business priorities on China, dominating the country’s trade and customs. Anne Reinhardt’s new book Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) focuses on these very dynamics and specifically the place of steam shipping as ‘a means of interrogating China’s experience of Euro-American and Japanese colonialism’ (p.2). Reinhardt's book reveals how trade in China’s coastal and inland waters, and the very vessels via which this was conducted, were sites where myriad grander processes crystallized in physical space. From the closer quarters of boardrooms, government departments and cabins below deck, Reinhardt also takes us to higher levels of elevation, revealing the place of steam shipping within global developments in trade, transport and technology during this crucial period. As well as being a captivating read, the book's fresh and nuanced presentation of China's ‘semi-colonial’ experience is vital for better understanding a history which to this day informs relations between China and the world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other related questions, discussing both why and how the Chinese state has today managed to make itself so forcefully present so far from the country's heartlands. Kinzley's fascinating new resource-centric perspective on the state incorporation of Xinjiang retrains our eyes on the material and physical dimensions to politics, showing how treasured items from oil to tungsten have attained a totemic political role as “a critical but largely overlooked factor in shaping the region’s connections to China, regional neighbours and indeed the world” (p.7). Deftly handling its multilingual and multi-perspectival scholarship, 'Natural Resources and the New Frontier' accounts for how successive ‘layers’ left by state and non-state actors - Chinese and Russian as well as British - have institutionalised the presence of outside actors in Xinjiang over time. These dynamics, Kinzley shows, also underlie much of the discord evident between Han Chinese immigrants and indigenous Turkic groups in this troubled region today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong’s Securing the Belt and Road, Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments (Red Globe Press, 2018) significantly contributes to an understanding not only of China’s ambitious infrastructure and energy driven Belt and Road Initiative, but also the increasing challenges it poses for China itself.  The multiple security issues the initiative poses, including political instability, religious and ethnic tensions, fragile legal environments, criminality, environmental degradation and social strains, has sparked the rise of a Chinese private security industry with what the authors call Chinese characteristics. Populated primarily by former People’s Liberation Army and police officers, the industry is on a steep learning curve that makes it dependent on Western and Russian expertise. It also has to come to grips with the fact that China’s mushrooming overseas investment threatens to drag the People’s Republic into international crises. Arduino and Gong and their contributors to this edited volume lay out a compelling argument for the need to not only physically secure Chinese personnel and assets but also develop guidelines for risk assessment, special insurance vehicles and crisis management in a world in which state-owned enterprises lack adequate security or an understanding for the utility of corporate social responsibility. In doing so, their edited volume constitutes a major addition to the understanding of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that de facto creates a building block of an as yet undefined new world order. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity moving through time, insights into the endlessly contingent, local and contested events which have occurred in this part of East Asia over time are always valuable. This arguably applies all the more the further back in history we look, and so Jinping Wang's In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200-1600 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) offers a welcome trove of detail concerning an especially crucial period. Beginning at the conjuncture of two 'foreign' Chinese dynasties – the Jurchen-Jin and Mongol-Yuan – Wang carries us all the way forward into the Ming era, discussing throughout the complex ways in which local people responded to the Mongol invasion of northern China from the 13th century. Radical transformations in local lives emerge through Wang's focus on Shanxi province and a host of evocative characters from wandering nuns to dispossessed literati, canal managers and warlords’ wives. Based on not-previously-studied stele inscriptions and on-the-ground fieldwork, the book charts political, social and religious changes some of which, the author shows, had a long afterlife. It is these sorts of historical continuities which, whilst perhaps not permitting us to talk about ‘China’ in an entirely uncritical and broad-brushed way, certainly make studying the country’s long history a compelling and important pursuit in the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both play a central role in any narrative of the end of the East Asia-Pacific War in 1945, yet Hiroshima has consistently drawn more attention in the ensuing decades. In Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2018), Chad Diehl argues that the tendency to overlook the bomb’s impact on the citizens of Nagasaki and the city’s arduous, contested process of reconstruction is hardly a coincidence. As Diehl exhaustively demonstrates in this richly documented, multi-dimensional study, Nagasaki’s municipal officials and US Occupation authorities worked together—though not necessarily for the same reasons—to downplay the bomb’s horrific impact in order to promote the city’s identity as an “international cultural city.” At the same time, conflicting interpretations of Nagasaki’s atomic past, present, and future have always competed with the officially sanctioned narrative for national and international attention. Throughout the Occupation era and even into the present day, Nagai Takashi (the “Saint of Urakami”), the city’s Catholic community, and survivor-activists have all contributed to a multivocal discourse that, in Diehl’s analysis, provides new insights into the politics of collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, historian Jennifer Altehenger, a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King’s College London, grapples with the complex issue of how authorities and cultural workers attempted to create effective law propaganda.  Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1989 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) traces the techniques used and challenges using a series of case studies including the 1953 Marriage Law mass campaign and the 1954 constitution national discussion. These efforts sought not only to inform Chinese citizens of the law but also involved them in such ways that they would feel obliged to then follow the laws in the future. Drawing from a wide variety of archival sources including government documents, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and posters, Altehenger highlights the tension between the intention of the government to educate and the interpretations the people made themselves about new laws. She explores law dissemination into the 1970s and 1980s, locating a revival of efforts to popularize laws, including the use of new media and five-year plans. These techniques have a lasting legacy in China, making this book important reading for anyone interested in propaganda and the governance of China. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Making of a Modern Art World: Institutionalization and Legitimization of Gouhua in Republican Shanghai (Brill, 2017) investigates the production and consumption of guohua (“national painting”) in Shanghai between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Defining the art world as sociologically constructed, Pedith Chan’s systematically... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When he was elected president of China in 1912, Yuan Shikai was hailed as his nation’s George Washington, yet four years later he would die as the leader of a country in turmoil after a failed bid to become its emperor. In Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal (University of British Columbia... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amidst an atmosphere of hope on the Korean Peninsula over the past year, questions over the wellbeing of North Korea’s population have again come to global attention. But this is far from the first time that such a subject has been in the news, for ever since the catastrophic famine... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In literature, evil can appear in a broad spectrum of shapes, images and motifs. For Endō Shūsaku, the problem of evil is central to the reality of human existence, and it has to be accepted as such. In Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of Endō Shūsaku. Between Reading and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, are parties to a dazzling array of of China-driven transformations unfolding on a vast scale in economics, politics,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) charts a “profound shift in attitude toward foreign technology” between the 16th century (when European devices arrived... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic hue. As Elizabeth McGuire relates in the rich, persuasive and utterly engrossing Red... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For all that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, books which dissect and analyse developments from a regional perspective are of great value, particularly when they focus on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (Stanford University Press, 2017) isn’t so much about the history... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and continue dealing in the lucrative commodity, opium. Historian Stephen R. Platt’s book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Kapur’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) is an ambitious look at the transformations of Japanese society after the massive protests against renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (abbreviated as “Anpo” in Japanese) in 1960. The treaty was renewed despite fifteen months... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339). In this book, Gamble gives an account of Rangjung... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of Michael Szonyi’s new book are two questions: 1) How did ordinary people in the Ming deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army?, and 2) What were the broader consequences of their behavior?” The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taylor and Jacobs have gathered... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Compared to the provinces’s native Uyghur population, Han Chinese settlers in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not attracted as much scholarly or indeed journalistic attention of late. But in a profoundly troubled and troubling present for Xinjiang, one that is thankfully now gaining somewhat more notice from concerned parties... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you work in Asian studies as a scholarly field, you should read Fabio Lanza’s new book. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) takes as its central case study the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) and The Bulletin of Concerned Asian... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan (MerwinAsia, 2016) is a chronicle of the large, government-sponsored housing projects called danchi that were built during Japan’s high-growth years, roughly 1955 until the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Though only a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“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

From petty runs to organized trafficking, the illicit activity of smuggling on the China coast was inherently dramatic, but now historian Philip Thai has also identified China’s history of smuggling as a significant narrative about the expansion of state power. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small), The Pidgin Warrior is a moving, hilarious novel set in 1930s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25). This is scarcely surprising, for over... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures. Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate McDonald‘s Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) is a thoughtful and provocative study of the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism. McDonald’s work on Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan traces the changing political valences of space and the spatial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.  How are bodies reproduced, broken apart, and circulated?  And how do the representations of these processes help... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle C. Wang’s new book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) joins a growing body of scholarship on esoteric Buddhism in China. Her work is an important contribution for the way in which she draws together murals, portable paintings, ritual manuscripts, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a magnet for foreign traders. Anthropologist Gordon Mathews (with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang) chronicles... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Knowing about China,” Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey Wasserstrom note in the preface to China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), is today “an essential part of being an engaged citizen” (p. xvii), and this is a difficult statement to disagree with. Yet... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, who notes that cities like this “are experienced as disaggregated places, always already... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”), the trajectory that the government had mapped out for the modernization of the country, he called on his readers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo, Associate Professor of Korean language and culture at the University of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent years have brought a burgeoning interest in how highland people in mainland Southeast Asia live and communicate along and across the boundaries geographically assigned states whose lowland people and their rulers were once but are by now no longer so far away. In The Lisu: Far from the Ruler... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations, and Contestations (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), edited by Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, gathers authors from a variety of disciplines to examine the growing emphasis on heritage in contemporary China. Since China began its heritage turn in the 1990s, and especially since... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945. Man argues that the Cold War divide between communism and liberal democracy cast Asians into... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote on paper. And so the Han continue to have writing today. The Tibetan man wrote on an animal... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Often when people think of Tibetan Buddhism they have a limited vision of that social reality, perhaps one that imagines monks sitting in meditation or focused on the Dalai Lama. Rarely is the historical role of female Buddhist masters central to one’s understanding of contemporary Tibetan life. In Love Letters... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Drawing on vast material of both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources, Baldanza challenges conventional narratives that focus... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ji-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia University Press, 2017) reexamines the theory and literature of the tribute system,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exception of the pitcher, are all visually impaired. Founded by the National Beep Ball Association in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rethinking Japanese Studies. Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, 2018) is co-edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto. The book tries to look at the discipline of Japanese Studies from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of contexts, starting from the premise that – as the authors put... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a very interesting and timely book China and Global Value Chains: Globalization and the Information and Communications Technology Sector... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (UNC Press, 2016) offers an important revision to this literature by examining legal and social responses... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetry within the unique political and cultural context of Communist China. In this ambitious study, Admussen attempts not only to define prose poetry... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his latest book, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences published in 2017 by Princeton University Press, Craig Clunas puts to question the entire concept of “Chinese painting” by looking at how this category is in fact a creation of its viewers. The book, which expanded on the A. W. Mellon... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday spent ten years interviewing criminal defense attorneys throughout China in order to compile the evidence on the professional lives of criminal defense attorneys in the one-party authoritarian state that is modern China. They present what they found in Criminal Defense in China: The Politics... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji (Wisdom Publications, 2018), Shinshu Roberts focuses on the practical study of the inner self and perception of all phenomena through the famously complex work of Dogen Zenji, “Uji” (or being-time). In doing so, she illuminates aspects of how... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent monograph, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017), Anna Andreeva focuses on a complex network of religious sites, figures, and texts to help us better understand the way in which Japanese deities were worshipped in medieval Japan. In so... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the advent of computing in the 1950s – the book explores the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan’s remarkable post World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite the general perception that Daoism is simply an informal and carefree philosophical perspective, the Daoist tradition is a highly formalized spectrum of ritual practices and communal beliefs. Religious Daoism emerged within the rich second-century political and social milieu when challengers to official rulership offered alternative political structures to the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent monograph, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Bryan D. Lowe examines eighth-century Japanese practices that ritualized writing, or, in other words, conceptually and practically set sutra-transcription apart from other forms of writing. Drawing on a rich trove of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

In his recent book, The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), John Powers presents a comprehensive overview of propaganda employed by the People’s Republic of China related to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, showing not only how Han... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent monograph, Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Justin R. Ritzinger examines the cult of Maitreya as developed during the Republican period by the Chinese monk Taixu (1890-1947) and his circle. Drawing on previously unexamined sources,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2017), plenty of work... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remarkable few evaded capture and fought on against the Japanese. In MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction with nonwhite, non-Christian peoples, and that their experiences have had a profound impact on the development of religious and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since its invention, the Internet has become a fundamental part of our lives. Since the invention of social media, communicative technologies have changed our lives and influenced journalism and politics in ways that were unimaginable just ten years ago. In her book, Micro-blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, there is in addition a distinct, positive variety of moral shame a virtue that, as Bongrae Seok writes, “is not for losers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, joins New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled Education and Society in Post-Mao China (Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia, 2017). He co-authored the book along with Xiaodong Zeng, Professor at Beijing Normal University. The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dorothy Ko‘s new book is a must-read. Troubling the hierarchy of head over hands and the propensity to denigrate craftsmen in Chinese history, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China (University of Washington Press, 2017) explores the place of inkstones in the early Qing political... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shortly after the introduction of Catholicism into Korea in the late 18th century, Korea’s Confucian government began to persecute Catholics. Why would a Confucian government torture and kill the people it was supposed to protect and nurture? Why would Koreans turn to a religion that differed fundamentally from the established... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the invention of nature in its borderlands. A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Informed by theoretical engagements with Russian Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the preface to his new book, Timothy Cheek calls out a widespread tendency to focus on dissidents when engaging with Chinese intellectuals. (This is a problem insofar as we use these intellectuals as a mirror for our own concerns, hopes, and fears.) Instead, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto‘s new book explores these questions in a compelling study that brings together the public discourse on women in the Tokugawa period (including prescriptive literature,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carrie J. Preston‘s new book tells the story of the global circulation of noh-inspired performances, paying careful attention to the ways these performances inspired twentieth-century drama, poetry, modern dance, film, and popular entertainment. Inspired by noh’s practice of retelling stories in different styles and tenses, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Columbia University Press, 2016) collects and translates a range of works by Li Zhi, a fascinating and significant... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the start of the twentieth century Britain’s relationship with China was defined by the economic and political dominance Britain exerted in the country as an imperial power, a dominance that would ebb over the next three decades. In Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931 (Routledge, 2017), Phoebe Chow describes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quincy Carroll’s new novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel (Inkshares, 2015) follows the experiences of a handful of expats teaching English in China, simultaneously offering a compelling story and a peek into various ways of making a life from encounters with dislocation. Readers explore... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, scholarship on Burma, or Myanmar, has undergone a renaissance. Jayde Lin Roberts’ Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (University of Washington Press, 2016) is a bellwether of exciting new books to come, and a model for how they might be done. Although Roberts completed... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Madokoro’s new book is a timely and important study of movement across national borders, migrants, and the refugee label in the global Cold War. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016) offers critical historical insight into the problem of defining refugee and the significance... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The essays in Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup’s new edited volume, Recovering Buddhism in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2016), collectively make a compelling argument that Buddhism and Buddhists played important roles in the modern transformations of China from the twentieth century through today. Though history scholarship has, relatively... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin M. Jacob‘s new book proposes that we understand modern China as a national empire, and traces the strategies of difference that have consistently marked Xinjiang as a part thereof. Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (University of Washington Press, 2016) guides readers through a history of the institutions and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once broad in sweep and nuanced in analysis, Peckham’s work explores a series of world-changing disease outbreaks across from the eighteenth century through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of roughly 1933-1937, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Award-winning author, Pamela S. Turner discusses two new books, Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the Worlds Smartest Bird (HMH Books for Young Readers, 2016), and Samurai Rising: The Epic Life of Minamoto Yoshitsune (Charlesbridge, 2016). In Crow Smarts, Turner introduces scientist Dr. Gavin Hunt and provides a fascinating account... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to host the Olympics in Tokyo, to important wartime and postwar conferences... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Narratives of the Pacific War frequently examine the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf from the operational perspective, focusing on the desperate actions of the US Seventh Fleets escort carriers, Task Unit 77.4.3 (“Taffy 3”) against the much larger Japanese Center Force, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. The ensuing drama,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period. He wrote three popular novels Family, Spring, and Autumn, collectively... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding and accommodating cultural difference. Members of the Society of Jesus were... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Akiko Takenaka’s new book looks carefully at Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial, examining its role in waging war, honoring the dead, promoting peace, and building a modern national identity. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) pays special attention to the significance of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Song Chinese emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1126 CE) has long been regarded as a failure due to his dynasty’s defeat in their war against the Jurchens. In Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press, 2014), however, Patricia Buckley Ebrey offers a more nuanced interpretation of his life and reign. Ebrey provides readers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruling as he did during the Five Dynasties period of Chinese history, the emperor Mingzong (r. 926-933) has not received the same degree attention from historians as have many of his counterparts. In From Warhorses to Ploughshares: The Later Tang Reign of Emperor Mingzong (Hong Kong University Press, 2015), Richard... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Morgan Pitelka’s new book looks closely at the material culture of the Three Unifiers of the late sixteenth century in Japan– Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu–in order to foreground the politics of culture in an age of civil war. The chapters of Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectivication or, the emergence of self with and through ambient media... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bringing together secondary and primary sources in a wide range of languages, David Brophy’s new book is a masterful study of the modern history of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) joins what have usually been... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that limit and censor people–both ordinary citizens and musicians–from speaking out on sensitive political issues, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persistence of figures including Bian Que, Chunyu Yi, Liu Xiang, Zhang Ji, and more, The Art of Medicine in Early... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou, Professor, Department of Education, National Chengchi University, rejoins the New Books Network to discuss her newly edited volume, Chinese Education Models in a Global Age (Springer, 2016), co-edited with Jonathan Spangler, Doctoral Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. The book brings together a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kirk A. Denton‘s recent book explores the role of the state in China in shaping particular visions of the past through work in and with museums. Focusing on history museums in particular, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (University of Hawaii Press, 2014)... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. Pi-Ching Hsu’s new translation Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen L. Field‘s new translation and study of the Zhouyi offers an inspiring and fresh take that importantly differs from previous translators approaches to the text. The Duke of Zhou Changes: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Zhouyi (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015) serves both scholarly readers who come to it... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to explore the global effects of Chinas capitalist boom and the limit of that boom. In... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Rausch‘s recent work looks closely at newspapers and journalism in modern Japan, focusing especially on the nature and significance of local newspapers. Though the local newspaper in Japan accounts for nearly half the consumption of newspapers overall, it has not been taken up and studied in any systematic way.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. The headline read, “Tears and Hugs as 5 Abducted Japanese Go... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First things first: Matthew H. Sommer‘s new book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and/or the history of gender. Based on 1200 legal cases from the central and local archives of the Qing dynasty, and focusing on the rural poor rather than the elite,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Chinese Revolution was a profoundly theatrical event. Brian James DeMare’s new book explores the relationship between drama and political action in China, from the earliest era of communist Red Drama to the establishment of Mao’s cultural army and beyond. Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in Chinas Rural Revolution (Cambridge... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and script. Inspired, in part, by the work of Friedrich Kittler, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beverly Bossler‘s wonderful new edited volume is a must-read for anyone interested in histories of and with gender in China. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters (University of Washington Press, 2015) collects nine essays that each explore and speak to some aspect of a handful of key questions raised by... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Douglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnational histories as it shaped modern China and Japan. Clark is both historian and master storyteller in this work, crafting a study moves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) reframes how we understand the relationships between science and politics in history by looking closely at the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeffrey Wasserstrom‘s wonderful new book in the “China Specials” series at Penguin opens with two main premises. First, it is more important than ever to have “illuminating lenses through which to view the People’s Republic of China,” especially ones that help us make sense of the ways that the PRC... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Minsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classic…prose fiction of Korea.” Though Hong Gildong is a popular figure in modern Korean culture – a kind of Robin Hood... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs devoted to the topic in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements (Columbia University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ultimately matters? Pamela D. Winfield‘s recent award-winning monograph, Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel, and Tina Chen about Volume 1, Issue 2: Collecting Asias (Fall 2015), which includes – among... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (University of Washington Press, 2015) presents and proposes what it calls... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson‘s new edited volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Mao Zedong era (1949-1978). Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Harvard UP, 2015) collects a wonderful range of essays from top scholars across North America and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“You are a member of a minority group but do not know it. How is this possible?” Christopher Bondy’s new book explores this question in a study of the making of burakumin identity in the schools and communities of young people in modern Japan. Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Will Buckingham‘s new book is a wonderful cycle of stories that are inspired by and speak back to the Chinese Yijing, the Classic of Changes. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw Books, 2015) collects 64 stories, one for each hexagram in the Yijing. Each story is introduced by... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi‘s new book opens with a series of questions that animate the study. They include but are not limited to: What does being Han mean to those classified as Hanzu? What are the narratives of Han-ness today? What other collective identities matter to the Hanzu? What are their roles... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erica Fox Brindley‘s new book is a powerful study of the history of conceptions of ethnicity in early China that focuses on the Hua-xia and the peoples associated with its southern frontier (Yue/Viet). Informed by a careful accounting of extant textual, linguistic, and archaeological forms of evidence, Ancient China and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Miao Li, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and School of Philosophy and Social Development at Shandong University, joins New Books in Education to discuss Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (Routledge, 2015). Part of the Research in International and Comparative Education series, the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisong Liu‘s thoughtful new book is an important and insightful read for any of us who are currently engaged in conversations about supporting the increasing numbers of international students in the North American academy. Since the inception of open-door and reform policies in 1978, more than three million Chinese students... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mountain in central Japan that served as both a pilgrimage destination for aristocrats from the capital and as a site... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers, the rhythm of everyday life, and the shifting global conjuncture” and a wonderfully rich historical... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (with brief extensions earlier and later), Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Rea‘s new book explores five kinds of laughter that emerged from the tumultuous first decades of China’s twentieth century: jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (University of California Press, 2015) takes a playful approach to approaching play –... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between medicine and religion in this context. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nanxiu Qian, professor at Rice University, discusses her new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015). Qian argues that the role women played in the late Qing reform movements has heretofore been overlooked by historiography. Leading reformer... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roberta Wue‘s new book brings readers into the world of late Qing Shanghai, a center of art, culture, and entertainment. As artists fled to the city after the Taiping Rebellion, they helped create new ways of being an artist that emerged from new kinds of relationships between them, their audiences,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the differences between religion, magic, and spirituality? Over time, these categories have been articulated in a variety of ways across differing cultures. However, many assume that the multiple understandings are merely derivative of western assertions about secular modernity. In The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ink landscape painting was distinctive to the Song dynasty, and the Northern Song period was a special time for the medium. By the tenth century, this kind of painting emerged as a “scholars’ category” whose “values were especially worthy of support” in critical scholarly discourse, according to Ping Foong‘s fascinating... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Linda Rui Feng‘s beautiful new book shows us the Tang city of Chang’an as we’ve not seen it before. City of Marvel and Transformation: Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015) remaps Chang’an as a lived space and a city created by wandering... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom? In his new book, Joseph R. Dennis helps answer... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first two volumes were released this year. Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (Harvard University Press, 2015) collects essays by... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces practices and practitioners of natural knowledge from the late-sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends after his death, extending from a moment in which the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nineteenth-century Nanjing was a “city of virtues,” the raw material out of which a series of communities in China built the time and space of their utopian visions. Chuck Wooldridge‘s beautifully written and thoughtfully composed new book City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions (University of Washington... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press, 2015) is the first book-length study of friendship in the Chinese tradition. Focusing on the period from the 790s through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself.” Written for a broad audience, Chang’s Fateful Ties: A History... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai, Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo (Lexington Books, 2014) explores the ways that admitting to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution.” Building from this premise, Andrew G. Walder‘s new book looks at the ways that China was transformed in the 1950s in order to understand why and how Mao’s decisions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press, 2015) is organized in two major parts. The first part (Ch.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barak Kushner‘s new book considers what happened in the wake of Japan’s surrender, looking closely at diplomatic and military efforts to bring “Japanese imperial behavior” to justice. Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Harvard University Press, 2015) focuses on the aftermath of the Japanese... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionaries coming into the country. In their new book, A History of Korean Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsteen... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, home, and culture in modern Japan. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much of a pleasure to read as it will be to teach with.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carlos Rojas‘s new book is a wonderfully transdisciplinary exploration of discourses of sickness and disease in Chinese literature and cinema in the long twentieth century. As its title indicates, Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015) focuses particularly on what Rojas calls “homesickness,” a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and argues that this figure has been misunderstood by both Sinhala nationalists, who have appropriated him for their own political ends,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation of the Tibetan landscape since 1950, construing development as a “state project that is presented as a gift to the Tibetan people” especially... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Ruth Hayhoe, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, has dedicated her academic career to the study of Chinese education. Now, after several decades of becoming one of the most recognizable names in the field of international and comparative education, she has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eighteenth century, The Life of the Buddha (or more fully rendered, The Life of the Lord Victor Shakyamuni, Ornament... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brett Sheehan‘s new book traces the interwoven histories of capitalism and the Song family under a series of five authoritarian governments in North China. Based on a wide range of sources a range of sources including family papers, missionary archives, corporate records, government documents, newspapers, oral histories, novels, and interviews, Industrial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015) considers Dongtan, the Chongming Island... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of work spurred the creation of a new generation of autoworkers with increased bargaining power. At the same time, China entered the global competition in mass-producing automobiles at a stage... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent book, Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), John K. Nelson delves into the historical circumstances that have led to the declining fortunes of Japanese Buddhism and explores recent and ongoing attempts by Japanese Buddhist clerics to render Buddhism relevant to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Nylan and Griet Vankeerberghen have produced a landmark volume. Chang’an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press, 2015) collects 19 essays (plus an Introduction and an Afterword) devoted to exploring the built environment and archaeology of Han Chang’an, sociopolitical transformations in the late Western Han,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The development of higher education in Asia has been as dramatic as the region’s rapid economic rise. The landscape of this diverse and ever-changing sector is thoroughly explored in Asia: The Next Higher Education Superpower? (Institute of International Education [IIE] and the American Institute For Foreign Study Foundation, 2015). Dr.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christians, like other religious people, have to manage the relationship between their belief in supernatural forces and an afterlife on one side, and how those beliefs impact their daily life on the other. This was especially difficult for Korean Protestant Christians (and members of an indigenous religion influenced by Christianity... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work and a boon for scholars and teachers working in the field of modern Chinese studies. Waverings is the second work in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David A. Pietz‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to disappear anytime soon. Using a careful history of water and environmental management to inform our understanding of water-related challenges in contemporary China, Yellow River: The Problem of Water... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s not to love about Jie Li‘s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes by focusing on two physical spaces, both built in the early twentieth century by Japanese and British companies, and both located in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When one thinks of the connection of religion and imperialism in Japan, one automatically thinks first of Shintoism and second of Buddhism. Christianity does not usually figure into that story. However, Emily Anderson, in her new book Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury, 2014), shows how... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging into the history of the bookmaking craft, the author approaches these ancient texts primarily through the lens of their artistry, while simultaneously showing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wen Jin’s book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms (Ohio State Press, 2012), compares histories and modes of multiculturalism in China and the United States. Whereas many see few correlations between China’s ethnic policies and the multiculturalist policies of the U.S., Wen Jin brings these... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs from their first appearance in the third century to the eighth century, when printed editions of the canon took over the catalog’s role of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to be a martyr? What does it mean to be an apostate? How should we understand people who choose one or the other? These are the questions asked by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, in which he tells the story of Japanese Catholics and foreign... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) pays careful attention to a wide range of contexts of concern with nature... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah M. Allen‘s new book looks at the literature of tales in eighth- and ninth-century China. Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) situates Tang tales in the context of social story exchange among elite men. Allen’s work not only... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Zhuang in his encounter with a skeleton who comes back to life... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Byonghyon Choi‘s new book makes a key document of Korean and world history available in English in a volume that will be tremendously useful for both scholarship and teaching. The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2014) translates an important excerpt from The Veritable... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our interview with Kenneth M. Swope about his book, The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44 (Routledge, 2014), published through Routledge, is an effort to address an oversight in how New Books in Military History has generally overlooked both early modern history and works that have an exclusively non-Eurocentric... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom. Beginning with Victor Mair’s argument that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tamara Chin‘s new book is a tour de force and a must-read for anyone interested in early China, the history of economy, or inter-disciplinarity in the humanities. Focusing on the reign of Han Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 BCE), Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paola Iovene‘s new book is a beautiful exploration of visions of the future as they have shaped a range of texts, genres, and editorial practices in Chinese literature from the middle of the twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I love picking up a historical monograph in which the footnotes count for a quarter or more of the total pages. Most students don’t share this strange love of mine. I’m therefore always trying to figure out ways to bring in other sorts of works that will engage students without... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the Buraku situation in Japan and beyond. Taking readers on a journey from Lubbock, Texas to Tokyo, India, and back again, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China today attracts one of the largest foreign student populations in the world. In 1975, though, very few foreign students were allowed to study in then-isolated China, especially Western students. But, Dr. Peter Peverelli was a part of a small cohort of students who studied in Beijing Language Institute at... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his fascinating new book, Rian Thum explores the craft, materiality, nature, and readership of Uyghur history over the past 300 years. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press, 2014) argues that understanding Uyghur history in this way is crucial for understanding both Uyghur identity and continuing relationships... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Mostow‘s new book focuses on the reception and appropriation of these stories from the twelfth through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr. Ernest P. Young shows in his fascinating exploration of this issue in his Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Melek Ortabasi‘s new book explores the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a writer, folk scholar, “eccentric, dominating crackpot,” “brilliant, versatile iconoclast” and much more. The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) expands how we understand and evaluate his work... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice. In a series of chapters that showcase exceptionally thoughtful, virtuosic readings of a wide range of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Successive waves of migration brought thousands of Chinese laborers to Cuba over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coolie trade, which was meant to replace waning supplies of slaves, was but the first. In the twentieth century, a sugar boom in Cuba facilitated the entry of thousands more. Many of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard University Press, 2014) thus makes available to an English-reading audience a fascinating perspective on... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Clark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onward, but focuses primarily on the past 150 years. Although today at least thirty different... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Kee‘s new book is a gorgeous and thoughtful introduction to the history of contemporary art in Korea. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) traces the creation, promotion, reception, and rhetoric of the work produced by a constellation of artists creating large,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ken Brashier’s new book is another tour de force and must-read for scholars of Chinese studies. Public Memory in Early China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) offers a history of identity and public memory in early China. An extensive introductory chapter lays a foundation for the rest of the book... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first millennium. Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dharani... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces this history by focusing on the Miryang Pak family. The history of transformations in the family’s social status and geography parallels that of modern Korea, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chan-fang Yu‘s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded in the early 1980s, and discusses the appearance and development of this community within the context of rapidly changing social and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China has had an amazing developmental path over the past thirty years. Decade long double digit economic growth numbers along with more assertion on the international stage have led to some concern of a “Rising China”, one that may eventually threaten the status quo. But economic rise is not the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods in Japan. Stolz charts the transformations of an “environmental unconscious” lying at the foundation of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shengqing Wu’s gorgeous new book begins by exploring the image of the treasure pagoda to introduce readers to an aesthetics of ornamental lyricism in Chinese poetry at the turn of the twentieth-century. Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) then continues... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Todd Henry’s new book is a wonderful study of public space as a laboratory for producing the experiences and engines of colonial society. Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 (University of California Press, 2014) explores the forms of spatialization of colonial Keijō... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, there is no singular formula for a great teacher. So then, what makes a great teacher? Do those characteristics transcend culture? These questions and more are explored in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lara Netting’s new book explores the life, career, and work of one man as a window into the history and associated practices of “Chinese art” during a period of massive transformation in the China of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While reading A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo, argue that Protestant Christianity has played an important role in how East Asians... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The worlds of cinema and illustrated fiction are replete with exciting data for the historian of religion. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University Of Hawai’i Press, 2012), by author Jolyon Thomas, sets up a robust theoretical model for examining how the concept of religion is... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stardom has a history. Hideaki Fujiki‘s new book traces that history through a story of the transformations of Japanese film stars in the early twentieth century. Taking a deeply transnational approach to understanding the imbrication of film stardom and modernity in Japan, Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) is a deeply contextualized study of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and also a prolific writer. Christina Laffin‘s new book explores Abutsu’s life and written works, taking readers in turn through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “state” (guo), and mapping the Ming in terms of guo‘s is a way of mapping Ming space in units that had centers, but not boundaries. (In having many guo‘s,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wensheng Wang‘s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. In White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014), Wang re-evaluates how we understand this crucial period in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback edition 2014) is less a traditional biography than... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012) is a deeply international history of the Taiping Civil War that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert A. Rhoads, Xiaoyang Wang, Xiaoguang Shi, Yongcai Chang are the authors of China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Dr. Rhoads is the Director, Globalization and Higher Education Research Center at UCLA. Dr. Wang is Director of the Higher Education Institute... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment he had occupied for 20 years. His is just one of many voices of the precarity of everyday life and death that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature have written 1949 as a radical break, Xiaojue Wang‘s new book takes a different approach. Modernity with a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social phenomena that some people like to call ‘religion’ has long shaped Chinese culture. In the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of what constitutes ‘religion’ has been central to the construction of a modern nation. In this far reaching book, The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle King‘s new book explores the intertwined histories of imperialism and infanticide. Situating the histories of infant killing and abandonment in China within a broader history of these practices in western Europe and across Eurasia, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford UP, 2014) thus wrests the notion of female... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Wert‘s new book considers the construction of memory around the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration, individuals and groups whose reputations suffered most in the late nineteenth-century transition from Tokugawa to imperial rule. Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) explores the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (University of California Press, 2013) locates the emergence of a series of three “moral crusades” against... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tobie Meyer-Fong‘s beautifully written and masterfully argued new book explores the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurative) of the Taiping civil war in nineteenth-century China. Often known as the “Taiping Rebellion” in English, the war is most often narrated as the story of a visionary (Hong... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, film, visual and performance art, design, and architecture, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (Columbia University Press, 2014) uses the sinograph as a frame to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Christopher P. Hanscom explores literary modernism in the work of three writers who were central to literary production in 1930s Korea. After introducing a useful critique of the standard approach to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin A. Elman‘s new book explores the civil examination process and the history of state exam curricula in late imperial China. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2013) is organized into three major sections that collectively provide a careful, deeply researched, and elegantly written account of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect and control of the Confucian gentleman, the rationality of the modern scientist. In Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China (University of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press, 2014) explores the person and the reign of the eighth emperor of the Song Dynasty, who ascended the Song throne in 1100... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese cinema. A commentary on the history of modernity, the book considers how an aesthetics of shadow emerged from a Japanese modern that was fundamentally transnational. A fascinating history of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua A. Fogel‘s new book is a carefully researched and wonderfully thoughtful exploration of the transformations of an artifact as read through the transformations in the way that artifact has been understood historically. Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 C. E.: Relic, Text, Object, Fake (Brill, 2013) follows the biography... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s always a joy when I have the opportunity to talk with the author of a book that is clearly a game-changer for its field. In The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Cornell University East Asia Series, 2012), Scott Cook has given us a work that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), David Spafford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? In Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2013), Michael J. Hathaway explores these questions in a rich study... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, translation studies, and world literature. Comprising 100 chapters rendered across five volumes, including more than 800 named characters and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global circulation and emerges from it. It has depended on the live-ness of embodied performance while flourishing in the context of “dead” recordings.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The opening is the illumination of a grave as you, the reader, turn on a light to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film are today. In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900 (Stanford University Press,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals in the West enjoyed political participation and protection, people in Japan did not, and this was due largely to the absence of a distinction between public... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press, 2013), Ian Jared Miller explores this transformation and its reverberations in a fascinating... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those determinations?Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012)guides readers through the ecologies... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most exciting approaches in the contemporary study of China is emerging from work that brings together archaeological and historical modes of reading texts and material objects to tell a story about the past. In Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries Along the Yangzi River (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Rowan... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. In Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), John DiMoia explores emergence of that marketplace in the context... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does the everyday experience of Muslim minorities look like? We have often heard about what Muslims deal with in the West. But what about Muslim minorities in the East? This was one of the questions Paul O’Connor, professor in the Anthropology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces became a capitalist frontier in a new phase of industrial revolution. In Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (University of California... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle the newborn. It’s an arresting way to begin an inspiring new book by Fabian Drixler. Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bowties, Hello Kitty has inspired tributes from Lisa Loeb and Lady Gaga, and artistic renderings from Hello Kitty Nativity to Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels. In Pink Globalization:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China  (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) is a study of domestically produced, portable decorative arts in early modern China. Decorative objects connect us, visually and physically, to the world around us. In many ways they think with us, and an experience of pleasure... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Osburg‘s new book explores the rise of elite networks of newly-rich entrepreneurs, managers of state enterprises, and government officials in Chengdu. Based on extensive fieldwork that included hosting a Chinese TV show and spending many evenings in KTV clubs with businessmen who were entertaining clients, partners, and state officials, Anxious... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James A. Milward‘s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers.The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxford “A Very Short Introduction” series. The book is organized into six chapters that each take a different... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press, 2012) collects ten chronologically-organized chapters that each explore practices of health and healing in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013) traces a shift in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beverly Bossler‘s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries of transformations, it also offers a fascinating rethinking of the histories of neo-Confucian thought, of commercialization, and of the family in China. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the series provides surveys of Korean scholarship on fundamental issues in the study of early Korean history, archaeology, and art history. The volumes, produced... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan  (Stanford University Press, 2012), the zograscope not least among them. The book opens with Fukuoka’s account of stumbling upon a manuscript of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh‘s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2013) is also an important, innovative, and timely intervention into... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion has long only been vaguely understood, with Hollywood playing as great a role in shaping... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written, and thoughtful consideration of the emergence of “students” as a category in twentieth-century China. Urging us to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note generated a wide-ranging set of debates over the nature of obscenity, the definition of counterfeiting, and the freedom of artists amid significant transformations in Japanese state,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), Perry Link mobilizes more than three decades of reading, writing, listening, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities of democracy. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013) is based... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (SUNY Press, 2012) offers readers a history of harmony in early China. Brindley shows how the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is much to love about Jonathan Abel‘s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) brilliantly takes readers into the performance of different modes of censorship in the early and mid-twentieth century. Some practices of censorship by Japanese writers, readers, and authorities... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aminda M. Smith‘s fascinating new book traces the history of transformations in the way that the PRC understood social control, deviance, and thought reform. Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) excavates the histories of thieves, prostitutes, and beggars from a wide... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are some books that are so fundamental to work in an academic field that practitioners refer to them simply by the author’s last name. Many of us had respectfully and affectionately referred to Endymion Wilkinson‘s Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged (2000) simply as “Wilkinson” (or, “The Yellow... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anyuan was a town of coal miners. It was a place where local secret societies held power, where rebellion and violence were part of the life of local laborers, and where the Chinese Communist revolution was experienced especially early and particularly intensely. In her meticulously researched and elegantly narrated new... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It opens with a parakeet named Homer, and it closes with a dog named Hachiko. In the intervening pages, Barbara Ambros explores the deaths, afterlives, and necrogeographies of pets in contemporary Japan. Bones of Contention:Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) takes readers through the urban... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the literary culture of late Qing and early Republican China. In Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Texts have lives. They grow, travel, transform, fade, and are reborn into new and other lives. In The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012), Richard J. Smith has given us a wonderfully readable (and assignable, and shareable, and enjoyable) life of one of the most important texts in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gene Cooper‘s new book is a multi-sited ethnographic study of market and temple fairs in the region of Jinhua, a city on the east coast of China and the home of Hengdian, “China’s Hollywood.” The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire (Routledge, 2013) weaves together historical and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival and ethnographic methods, Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After coming to power in a series of violent and deceptive acts, including tricking his father into cuckolding the Emperor, Li Shimin went on to become a ruler whose reign as Emperor Taizong has been hailed as a model of good government throughout East Asia. Jack W. Chen‘s recent book... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do historians of East Asia sufficiently account for the role of religious communities in the construction of history? Of course, there are histories of the Taiping Rebellion, and groups like Soka Gakkai or Falungong. But have historians probed how these movements have shaped the history of China and Japan more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did the authors of the one of the most important Confucian ritual texts in early China recognize, explain, and cope with mistakes and dysfunction in ritual? The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism (Oxford University Press, 2012) brings readers into the intricacies of the text of the Liji. Michael... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christopher Bush offers a wonderfully trans-disciplinary account of modernism through the figure of the ideograph, or Chinese writing as imagined in the West. The beginning of the book introduces the ways... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jini Kim Watson‘s book links literature, architecture, urban studies, film, and economic history into a wonderfully rich account of the fictions of urban transformation in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Ranging from the colonial period to the late 1980s, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) is divided into two sections, devoted loosely to esoteric and exoteric realms of knowledge. The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Nugent‘s wonderful recent book will change the way you read. At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) will transform the way we think and write about medieval poetry in China. Nugent’s book urges... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom of religion to Christian missionaries. The challenge this request posed was based on the fact that prior to the nineteenth century Japanese language had no parallel terminology... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the 20thcentury, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performance medium. Shawn Bender‘s recent book takes us through the history and spaces of this art, from the stretching of animal skins to make its instruments through the seemingly incongruous... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire cultures or groups of peoples, and if so, how should that level be reconciled with that of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using the example of pingtan storytelling to reexamine the history of cultural reform in the People’s Republic of China, Qiliang He‘s new book integrates political history and performance studies to challenge some widely-held assumptions about the history of the arts in modern China. In Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and understandings of power. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) uses a trans-regional and transnational focus to explore the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful service in his careful, elegant, and accessible translation of Amino Yoshihiko‘s Rethinking Japanese History (Center for Japanese... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really could fight the Japanese. I recall building a model of one of their P-40... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine together in a common dialogue that also informs and is shaped by cutting-edge work in Science... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, they transformed Japan: what was a thoroughly traditional, quasi-feudal welter of agricultural estates became a modern industrial nation-state. Since... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to offer scholars across the humanities. The book looks at the experimental arts in postwar Japan in a study that ranges... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If New Books in East Asian Studies were an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe and if one of the perks that came along with being an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe were to ensure that certain books got major awards, then we would exercise that perk... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It is a compelling and engaging read, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in early China, the history of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using materials that range from poetry and fiction to historiography and film, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (Routledge, 2011) proposes a sharp critique of the way that China’s history from 1949-1979 has been understood and written in a wide variety of texts. Daniel Vukovich argues that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do walking backward, water calligraphy, and belting out popular songs in public have in common? All of them can be conceived as techniques for cultivating life, or yangsheng, and they are all featured in Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang‘s wonderful new book. Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers through a fascinating exploration of the politics, society, and culture of pre-1600 Japan. One of the wonderful things about... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Merry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author’s favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified. One thing I learned from reading Gail Hershatter‘s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizo : Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizo is a Buddhist Bodhisattva whose presence has become ubiquitous throughout Japan as the protector of travelers, women,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coherent treatment of the history and practice of Vietnamese medicine, but it’s also a wonderfully interdisciplinary collection of approaches that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, Márta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe.But other stars are visible only in certain lands: Yuna Kim, Barbora Strycova, Sebastien Chabal, Andres Guardado, Israel Folau, Buster... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Rowe‘s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones‘s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011). It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a truly brilliant study of the ways that a discourse of development was taken up from evolutionary works of Lamarck,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daqing Yang‘s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008). Common in Tibetan Buddhism is the story of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My Little League baseball career spanned the late Seventies and early Eighties. During those summers, I always set aside the afternoon in August when the championship game of the Little League World Series was broadcast on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” There was a thrill to watching kids my own... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yellow” and “Mongolian” East Asian identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Becoming Yellow incorporates a wide range of sources in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police. What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of Japanese Buddhist history, there is still much to be learned. Take... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, etc.). But fewer of us know about what might be called “Nuremberg East,” that is,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices