New Books in Chinese Studies

Who are the Wa of Myanmar and how, in three decades, have they built a force that is now the largest non-state military actor in Asia-Pacific? How does China’s economic, political, and military support for the Wa factor into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative? What role might the Wa play in the unfolding political crisis in the wake of the February 1, 2021 coup in Myanmar, and Covid-19 pandemic?...

In Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration (Routledge, 2021), Carlos M. Piocos explores the politics of gendered labor migration in Southeast Asia through the stories and perspectives of Indonesian and Filipina women presented in films, fiction, and performance to show how the emotionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women's social movements in S...

European Decadence, a controversial artistic movement that flourished mainly in late-nineteenth-century France and Britain, has inspired several generations of Chinese writers and literary scholars since it was introduced to China in the early 1920s. Translated into Chinese as tuifei, which has strong hedonistic and pessimistic connotations, the concept of Decadence has proven instrumental in mult...

In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese...

The widely acclaimed films of Wong Kar-wai are characterized by their sumptuous yet complex visual and sonic style. This study of Wong’s filmmaking techniques uses a poetics approach to examine how form, music, narration, characterization, genre, and other artistic elements work together to produce certain effects on audiences. Bettinson argues that Wong’s films are permeated by an aesthetic of se...

Today I spoke to Nick R. Smith to talk about how China's expansive new era of urbanization threatens to undermine the foundations of rural life, which he writes about in his recently published book The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (U Minnesota Press, 2021). Centered on the mountainous region of Chongqing, which serves as an experimental site for the country's new ur...

In the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both...

Laurence Coderre’s Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China (Duke UP, 2021) is an exciting book that considers Chinese socialist culture seriously in terms of materiality and theory by tracing the contours of Maoist China through the heretofore unexpected lens of the commodity and consumerism. In Coderre’s book, the “newborn socialist thing,” a critical concept developed by theorists...

Mozina’s Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice (U Hawaii Press, 2021) weaves together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, inviting readers into the religious world of Daoist practice in today’s south China by exploring one particular ritual called the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin, as practiced in central Hunan province. Performed as the first public ri...

To call the hundred years that straddle the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC. Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960, published by Columbia University Pres explores this history...

At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China (U Washington Press, 2021) explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeople used po...

What is the impact of Internet technology communication in China? How do Chinese people view "privacy" differently from the western perspective? How is the newly passed China's Personal Information Protection Law going to impact people's lives? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Elaine Yuan, an Associate Professor in the Departmen...

In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 (Cornell University Press, 2021), Ying Jia Tan explores the fascinating politics of Chinese power consumption as electrical industries developed during seven decades of revolution and warfare. Tan traces this history from the textile-factory power shortages of the late Qing, through the struggle over China's electrical industries during its civi...

On the podcast today, I am joined by Minhua Ling, Assistant Professor in the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to talk about her book, The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant youth coming of age on Shanghai’s edge, which was published in 2020 by Stanford University Press. After three decades of massive rural-to-urban migration in China, a burgeoning population of over 35...

Erin Y. Huang’s Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke UP, 2020) is an expansive and ambitious book that explores the affective territory of “neoliberal post-socialist China” as it manifests in contemporary Chinese (language) cinema. Pushing beyond the geographic boundaries of the PRC and the confines of art cinema, Huang’s book reads the post-socialist conditio...

One would think that comparing civilizations as far removed in time and space as Ancient Egypt and Ancient China might not reveal much. Yet Professor Tony Barbieri’s Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021) gleans much from a deeply-researched comparison of political structures, diplomatic relations, legal systems, ideas of the afterlife, an...

Howard chats with Dang Qun, one of the three founding partners of Beijing-based MAD architects, about aesthetics, history, cultural distinctiveness and architecture's unique balance of the concrete and ethereal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Examining the Green Party Taiwan (GPT) since its establishment through the aftermath of the most recent national elections in January 2020, Dafydd Fell’s Taiwan’s Green Parties: Alternative Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2021) focuses on Taiwan’s most important movement party over the last two and a half decades. Despite its limited electoral impact, its leaders have played a critical role in a ra...

Liang Luo's book The Global White Snake (U Michigan Press, 2021) examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreo...

Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949 (Cornell UP, 2021) explores a fascinating archive of Sino-Malay texts – writings produced by the Chinese community in the Malay language – in Indonesia. It demonstrates the myriad ways in which the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia resorted to the press for their education, legal and medical advice, conflict resolution, and entertai...

'I broke a law simply by being born.' In the late 1980s, Shen Yang was born during the fiercest years of China's One-Child Policy. As the second daughter of the family, she was a massive liability - an excess child, a product of illegal birth. From being raised by her grandparents in a remote village as soon as she was born, to being whisked away to her aunt's home in a distant faraway city, Shen...

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 (Co...

In this episode, Camilla T.N. Sørensen joins Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS for a conversation about the Indo-Pacific region as seen from a Danish and broader European perspective. Camilla was recently tasked by the Danish government to provide an assessment of current development trends in the Indo-Pacific ahead of a forthcoming new Danish foreign and security policy. Apart from discussing the sco...

We think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today. Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China...

In the extreme north of Laos, in Phongsali Province, lies a tiny village home to around 24 households. Until recently it was a monoethnic Khmu village. The Khmu have had a historically ambivalent relationship to the national majority in contemporary Laos. It’s also home to the Akha, another ethnic group that have been described as state evaders seeking to avoid lowland politics and who migrated to...