New Books in East Asian Studies

Laura Madokoro’s new book is a timely and important study of movement across national borders, migrants, and the refugee label in the global Cold War. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016) offers critical historical insight into the problem of defining refugee and the significance... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premiu...

The essays in Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup’s new edited volume, Recovering Buddhism in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2016), collectively make a compelling argument that Buddhism and Buddhists played important roles in the modern transformations of China from the twentieth century through today. Though history scholarship has, relatively... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...

Justin M. Jacob‘s new book proposes that we understand modern China as a national empire, and traces the strategies of difference that have consistently marked Xinjiang as a part thereof. Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (University of Washington Press, 2016) guides readers through a history of the institutions and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our...

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pre...

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once broad in sweep and nuanced in analysis, Peckham’s work explores a series of world-changing disease outbreaks across from the eighteenth century through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of roughly 1933-1937, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

Award-winning author, Pamela S. Turner discusses two new books, Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the Worlds Smartest Bird (HMH Books for Young Readers, 2016), and Samurai Rising: The Epic Life of Minamoto Yoshitsune (Charlesbridge, 2016). In Crow Smarts, Turner introduces scientist Dr. Gavin Hunt and provides a fascinating account... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices S...

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to host the Olympics in Tokyo, to important wartime and postwar conferences... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

Narratives of the Pacific War frequently examine the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf from the operational perspective, focusing on the desperate actions of the US Seventh Fleets escort carriers, Task Unit 77.4.3 (“Taffy 3”) against the much larger Japanese Center Force, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. The ensuing drama,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou...

Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period. He wrote three popular novels Family, Spring, and Autumn, collectively... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premi...

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium membe...

The transmission of a religion closely connected to a particular culture into a very different religious and cultural environment is a difficult act of translation in which a balance must be struck between remaining true to doctrine while understanding and accommodating cultural difference. Members of the Society of Jesus were... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppo...

Akiko Takenaka’s new book looks carefully at Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial, examining its role in waging war, honoring the dead, promoting peace, and building a modern national identity. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) pays special attention to the significance of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

The Song Chinese emperor Huizong (r. 1100-1126 CE) has long been regarded as a failure due to his dynasty’s defeat in their war against the Jurchens. In Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press, 2014), however, Patricia Buckley Ebrey offers a more nuanced interpretation of his life and reign. Ebrey provides readers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Ruling as he did during the Five Dynasties period of Chinese history, the emperor Mingzong (r. 926-933) has not received the same degree attention from historians as have many of his counterparts. In From Warhorses to Ploughshares: The Later Tang Reign of Emperor Mingzong (Hong Kong University Press, 2015), Richard... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Morgan Pitelka’s new book looks closely at the material culture of the Three Unifiers of the late sixteenth century in Japan– Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu–in order to foreground the politics of culture in an age of civil war. The chapters of Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppor...

Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) looks carefully at the phenomenon of ambient subjectivication or, the emergence of self with and through ambient media... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Su...

Bringing together secondary and primary sources in a wide range of languages, David Brophy’s new book is a masterful study of the modern history of the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Xinjiang. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) joins what have usually been... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Supp...

Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that limit and censor people–both ordinary citizens and musicians–from speaking out on sensitive political issues, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...

Miranda Brown‘s new book takes a sustained look at the role and significance of the medical fathers in the historiography of Chinese medicine. Paying careful attention to the ubiquity and persistence of figures including Bian Que, Chunyu Yi, Liu Xiang, Zhang Ji, and more, The Art of Medicine in Early... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a p...

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by...

Dr. Chuing Prudence Chou, Professor, Department of Education, National Chengchi University, rejoins the New Books Network to discuss her newly edited volume, Chinese Education Models in a Global Age (Springer, 2016), co-edited with Jonathan Spangler, Doctoral Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. The book brings together a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...