New Books in East Asian Studies

Corey Byrnes’ Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a work of considerable historical and disciplinary depth. Byrnes brings together the Tang dynasty poetry of Du Fu, Song travel writing about the same, late Qing cartographic ventures, texts written by Western travelers in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as contemporary Chinese...

Hakkenden is a classic work of Japanese literature: the story of the eight warriors, born from Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa, has been adapted to manga, movies and anime. And its tropes continue to pop up in Japanese popular culture today. But there’s so much story in Hakkenden that Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One―An Ill-Considered Jest (Cornell University Press: 2021), a new translatio...

Postcolonial feminist scholarship on the formation of gender relations primarily uses the analytic of colonizer-colonized dyad. In her new monograph, Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (Cambridge UP, 2020), Professor Hyaeweol Choi makes an important intervention by examining colonial Korea to propose a new framework that accounts for transnational encoun...

Political corruption remains … one of the most intriguing and challenging issues in social science research and public policy, perhaps because although it occurs in virtually all polities, its causes, patterns, and consequences often seem unique to each circumstance. – Cadres and Corruption by Xiaobo Lu (2000) Corruption is rampant in many authoritarian regimes, leading most observers to assume th...

In this account of the rapid erosion of liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and civil and political rights in Hong Kong, Mark L. Clifford's latest book provides an historically in-depth, vivid political analysis of the rapidly changing situation in Hong Kong. When the British ceased its period of colonial rule in 1997, and Hong Kong was returned to the governance of the People's Rep...

The anti-feminist movement in South Korea is gaining global attention. The story has been covered by many western mainstream news outlets including the New York Times, CNN, and BBC. Is this trend a new trend in South Korea? Where does this anti-feminist idea come from? In this episode, we invite Prof. Ju Hui Judy Han and discuss South Korean feminist history and gender politics. We discuss pre- an...

How has digital nationalism manifested amid the Covid-19 pandemic in China? How does anti-American sentiment in China feed into the disinformation campaigns in regard to the war on Ukraine? What lessons can we draw from Asian countries' handling of the public health crisis? Florian Schneider, Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Modern China at Leiden University, shares his research on the multiple...

Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization (Cornell UP, 2022) is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention—sub-Saharan Africa and Inner/Central Asia. Based on their fieldwork on Chinese infrastructure and resource-extraction projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten...

In this timely book, award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger, Louisa Lim, weaves together Hong Kong's fraught political and social history with her own first hand account of the spirit of an indelible city. In her latest book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, published by Riverhead Books in April 2022, Lim reflects on attempts at the erosion of Hong Kong identity,...

Present-day relations between ‘the West’ and each of China, Russia and North Korea are often fractious to say the least, yet today’s global atmosphere of menace or crisis just as often has to do with history as it does with contemporary disagreements. All states of course seek ‘usable pasts’ which may or may not be in conflict with one another, but as Katie Stallard shows in Dancing on Bones, lead...

Yi’s eyes soften as he watches Jiazhi sing a Chinese folk song with subtle, feminine movements in the film, Lust, Caution. The room fills with laughter when Ali Wong unabashedly enacts her vulgar, bodily desires. What is the affect created through these performances? At different localities and temporalities, an actress and a comedian Tang Wei and Ali Wong embody ever-failing meaning of Chinesenes...

A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea (U Hawaii Press, 2019) is the first book in any language to describe and analyze the history of all Japanese teas from the plant’s introduction to the archipelago around 750 to the present day. To understand the triumph of the tea plant in Japan, William Wayne Farris begins with its cultivation and goes on to describe the myriad ways in which...

Ban Wang's book China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (Duke University Press, 2022), traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The con...

In this timely and insightful new book, Markus Bell presents the case study of Korean-Japanese – “Zainichi” – who have escaped North Korea in the years following the end of the Cold War. Through building alliances and long-distance relationships, Zainichi returnees resist forced integration and push back against life-threatening political purges to forge new ways of belonging and, ultimately, surv...

In Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer (Naval Institute Press, 2019), authors Mathew Brazil and Peter Mattis present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage. An introduction-cum-reference guide, the book describes the institutions, operations, individuals, and ideology that have shaped modern China’s intelligence apparatus. On the podcast, we talk about the...

Forging Leninism in China: Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927–1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a re-examination of the events of the Chinese revolution and the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party from the years 1927 to 1934. Describing the transformation of the party as 'the forging of Leninism', Dr. Joseph Fewsmith offers a clear analysis of the developm...

Does the rise of China mean that studying Japan is inexorably declining? Many students become interested in Japan because of popular culture, such manga and video games: is this a good or a bad thing? In an era of Google Translate and nifty smartphone apps, do people still need to spend years and years learning Japanese? What kind of problems do prevailing notions of methodological nationalism cre...

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male s...

After Japan’s devastating defeat in World War II, by late 1945, local Japanese turned their energies towards creating new behaviors and institutions that would give young people better skills to combat repression at home and coercion abroad. They rapidly transformed their political culture – policies, institutions, and public opinion – to create a more equitable, democratic, and peaceful society....

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include s...

Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (Syracuse University Press, 2021), co-edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, offers an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural “feminisms” with “Chinese characteristics,” they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of C...

China has the reputation for being a strong security state. After the pro-democracy Tiananmen protests, the Chinese government moved to increase stability maintenance – and that approach is reflected in today’s suppression of social unrest in Xinjiang where somewhere between 800,000-2 million members of the Uighur minority have been interned in camps. Throughout the country, the government has mai...

The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge, 2021) examines the visual culture of Japan's transition to modernity, from 1868 to the first decades of the twentieth century. Through this important moment in Japanese history, contributors reflect on Japan's transcultural artistic imagination vis-a-vis the discernment, negotiation, assimilation, and assemblage...

Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford, 2022) tells the stories of men and women who have lived and worked in China from before the Communist era to the present. Their experiences provide unique insights and deeply human perspectives on issues that have shaped US engagement with the PRC: politics, diplomacy, education, science, business, art, law, journalism, and human r...

When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Nicole Elizabeth Barnes’s book, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945 (University of California Press, 2018), argues that women wh...