New Books in Chinese Studies

China re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the Myanmar side of the border and the Myanmar immigration authorities refused to open the border for fear of COVID surge. This has continued to affect the livelihood of Myanmar jewellers who used to travel to China to do business. In this episode, Julie Yu...

Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over time. From the earliest historically recorded systems of segmentary lineage to the incorporation first into local fiefdoms and then into t...

Hung-Yok Ip's Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence ( Lexington Books, 2022) examines Mohism as a movement in early China, focusing on the Mohists’ pursuit of power. Fashioning themselves as grassroots activists, the Mohists hoped to impact the elite by gaining entry in its community and influencing it from within. To create a less violent world, they deployed strategies of...

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed militar...

In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was inten...

What does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they st...

The late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries all sought to find ways to shape China’s future. For many, as explored in Daniel Barish’s new book, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912 (Columbia UP, 2022), the solution lay not outside the Qing but within it...

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Bill McGrath, a historian of Tibetan Buddhism and medicine. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on this subject, and we get deep into the weeds in an academic conversation about traditional Tibetan medicine, the category of Buddhist medicine, and Bill's perspectives on magic, religion, and science. We also reminisce about the time that...

Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade impact the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands? Annuska Derks and Jean-Francois Rousseau, co- editors with Sarah Turner of the book Fragrant Frontier Global Spice Entanglements in the Sino Vietnamese Uplands, joined Ju...

How should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nuns, monks, and devotees on mountainsides in Baoshan, north central China, and through them, the soteriology of Buddhism in the medieval world. The convents have vanished and the stones weathered, but the skillful work in maintaining co-constitutive rel...

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) w...

On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor. Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong K...

For decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics--until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up.  Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China (Oxford UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideo...

Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despi...

Comparing Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism by Jingjing Li (Bloomsbury, 2022) starts its investigation with a longstanding question in the comparative studies of phenomenology and Yogacara. While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: ph...

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survive...

In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical frame through which to understand discourses of globalization: the so-called Chinese Atlantic. Elaborating on and complicating various Atlantic discourses (among them Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”), Metzger follows the flows of Chinese labor and capita...

Ying-chen Peng’s Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making is a beautiful new volume on late Qing imperial art practice from Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2023). Peng’s book, rigorously researched and richly illustrated, presents a revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager through an analysis of her patronage and participation in making art. Each chapter follows Cixi’s her...

In 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family...

The first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2020) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yu...

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness...

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act...

Why do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. International institutions shape the cho...

This week, RBI Director John Torpey talked with William Hurst, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University, about the origins of the protests in China, how they differ from those in 1989, and the possibilities of regime change. Hurst delves into the mobilization and contentious politics of China and its local-central interplay, where protesters act as rational actors who use different s...

Entitled People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown’s new book focuses upon the ways in which ethnic difference is writ through the banalities of everyday life: who one trusts, what one eats, where one shops, even what time one's clocks are set to (Xinjiang being perhaps one of the only places where...