New Books in Chinese Studies

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://ne...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premiu...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Sup...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a prem...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho...

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.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support o...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People’s Republic of China (Palgrave, 2019) 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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium memb...

Hoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Christopher 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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Su...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://n...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...

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... Learn more about...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. V...

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... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a...

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.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho...