The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AI

While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corrido...

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In  Revolutionary Becomings ¸ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary mov...

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century.  Distant Shores  challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of E...

Nullius  is an award-winning anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a cornerstone of modern law, in the Indian case they are often a spectral presence. Kapila offers a detailed study of paradigms where proprietary relations have been eras...

A richly illustrated history of textiles in the Mughal Empire In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast array of textiles circulated throughout the Mughal Empire. Made from rare fibers and crafted using virtuosic techniques, these exquisite objects animated early modern experience, from the intimate, sensory pleasure of garments to the monumentality of imperial tents.  The Art of Cloth in...

In the 1920s, revolution, war, and imperialist aggression brought chaos to China. Many of the dramatic events associated with this upheaval took place in or near China's cities. Bound together by rail, telegraph, and a shared urban mentality, cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing formed an arena in which the great issues of the day--the quest for social and civil peace, the defense of popul...

In October 1934, the badly beaten Red Army set out on the Long March from southern and central China, leaving behind a rearguard to fight the overwhelming Nationalist government forces. Three bloody years followed, in which many guerrillas were killed, some abandoned the Revolution, and others deserted to the enemy. When survivors of the lost legions came down from their mountain hideouts in 1937,...

What role did South Korea play in shaping modern American evangelicalism? In this episode, we explore Helen Jin Kim’s Race for Revival , which uncovers the intricate and often overlooked relationship between American evangelicalism and South Korean Christianity during the Cold War. We examine how figures like Billy Graham and Bill Bright, along with organizations such as World Vision and Campus Cr...

In this episode, we dive into the concept of "lemon presidencies" in South Korea, exploring how Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye transformed their democratically elected roles into personalized regimes. We examine Park Geun-hye's controversial presidency, from her family history to her ties with alleged cult leaders, the Sewol Ferry disaster, and her eventual impeachment and imprisonment...

This is the final volume in a trilogy that examines the politics, personalities, economics, culture, and international relations of China from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. It seeks to answer the central question: Why did Chairman Mao Zedong launch the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which plunged China into chaos and almost destroyed its Communist Party? The Coming of the Cataclysm  starts with...

In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era. The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and...

The detailed portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and revolution and how it in turn shaped the revolutionary process. The authors spent a decade interviewing villagers and rural officials, exploring archives, and investigating villagers with diverse resources and cultural, traditions, and they vividly describe...

China's 1911–12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty that was overthrown―the Qing―was that of a minority ethnic group that had ruled China's Han majority for nearly three centuries, and that the revolutionaries were overwhelmingly Han...

Dive into the economic complexities of the US-China trade war with insights from the latest research by Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal. This episode explores the surprising findings of tariff pass-through rates, the distributional impacts on consumers and producers, and the broader implications for global trade dynamics. Perfect for anyone seeking to understand the nuanced interplay between two economi...

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus...

The vast majority of monasteries in Tibet and nearly all of the monasteries in Mongolia belong to the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, best known through its symbolic head, the Dalai Lama. Historically, these monasteries were some of the largest in the world, and even today some Geluk monasteries house thousands of monks, both in Tibet and in exile in India. In  Building a Religious Empire , Bren...

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific. The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attenti...

A Thousand Steps to Parliament  traces how the complicated, contradictory paths to political representation that women in Mongolia must walk mirror those the world over. Mongolia has often been deemed an “island of democracy,” commended for its rapid adoption of free democratic elections in the wake of totalitarian socialism. The democratizing era, however, brought alongside it a phenomenon that M...

How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In  Outsourcing Repression , Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted a...

This is a fascinating study of the Vietnamese experience and memory of the Vietnam War through the lens of popular imaginings about the wandering souls of the war dead. These ghosts of war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination and Heonik Kwon explores the intimate ritual ties with these unsettled identities which still survive in Vietnam today as well as...

Stories centering on the lovelorn ghost (Mae Nak) and the magical monk (Somdet To) are central to Thai Buddhism. Historically important and emotionally resonant, these characters appeal to every class of follower. Metaphorically and rhetorically powerful, they invite constant reimagining across time. Focusing on representations of the ghost and monk from the late eighteenth century to the present,...

Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not provides a striking new answer to the classic question of why Europe industrialized from the late eighteenth century and Asia did not. Drawing significantly from the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophist...

The definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s most brutal, yet least examined, episodes of genocide and detention The Killing Season  explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century―the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965–66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more th...

The Burmese army took political power in Burma in 1962 and has ruled the country ever since. The persistence of this government―even in the face of long-term nonviolent opposition led by activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991―has puzzled scholars. In a book relevant to current debates about democratization, Mary P. Callahan seeks to explain the extraordinary durab...

Explore the origins and evolution of nationalism with Imagined Nations , a podcast inspired by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and other key works on global modernity. Through discussions on print capitalism, colonialism, and the interplay between empires and international organizations, we uncover how maps, museums, and media shaped imagined national identities. Journey from the birth of...