New Books in East Asian Studies

Nationalism is pervasive in China today. Yet nationalism is not entrenched in China's intellectual tradition. Over the course of the twentieth century, the combined forces of cultural, social, and political transformations nourished its development, but resistance to it has persisted.  In World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021),  Xin Fan examines th...

Xiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. Dr. Chen argues that these three theatre artists laid the groundwork for Mao-era Chinese drama during the earlier Republic period, and that there is more continuity between the two periods...

The Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Brantly Womack from the University of Virginia about his new book Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order (Cambridge University...

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Stefano Pelaggi, Adjunct Professor at Sapienza University in Rome. The two discuss Dr Pelaggi’s most recent book, L’Isola Sospesa. Taiwan e Gli Equilibri del Mondo (The Suspended Island: Taiwan and the Balance of the World) published by LUISS University Press in 2022. In this engaging chat, Dr Pelaggi shares with the audience how he decided to...

In Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge UP, 2022), assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez explores the longue durée history of birth control and abortion in China from the Republican period to the present day. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, oral histories, posters, films, novels, and...

Buddhist cosmological history of the universe, history of Chinggis Khan, history of China, and history of the Mongols — The Precious Summary, written in 1662 by Sagang Sechen, is many things. As a whole, it is the most important work of Mongolian history on the period before the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty. The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty (...

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Ignatius Suglo discusses the book Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Thomas Chen. You’ll hear about: Author’s intellectual and professional trajectory that led him to the book; How to study Tiananmen Movement as a media event t...

If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China. It’s an inopportune start to four centuries of trade, diplomacy, imperialism, ideology–and a lot of personal griping between different Russian and Chinese leaders, as charted by Phi...

I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet I serve as dean of a large faculty of political science in a Chinese university that trains students and provincial cadres to serve the country as Communist Party officials: It’s typically a post reserved for members of the CCP, given the political sensitivity of the work. That’s part of the surprise. Th...

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving t...

Garrett Washington’s Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan (Hawai’i 2022) brings a fresh perspective to the question of Protestant Christianity’s outsized influence in modernizing Japan from almost the moment the centuries-long ban was lifted in the 1870s. Washington roots his research in the physical space of Protestant houses of worship in Tokyo, exploring the ways that the churches becam...

The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the opium trade — but not through the relatively well-trodden history of the ‘Opium Wars.’ Instead, in this wonderfully rich book Peter Thilly investigates the little known social history of the opium trade in coastal southern Fujian province. The Opium Business focuses on the relationship between...

How has China’s one-party system dealt with the country’s growing environmental issues? And what implications does its green turn have on people’s everyday realities? Virginie Arantes joins Petra Alderman, associate researcher at NIAS and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, to talk about her book China’s Green Consensus: Participation, Co-optation, and Legitimation that w...

Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that she had an easy out for any boring conversation: For the rest of my life, when I am ‘stalled’ conversationally, it would be a wonderful thing to fall back on: ‘Oh, I must tell you about the time I was captured by Chinese bandits.’ Aldrich was one of ma...

Today I talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022). Winston Churchill famously described Russia in 1939 as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But as Andrew Small correctly argues here, China’s path forward has often been laid out quite explicitly by its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping in speeches to the Com...

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Yan Sun, Professor of Chinese politics at Queens College and the Graduate Center, to discuss the origins of the ethnic divisions in China and their contemporary effects. Yan addresses the imperial administrative system and the historical incorporation of non-core peoples into it. Furthermore, she discusses the complexit...

Uncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura Dykstra’s Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard UP, 2022) shows, one relatively uncontested pole of political power is perfectly capable of generating uncertainty on its o...

On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000 residents in the Tōhoku region lost their lives, with many hundreds of thousands more injured, displaced, and left with horrific loss. Dr. Pilvi Posio shares her PhD research based on eight months of fieldwork in the town of Yamamot...

Jonathan Abel’s The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (U of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a history of our relationships to new media. The book centers on different modalities of mimesis and mediation and more as it explores the important transformation of “new media” into “the new real.” Abel describes this “new real” as the phase when the newer, better, faster, more rea...

History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China's Hidden Past (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), the author Robert J. Antony provides glimpses into China’s hidden past through the native’s point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, t...

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal statu...

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book...

Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 (Brill, 2022) focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-state by examining the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China. Based on untapped archives and diaries, Di Luo uncovers people’s strategic use of literacy and illiteracy in social interactions and explores the im...

A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet. Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2023) delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after near...