New Books Network

New Books in Chinese Studies

Arts EN ↓ 1023 episodes

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠ newbooksnetwork.com ⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠ https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ ⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Sup...

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Aminda M. Smith, “Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) 19.03.2013 1:12:41

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...

Elizabeth J. Perry, “Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition” (University of California Press, 2012) 05.03.2013 1:10:30

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 Support our...

Gene Cooper, “The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire” (Routledge, 2013) 10.01.2013 1:15:21

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 Support our show by becoming a premium m...

Christopher Bush, “Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media” (Oxford UP, 2010) 13.11.2012 1:19:23

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 megaphon...

Shih-Shan Susan Huang, “Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) 31.10.2012 1:10:21

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....

Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) 13.10.2012 1:15:33

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 Support our show...

Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012) 13.09.2012 1:08:33

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 c...

Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings” (Bantam Books, 2012) 30.08.2012 55:17

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksn...

Kenneth Brashier, “Ancestral Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) 17.08.2012 1:15:15

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnet...

Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011) 11.08.2012 1:09:47

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 Support our show by becomi...

Daniel Vukovich, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.” (Routledge, 2012) 17.07.2012 1:15:57

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 Support o...

Xiaofei Tian, “Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) 23.05.2012 1:08:01

Xiaofei Tian‘s Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their... Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011) 23.05.2012 1:16:10

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 Support our show by becoming a pre...

Xiaofei Tian, "Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China" (Harvard UP, 2011) 23.05.2012 1:06:16

Xiaofei Tian's Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their experiences of dislocation over land an...

Rowan K. Flad, “Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China” (Cambridge UP, 2011) 27.04.2012 1:13:43

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad‘s Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Rowan K. Flad, "Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China" (Cambridge UP, 2011) 27.04.2012 1:11:58

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad's Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China's Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case stud...

Thomas Mullaney, “Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China” (University of California Press, 2011) 02.04.2012 1:42:41

In telling a clear story about the emergence of ethnic categories in modern China, Tom Mullaney‘s Coming to Terms With the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2011) ranges across Saussurean linguistics, census reports, oral histories, and the historiography of laboratory science. Mullaney uses a careful,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010) 24.02.2012 1:29:12

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 Support our show by becoming...

Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011) 16.02.2012 1:28:33

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 Support our show by becoming a pr...

Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011) 01.02.2012 1:36:31

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 Support our...

Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011) 24.01.2012 1:25:33

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 Support our show by becoming a premium...

Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010) 01.11.2011 1:12:31

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 Supp...

Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) 31.05.2011 58:38

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/adchoi...