New Books in East Asian Studies Podcast

On Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" from 2022-10-06T08:00

We don’t even know the real name of the 11th century author Murasaki Shikibu. But we do know that her book, The Tale of Genji, is arguably one of the most influential Japanese texts to date. Genji ...

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On Inazō Nitobe's "Bushido: The Soul of Japan" from 2022-08-25T08:00

Nitobe Inazō wanted to explain Japan to Westerners, particularly morality as it is taught in Japanese society. He was born a Samurai in 1862. In his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Inazō Nitobe ex...

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On "The Story of the Stone" from 2022-08-04T08:00

The 1750s are remembered as a high point of China's Qing Dynasty: a time of power, prestige, and social harmony. But The Story of the Stone paints a different picture: one of harmful traditions, po...

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Michael C. Davis, "Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Imagine you live in a freewheeling city like New York or London – one of the world’s leading financial, educational, and cultural centres. Then imagine that one of the world’s most infamous author...

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Minjeong Kim, "Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and "Multiculturalism" in Rural South Korea" (U Hawai’i Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Studies on marriage migration often portray marriage migrants as victims of globalization and patriarchy. Although there are intersecting oppressions among female migrant workers, the tendency to c...

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Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from th...

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Hank Glassman, “The Face of JizÅ?: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizo : Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizo is a Buddh...

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Aubrey Menard, "Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East" (PRH SEA, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mongolia is sometimes seen as one of the few examples of a successful youth-led revolution, where a 1990 movement forced the Soviet-appointed Politburo to resign. In Young Mongols: Forging Democrac...

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Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the past decade alone, more than ten million corpses have been exhumed and reburied across the Chinese landscape. The campaign has transformed China's graveyards into sites of acute personal, so...

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Andrew McKevitt, “Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017), Andrew McKevitt explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future look...

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Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Jap...

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Charlotte Eubanks, "The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2019) examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a mi...

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Frank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you mention Japanese War crimes in World War Two, you’ll often get different responses from different generations. The oldest among us will talk about the Bataan Death March. Younger people, c...

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Terry Kleeman, “Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the general perception that Daoism is simply an informal and carefree philosophical perspective, the Daoist tradition is a highly formalized spectrum of ritual practices and communal belief...

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Laurence Monnais, C. Michele Thompson, and Ayo Wahlberg, “Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coher...

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Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound...

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Bryan D. Lowe, “Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent monograph, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Bryan D. Lowe examines eighth-century Japanese practices ...

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Andrew Field, “Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954” (The Chinese University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into t...

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Christopher Lupke (trans.), "A History of Taiwan Literature" (Cambria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ye Shitao was a Taiwanese public intellectual who rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. His encyclopedic A History of Taiwan Literature was published in 1987, the same yea...

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Kristian Petersen, “Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen, Assistant Professor of Religious St...

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Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 introd...

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Alan Chong, "Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Political scientists Alan Chong and Quang Min Pham bring with their edited volume, Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), originality as well as dimens...

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John Powers, “The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), John Powers presents a comprehensive overview ...

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Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ri...

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C. Chan and F. de Londras, "China’s National Security: Endangering Hong Kong’s Rule of Law?" (Hart, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On July 1, 2020, China introduced a National Security Law into Hong Kong partly in an attempt to quell months of civil unrest, as a mechanism to safeguard China’s security. In this new book, China’...

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Justin R. Ritzinger, “Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent monograph, Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Justin R. Ritzinger examines the cult of Maitreya as ...

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Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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),...

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John W. Traphagan, "Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan" (Cambria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small...

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Bradley Camp Davis, “Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands” (U of Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in I...

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Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Chris Fenton, "Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business" (Post Hill Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For seventeen years, Chris Fenton served as the president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a multi-billion-dollar global media company headquartered in Beijing. He has produced or supervi...

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Peter Eisner, “MacArthur’s Spies: The Solider, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in WWII” (Viking, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remark...

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Dennis Frost, “Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, MÃ¡rta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe.But ot...

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Takeshi Morisato, "Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019) by Takeshi Morisato is a book that brings together the work of two significant figures in contemporary philosophy. By cons...

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Albert Wu, “From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction wit...

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Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more ...

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Sam van Schaik, "Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages" (Shambala Publications, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As far back as we can see in the historical record, Buddhist monks and nuns have offered services including healing, divination, rain making, aggressive magic, and love magic to local clients. Stud...

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Eileen Le Han, “Micro-Blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its invention, the Internet has become a fundamental part of our lives. Since the invention of social media, communicative technologies have changed our lives and influenced journalism and po...

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Mark Rowe, “Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Rowe‘s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism ...

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Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultura...

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Bongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, the...

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Andrew F. Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones‘s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011). It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a ...

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Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving f...

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Edward Vickers, “Education and Society in Post-Mao China” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, joins New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, entitled Education and Society in Post-Mao China (Routle...

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Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daqing Yang‘s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of sci...

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Karl Gerth, "Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised par...

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Dorothy Ko, “The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China” (U. of Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dorothy Ko‘s new book is a must-read. Troubling the hierarchy of head over hands and the propensity to denigrate craftsmen in Chinese history, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in...

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Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Joshua Esler, "Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese: Mediation and Superscription of the Tibetan Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Society" (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While Tibetan Buddhism continues to face restrictions and challenges imposed by the state in contemporary China, it has in fact entered mainstream Chinese society with a growing middle-class and ev...

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Don Baker, “Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea” (U. Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shortly after the introduction of Catholicism into Korea in the late 18th century, Korea’s Confucian government began to persecute Catholics. Why would a Confucian government torture and kill the p...

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Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man wh...

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Brian R. Dott, "The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In China, chiles are everywhere. From dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, Chinese culture and the chile pepper have been intertwined ...

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Jonathan Schlesinger, “A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Schlesinger‘s new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and the inven...

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Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the A...

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James Carter, "Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai" (Norton, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shanghai’s status as a bustling, international place both now and in the past hardly needs much introduction, although the centrality of horse racing to the earlier incarnation of the city’s cosmop...

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Roy Bing Chan, “The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature” (U. Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period throug...

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Andrew Morris, “Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My Little League baseball career spanned the late Seventies and early Eighties. During those summers, I always set aside the afternoon in August when the championship game of the Little League Worl...

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Zuraidah Ibrahim, "Rebel City: Hong Kong's Year of Water and Fire" (World Scientific, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In June of 2019, a proposed amendment to Hong Kong’s Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, sparked widespread protests across the region. Protestors saw in the bill a threat to the judicial independence th...

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Timothy Cheek, “The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the preface to his new book, Timothy Cheek calls out a widespread tendency to focus on dissidents when engaging with Chinese intellectuals. (This is a problem insofar as we use these intellectua...

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Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book...

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Brian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainl...

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Marcia Yonemoto, “The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan” (U of California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto‘s new book explores these questions in a compelling study...

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Michael Kevaak, “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yel...

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Ann-elise Lewallen, "The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan" (U New Mexico Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (University of New Mexico Press) is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on Ainu identity and settler colo...

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Carrie J. Preston, “Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carrie J. Preston‘s new book tells the story of the global circulation of noh-inspired performances, paying careful attention to the ways these performances inspired twentieth-century drama, poetry...

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Lee Ambrozy, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Anim...

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Sean Roberts, "The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s new episode, we speak with Sean Roberts about his brand new book The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). Roberts i...

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Li Zhi, “A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Wr...

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Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this att...

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Steven Heine, "Readings of D?gen's 'Treasury of the True Dharma Eye'"(Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Sh?b?genz?) is the masterwork of D?gen (1200–1253), founder of the S?t? Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist co...

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Phoebe Chow, “Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the start of the twentieth century Britain’s relationship with China was defined by the economic and political dominance Britain exerted in the country as an imperial power, a dominance that wou...

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Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 introd...

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Sören Urbansky, "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often lose out...

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Quincy Carroll, “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel” (Inkshares, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Quincy Carroll’s new novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel (Inkshares, 2015) follows the experiences of a handful of expats teaching English in China, simultaneously offeri...

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Michael Auslin, “Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cul...

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Harriet Evans, "Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest nei...

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Jayde Lin Roberts, “Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, scholarship on Burma, or Myanmar, has undergone a renaissance. Jayde Lin Roberts’ Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (University of Washington Press, ...

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Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Goering, Albe...

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Mary Augusta Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Powe...

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Laura Madokoro, “Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 W...

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Adam Broinowski, "Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and After the Cold War" (Bloomsbury 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and After the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2016), Adam Broinowski analyzes the emergence of Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) in the ...

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Richard Jean So, “Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network” (Columbia University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 bet...

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Philip Thai, "China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assista...

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Chris Miller, “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Com...

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Xiaoqiao Ling, "Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As much of the world’s population is currently discovering, living through a historical cataclysm is a more common fact of human existence than one might think. Perhaps one reason why this is easil...

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Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup, eds., “Recovering Buddhism in Modern China” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Bu...

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David G. Atwill, "Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960" (U California Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Centering on the Tibetan Muslims (the Khache) from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 (Universi...

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Justin M. Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Ting Zhang, "Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How could a peasant in Shandong in the Qing dynasty come to know enough about a specific law that he felt confident enough to kill his own wife and his lover’s husband and think that he could get a...

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Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China” (U. California Press, 2014 reprint) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 fi...

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Post Script: A Deep Dive on China from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s begins a new set of podcasts from New Books in Political Science called POST-SCRIPT. Lilly Goren and I invite authors back to the podcast to react to contemporary political developments tha...

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Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Daniel P. Aldrich, "Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of T?hoku mad...

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Kate Merkel-Hess, “The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Recons...

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Nozomi Naoi, "Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nozomi Naoi’s Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length English-language study of one of Japan’s iconic twenti...

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Pamela S. Turner, “Crow Smarts/Samurai Rising” (HMH/Charlesbridge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 M...

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Rebecca E. Karl, "China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History" (Verso, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a...

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Jessamyn R. Abel, “The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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,...

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Mark A. Nathan, "From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation in Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the Mountains to the Cities A History of Buddhist Propagation in Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), written by Mark A. Nathan, is a history of P’ogyo (Buddhist Propagation) on the Korea...

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John Prados, “Storm Over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy” (NAL, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Uni...

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Bo Mou, "Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contributors to?Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and seman...

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Kristin Stapleton, “Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 i...

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Mayfair Yang, "Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Re-enchanting Modernity: Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press, 2020), Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life af...

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Ellen Widmer, “Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Gregory Afinogenov, "Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The ways in which states and empires spy on and study one another has changed a great deal over time in line with shifting political priorities, written traditions and technologies. Even on this hi...

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Liam Brockey, “The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Eugenia Lean, "Vernacular Industrialism in China"(Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkere...

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Akiko Takenaka, “Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. Yasuku...

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Andreas Fulda, "The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The key question in The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge, 2020), is to what extent political activists in these three domi...

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Patricia Buckley Ebrey, “Emperor Huizong” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, 2...

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Yuhang Li, "Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did Buddhist women access religious experience and transcendence in a Confucian patriarchal system in imperial China? How were Buddhist practices carried out in the intimate settings of a boudo...

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Richard L. Davis, “From Warhorses to Ploughshares: The Later Tang Reign of Emperor Mingzong” (Hong Kong UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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. ...

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Crystal Mun-hye Baik, "Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique" (Temple UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This interview coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Korean War, a war that, as Baik reminds us, has not officially ended. How are the particularities of the Korean War, as an unended war, exp...

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Morgan Pitelka, “Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 foreg...

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Takashi Miura, "Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, we talk to Takashi Miura, assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, about his book Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in...

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Paul Roquet, “Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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)...

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Gina Anne Tam, "Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a contin...

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Mark R. E. Meulenbeld, “Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (Fe...

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He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dy...

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David Brophy, “Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Xinji...

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Macabe Keliher, "The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bringing attention to the importance of li (an articulated system of social domination and political legitimization, consisting of rituals, ceremonies, and rites) as the foundation of the Qing poli...

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Noriko Manabe, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 li...

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Michael Schuman, "Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World" (PublicAffairs, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for gr...

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Miranda Brown, “The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 persisten...

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Charlotte Bruckermann, "Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China" (Berghahn Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Charlotte Bruckermann about her new book Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China (Berghahn Books, 2019). Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic tran...

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Susan Turner Haynes, “Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization” (Potomac Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 nucle...

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John Harney, "Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Ide...

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Chuing Prudence Chou and Jonathan Spangler, eds. “Chinese Education Models in a Global Age” (Springer, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Ag...

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Brian DeMare, "Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the countryside whe...

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Kirk A. Denton, “Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kirk A. Denton‘s recent book explores the role of the state in China in shaping particular visions of the past through work in and with museums. Focusing on history museums in particular, Exhibitin...

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Frederik H. Green, "Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic" (Stone Bridge Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of no...

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Pi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Laughs’: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour” (Brill, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kin...

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Elisheva A. Perelman, "American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan" (Hong Kong UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis...

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Mingwei Song, “Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Stephen L. Field, “The Duke of Zhou Changes: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Zhouyi” (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen L. Field‘s new translation and study of the Zhouyi offers an inspiring and fresh take that importantly differs from previous translators approaches to the text. The Duke of Zhou Changes: A ...

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Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common...

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Ho-fung Hung, “The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to e...

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Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of...

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Anthony Rausch, “Japan’s Local Newspapers: Chihoshi and Revitalization Journalism” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anthony Rausch‘s recent work looks closely at newspapers and journalism in modern Japan, focusing especially on the nature and significance of local newspapers. Though the local newspaper in Japan ...

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Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, "Branding Japan’s Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku" (U Hawaii Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Yasuhara Miho’s Branding Japan’s Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores historical and contemporary practices of place branding through...

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Robert S. Boynton, “The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project” (FSG, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a p...

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Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking ??kyamun...

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Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan mig...

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Matthew H. Sommer, “Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

First things first: Matthew H. Sommer‘s new book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and/or the history of gender. Based on 1200 legal cases from the central and ...

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Yujie Zhu, "Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China" (Amsterdam UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The drums beat, an old man in a grand robe mutters incantation and three brides on horseback led by their grooms on foot proceed to the Naxi Wedding Courtyard, accompanied, watched and photographed...

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Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social co...

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Brian James DeMare, “Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in Chinas Rural Revolution” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Chinese Revolution was a profoundly theatrical event. Brian James DeMare’s new book explores the relationship between drama and political action in China, from the earliest era of communist Red...

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Wesley C. Robertson, "Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language ...

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Diana Fu, "Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? Diana Fu’s nuanced ethnography of Chinese labor organizations demonstrates how grassroots non...

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Seth Jacobowitz, “Writing Technology in Meiji Japan” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and scr...

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Theresia Hofer, "Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform (University of Washington Press, 2018) is the first full-length ethnography of Tibetan medical practitioners (amchi) in central Ti...

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink" (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast was recorded on May 21st, 2020 – the same day that the Chinese government proposed new national security laws that would give China greater control over Hong Kong. What motivates these...

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Beverly Bossler, ed., “Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beverly Bossler‘s wonderful new edited volume is a must-read for anyone interested in histories of and with gender in China. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters (University of Was...

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Bill Sewell, "Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45" (UBC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens to everyday-life in a city when it becomes subsumed into an empire? Who becomes responsible for the everyday building and management of the new imperial enclave? How do local residents...

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Johan Elverskog, "The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia" (U Penn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Challenging the popular image of Buddhism as a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment, Dr. John Elverskog’s new monograph, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (U...

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Douglas Clark, “Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943)” (Earnshaw Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnation...

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Benno Weiner, "The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier (Cornell University Press, 2020) Benno Weiner provides an in-depth study of what happened when the Chinese Revolution came to Amdo, a Tibetan regio...

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Julia C. Strauss, "State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Julia C. Strauss is a comparative study of regime consolidation in the People’s Rep...

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Sigrid Schmalzer, “Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China” (University of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Uni...

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Andray Abrahamian, "Being in North Korea" (Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As well as presenting practical challenges, addressing the question ‘what is it like in North Korea?’ raises ethical concerns around who is entitled to interpret life in a place so often discussed ...

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Courtney J. Fung, "China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations accused of human rights violations. The PRC has...

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo” (e-Penguin, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeffrey Wasserstrom‘s wonderful new book in the “China Specials” series at Penguin opens with two main premises. First, it is more important than ever to have “illuminating lenses through which to ...

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Ian M. Miller, "Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ian M. Miller’s book Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2020) offers a transformation of our understanding of China’s early modern ...

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Wasana Wongsurawat, "The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One can’t understand modern Thailand without understanding the role of the ethnic Chinese. And one can’t understand the role of the ethnic Chinese without understanding the history of their relatio...

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Minsoo Kang, trans. “The Story of Hong Gildong” (Penguin Classics, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classicâ€¦prose fiction of...

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Roberta Zavoretti, "Rural Origins, City Lives: Class and Place in Contemporary China" (U Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more ...

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Sarah Schneewind, "Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What recourse did you have in Ming China if your very excellent local official was leaving your area and moving on to a new jurisdiction? You could try to block his path, you could wail and tear yo...

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Erik Hammerstrom, “The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs d...

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Els van Dongen, "Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the role of the intellectual? Is violence, not to mention radical change, necessary? Can there be a revolution without them? Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and P...

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Tatiana Linkhoeva, "Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A century ago it wasn’t a virus whose spread was eliciting reactions around the world, but an idea. As Russia’s 1917 October Revolution distended itself across north Asia and reverberated globally,...

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Pamela D. Winfield, “Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kukai and Dogen on the Art of Enlightenment” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or ar...

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Matjaz Ursic and Heide Imai, "Creativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a Mature City" (Palgrave, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Creativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a Mature City (Palgrave, 2020), Heide Imai and Matjaz Ursic focues on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urb...

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Richard McBride II, "Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of ?ich’?n" (U Hawaii Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of ?ich’?n (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of...

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Eubanks, Abel and Chen, eds., “Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.2: Collecting Asias” (U of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Char...

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David Chaffetz, "Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou" (Abbreviated Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “diva” is a common trope when we talk about culture. We normally think of the diva as a Western construction: the opera singer, the Broadway actress, the movie star. A woman of outstanding tale...

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David Ambaras, "Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Through a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge Universi...

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Paul Rouzer, “On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems” (U. of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhi...

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Guojun Wang, "Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much is known about the Qing sartorial regulations and how the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. But what happened on the stage? What did Qing perform...

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Antony Dapiran, "City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong" (Scribe, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the stre...

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J. Brown and M. D. Johnson, eds., “Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson‘s new edited volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Mao Zedong era (1949-1978). Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High S...

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Clara Han, "Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War" (Fordham UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Intertwining autobiography and ethnography, Clara Han’s touching new book Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2020) asks how scholarship can be transformed fro...

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Chris Courtney, "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely rem...

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Christopher Bondy, “Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“You are a member of a minority group but do not know it. How is this possible?” Christopher Bondy’s new book explores this question in a study of the making of burakumin identity in the schools an...

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Rachel Silberstein, "A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel Silberstein’s book A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020) reveals how Qing fashion was produced at the intersection of c...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Will Buckingham, “Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes” (Earnshaw Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Will Buckingham‘s new book is a wonderful cycle of stories that are inspired by and speak back to the Chinese Yijing, the Classic of Changes. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw B...

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Woojeong Joo, "Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday" (Edinburgh UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and i...

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Gregory Scott, "Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gregory A. Scott's Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the first major work in any language to address the topic of Buddhist...

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Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi, “The Han: China’s Diverse Majority” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi‘s new book opens with a series of questions that animate the study. They include but are not limited to: What does being Han mean to those classified as Hanzu? What are the n...

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Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's C...

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Margaret Hillenbrand, "Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast societ...

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Erica Fox Brindley, “Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c.400 BCE-50 CE” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erica Fox Brindley‘s new book is a powerful study of the history of conceptions of ethnicity in early China that focuses on the Hua-xia and the peoples associated with its southern frontier (Yue/Vi...

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Nicholas Bartlett, "Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coinci...

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Jin Y. Park, "Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iry?p" (U of Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iry?p (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Kor...

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Miao Li, “Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Miao Li, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and School of Philosophy and Social Development at Shandong University, joins New Books in Education to discuss Citizenship Education and M...

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Gracia Liu-Farrer, "Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Immigrant Japan? Sounds like a contradiction, but as Gracia Liu-Farrer shows in Immigrant Japan Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society (Cornell University Press, 2020), millions of ...

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G. Clinton Godart, "Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of G...

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Lisong Liu, “Chinese Student Migration and Selective Citizenship” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisong Liu‘s thoughtful new book is an important and insightful read for any of us who are currently engaged in conversations about supporting the increasing numbers of international students in th...

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William C. Hedberg, "The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japa...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Heather Blair, “Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan” (Harvard U Asia Center, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her recent monograph, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Heather Blair explores the religious and institutional history of Kinpusen, a mou...

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William W. Kelly, "The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan" (University of California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. In The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2018), anthropologi...

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Ins...

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Joan Judge, “Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was cl...

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Kelly A. Hammond, "China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1930s-40s expansion of the Japanese empire was marked by significant interest among Japan-based scholars and policy-makers in China’s Muslim population and how best to write them into a new pan...

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Kunio Hara, "Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A beloved Japanese anime move released in 1988, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, as they deal with the separation from their mother who is in the hospital, and th...

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James A. Benn, “Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History” (U of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Benn‘s new book is a history of tea as a religious and cultural commodity in China before it became a global commodity in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Tang and Song dynasties (w...

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John Wei, "Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes" (Hong Kong UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Wei’s book Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) studies queer cultures and social practices in China and Sinophone A...

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Norman A. Kutcher, "Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eunuchs. Nobody liked them, everybody seems to have hated them, but, even so, they were an essential part of many states – even in the Qing. Norman A. Kutcher's book Eunuch and Emperor in the Great...

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Christopher Rea, “The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China” (University of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Rea‘s new book explores five kinds of laughter that emerged from the tumultuous first decades of China’s twentieth century: jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor. The Age of Irreverenc...

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Ronald C. Po, "The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Qing Empire from a maritime perspective, Ronald C. Po argues that it is reductive to view China over this period exclusively as a continental p...

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Michelle Murray, "The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrins...

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Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet Gyatso‘s new book is a masterfully researched, compellingly written, and gorgeously illustrated history of medicine in early modern Tibet that looks carefully at the relationships between med...

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Jonathan C. Slaght, "Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl" (FSG, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest living species of owl, with larger females of the species weighing as much as ten pounds. It lives in the Russian Far East and Northern Japan. It is ...

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D. A. Bell and W. Pei, "Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the arguments in favor of social hierarchies? Are there differences in how hierarchy is viewed and valued in China compared with other countries? Which forms of social hierarchy are morall...

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Francesca Bray et al.,eds., “Rice: Global Networks and New Histories” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black and Dagmar Schafer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 1...

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Kirsten L. Ziomek, "Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples" (Harvard Asia Center. 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Using diverse sources well beyond the colonial archive such as photographs, postcards, and even headstones, Dr. Kirsten L. Ziomek reveals the stories of colonial subjects in the Japanese empire in ...

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Nanxiu Qian, “Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nanxiu Qian, professor at Rice University, discusses her new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015). Qian argues ...

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Cole Roskam, "Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shanghai’s role in shaping modern China and indeed the very idea of what modernity is in China can hardly be overstated. Much of this long-lasting influence can be seen in how the city itself came ...

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Roberta Wue, “Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late 19th-Century Shanghai” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roberta Wue‘s new book brings readers into the world of late Qing Shanghai, a center of art, culture, and entertainment. As artists fled to the city after the Taiping Rebellion, they helped create ...

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Loretta E. Kim, "Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration" (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Harvard Asia Center, 2019) is the first monograph published in English on the early modern history of the ...

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Peter van der Veer, “The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India” Princeton University Press, 2013 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the differences between religion, magic, and spirituality? Over time, these categories have been articulated in a variety of ways across differing cultures. However, many assume that the m...

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Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, "Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice" (Indiana UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded. With thousands of scholars across the country, it is surprising then that there is relatively little und...

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Ping Foong, “The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ink landscape painting was distinctive to the Song dynasty, and the Northern Song period was a special time for the medium. By the tenth century, this kind of painting emerged as a “scholars’ categ...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Linda Rui Feng, “City of Marvel and Transformation” (U of Hawai’i Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Linda Rui Feng‘s beautiful new book shows us the Tang city of Chang’an as we’ve not seen it before. City of Marvel and Transformation: Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China (U...

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Charlene Makley, "The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rebgong, in the Northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (China’s Qinghai Province), is in the midst of a ‘Battle for Fortune.’ That is, a battle to both accumulate as much fortune, but also a batt...

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Joseph R. Dennis, “Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the emp...

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Daniel Mattingly, "The Art of Political Control in China" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in rural China leads him to conclude that civil societ...

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Eric Tagliacozzo, et al., “Asia Inside Out: Connected Places” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first ...

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Eric Setzekor, "The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps: The Republic of China Military, 1942-1955" (U Oklahoma Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, two antipodal ideologies vied for control of China's military. The first, advanced by Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), maintained that th...

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Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan ...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Minghui Hu, “China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This...

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Mark Gamsa, “Manchuria: A Concise History” (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The term ‘Manchuria’ conjures up all manner of evocative associations for people interested in East Asian and world history, from the Manchu founders of China’s last imperial dynasty, to Russian ra...

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Chuck Wooldridge, “City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions” (University of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nineteenth-century Nanjing was a “city of virtues,” the raw material out of which a series of communities in China built the time and space of their utopian visions. Chuck Wooldridge‘s beautifully ...

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Filippo Marsili, "Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s ea...

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Anna M. Shields, “One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press,...

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Ching-yuen Cheung, "Globalizing Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline" (VR Unipress, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ching-yuen Cheung's and Wing-keung Lam's edited volume Globalizing Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline (V&R Unipress, 2017) is a collection of essays written by scholars of Japanese philo...

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Gordon H. Chang, “Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the deve...

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Elizabeth Economy, "The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A trade war with China has dangerous implications for the global economy. What began more than a year ago with President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs has become an unpleasant economic reality...

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Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Ord...

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Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as A...

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Paul A. Christensen, “Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo” (Lexington Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alco...

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Christopher Lovins, "King Ch?ngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Ch?ngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has ...

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Andrew G. Walder, “China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution.” Building from this premise, Andrew G. Walder‘s new book looks at the ways ...

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Charlotte Brooks, "American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 1901 and World War II, up to half of all U.S.-born Chinese Americans relocated to China in search of better lives due to the discrimination they faced in the United States. Charlotte Brooks...

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Parks M. Coble, “China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resista...

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M. Sheehy and K-D Mathes, "The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael R. Sheehy and Klaus-Dieter Mathes's edited collection The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet (SUNY Press, 2019) brings together perspectives of leading int...

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Barak Kushner, “Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Barak Kushner‘s new book considers what happened in the wake of Japan’s surrender, looking closely at diplomatic and military efforts to bring “Japanese imperial behavior” to justice. Men to Devils...

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Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are no...

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Kirsteen Kim and Sebastian C. H. Kim, “A History of Korean Christianity” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionari...

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Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of cour...

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Jonathan M. Reynolds, “Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture” (U of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, h...

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in eac...

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Barry Allen, “Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition” (Harvard University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a...

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Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various p...

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Carlos Rojas, “Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlos Rojas‘s new book is a wonderfully transdisciplinary exploration of discourses of sickness and disease in Chinese literature and cinema in the long twentieth century. As its title indicates, ...

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Miriam Driessen, "Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia" (Hong Kong UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong...

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Steven E. Kemper, “Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864...

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Erin Schoneveld, "Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde" (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Befitting an art history book, Erin Schoneveld’s Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Brill, 2018) is a beautifully packaged analysis of...

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Emily T. Yeh, “Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation...

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Enze Han, "Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2019) explains the variations in state building across the borderland area between China, Myanmar, and...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Ruth Hayhoe, “China Through the Lens of Comparative Education: The Selected Works of Ruth Hayhoe” (Routledge. 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Ruth Hayhoe, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, has dedicated her academic career to the study of Chinese education. Now, after several de...

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Paul Goldin, "The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Goldin's book The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton UP, 2020) provides an unmatched introduction to eight of the most important works of classica...

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Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-P...

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Tenzin Chogyel (trans. Kurtis R. Schaeffer), “The Life of the Buddha” (Penguin Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eig...

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Yuen Yuen Ang, "China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Yuen Yuen Ang, a Professor of political science and China expert at the University of Michigan. We spoke already in summer 2019 to discuss her previous book: How China Escaped the...

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Lian Xi, "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China" (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to b...

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Brett Sheehan, “Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capitalist Vision” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brett Sheehan‘s new book traces the interwoven histories of capitalism and the Song family under a series of five authoritarian governments in North China. Based on a wide range of sources a range ...

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Sharon J. Yoon, "The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography on Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing's Koreatown" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How vulnerable can you be as a researcher? Why, in a commercially successful city like Wangqing, are Chinese Koreans more successful in their businesses than entrepreneurs from Korea who often have...

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Charles B. Jones, "Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest is Charles B. Jones, Associate Professor and Director of the Religion and Culture graduate program in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Americ...

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Julie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chi...

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Noel John Pinnington, "A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre: Noh and Ky?gen from 1300 to 1600" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Noel Pinnington's A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre: Noh and Ky?gen from 1300 to 1600 (Palgrave, 2019) traces the history of noh and ky?gen, the first major Japanese theatrical arts. Going...

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Noelle Giuffrida, "Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Noelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibi...

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Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of work spurred the creation of a new generation of...

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Geoffrey C. Goble, "Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2019), Geoffrey Goble examines the emergence and early his...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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John K. Nelson, “Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Experimental Buddhism: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), John K. Nelson delves into the historical circumstances that have led to...

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Jack Meng-Tat Chia, "Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford University Press 2020) is the first monograph in the English language to explore the transnationally connected history of ...

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Wang Gungwu, "Home is Not Here" (NUS Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, bu...

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Michael Nylan and Griet Vankeerberghen, “Chang’an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Nylan and Griet Vankeerberghen have produced a landmark volume. Chang’an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China (University of Washington Press, 2015) collects 19 essays (plus an Introduction and...

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Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, "Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast As...

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Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg, "Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a ca...

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Rajika Bhandari and Alessia Lefebure, “Asia: The Next Higher Education Superpower?” (2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The development of higher education in Asia has been as dramatic as the region’s rapid economic rise. The landscape of this diverse and ever-changing sector is thoroughly explored in Asia: The Next...

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Rana Mitter, "China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since the Deng Xiaoping...

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Christian Sorace, "Afterlives of Chinese Communism” (Verso-ANU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What to make of the fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party which detains and arrests people studying Maoism, organising workers, or campaigning for women’s liberation is a difficult task. Al...

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Stuart Young, “Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China” (U of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (...

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Elisabeth Köll, "Railroads and the Transformation of China" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) looks at the development of railroads in China from the late 19th century to the post-Mao reform period. Treating railroad...

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Albert L. Park, “Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea” (U of Hawaii Press, ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christians, like other religious people, have to manage the relationship between their belief in supernatural forces and an afterlife on one side, and how those beliefs impact their daily life on t...

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Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Mich...

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David Hull (trans.), Mao Dun, “Waverings” (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Kurtis R. Schaeffer, et al. “The Tibetan History Reader/Sources of Tibetan Tradition” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them...

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Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University ...

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David A. Pietz, “Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David A. Pietz‘s new book argues that China’s water challenges are historically grounded, and that these historical realities are not going to disappear anytime soon. Using a careful history of wat...

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Larry Diamond, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Larry Diamond joins us this week to talk about the threat China’s model of authoritarian capitalism poses to liberal democracy in the United States and around the world. Economics drives politics, ...

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Jie Li, “Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What’s not to love about Jie Li‘s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes by focusing on ...

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Nianshen Song, "Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Land borders in East Asia have played just as big a role in the region’s social transformations as their more recently debated maritime counterparts, and the boundary between China and Korea offers...

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Emily Anderson, “Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God” (Bloomsbury, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When one thinks of the connection of religion and imperialism in Japan, one automatically thinks first of Shintoism and second of Buddhism. Christianity does not usually figure into that story. How...

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Jolyon Baraka Thomas, "Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its s...

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Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, “The Archaeology of Tibetan Books” (Brill, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging ...

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Evan N. Dawley, "Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How was the Taiwanese identity constructed? Dr. Evan N. Dawley, an associate professor of history at Goucher College, explores this question in his new book Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Co...

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Wen Jin, “Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms” (Ohio State University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wen Jin’s book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms (Ohio State Press, 2012), compares histories and modes of multiculturalism in China and t...

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Yan Li, “China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The warmth of China and Russia’s present-day relationship is sometimes said to reprise 1950s ties between Mao’s PRC and the Soviet Union, even if that remains a poorly understood period in both cou...

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Tanya Storch, “The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs fro...

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Nicholas Walton, "Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, g...

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Mark Dennis and Darren Middleton, eds., “Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel” (Bloomsbury, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it mean to be a martyr? What does it mean to be an apostate? How should we understand people who choose one or the other? These are the questions asked by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silenc...

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Kyle A. Jaros, "China's Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Discussions of China’s 21st-century ‘rise’ often focus on the country’s dazzling megacities and the dizzying pace of urbanization which has propelled their development over the past 30 years. But h...

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Eugene N. Anderson, “Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eugene N. Anderson‘s new book offers an expansive history of food, environment, and their relationships in China. From prehistory through the Ming and beyond, Food and Environment in Early and Medi...

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Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages ...

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Sarah M. Allen, “Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah M. Allen‘s new book looks at the literature of tales in eighth- and ninth-century China. Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University ...

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Amy Olberding, "The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Olberding’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a joy to read, both entertaining and rich in ideas. The Wrong of Rudeness asks a...

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Wilt Idema, “The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun” (Columbia University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) col...

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Jenny Huangfu Day, "Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in recent years, few scholars have attempted to th...

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Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in ...

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Levi McLaughlin, "Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of A Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Being Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization, Soka Gakkai (Society for the Creation of Value) and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) claims to have 12 million members in 192 c...

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Byonghyon Choi, “The Annals of King T’aejo: Founder of Korea’s Choson Dynasty” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Byonghyon Choi‘s new book makes a key document of Korean and world history available in English in a volume that will be tremendously useful for both scholarship and teaching. The Annals of King T’...

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Max Ward, "Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservati...

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Kenneth M. Swope, “The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our interview with Kenneth M. Swope about his book, The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-44 (Routledge, 2014), published through Routledge, is an effort to address an oversight in ho...

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Max Oidtmann, "Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected the technology of the “Golden Urn,” a Qing-era tool which involves the identification of the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks b...

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Meir Shahar and John Kieschnick, “India in the Chinese Imagination” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese re...

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Martin T. Fromm, "Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With China’s northwestern and southern edges justifiably being sources of global attention at present, Martin Fromm’s Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambr...

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Charlotte Eubanks, “Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (U of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between MahÄ?yÄ?na Buddhist sÅ«tras and...

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Sabine Frühstück, "Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017), Sabine Frühstück shows how children and childhood have been used in twentieth centur...

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Tamara T. Chin, “Savage Exchange” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tamara Chin‘s new book is a tour de force and a must-read for anyone interested in early China, the history of economy, or inter-disciplinarity in the humanities. Focusing on the reign of Han Emper...

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Meredith Oda, "The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fas...

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R. Keller Kimbrough, “Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully t...

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Jessica Starling, "Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary J?do Shinsh?" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her recent ethnography, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary J?do Shinsh? (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), Prof. Jessica Starling invites us into the daily lives...

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Paola Iovene, “Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paola Iovene‘s new book is a beautiful exploration of visions of the future as they have shaped a range of texts, genres, and editorial practices in Chinese literature from the middle of the twenti...

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Daniel Vukovich, "Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison ...

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Gene Luen Yang, “Boxers & Saints” (First Second, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I love picking up a historical monograph in which the footnotes count for a quarter or more of the total pages. Most students don’t share this strange love of mine. I’m therefore always trying to f...

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Danny Orbach, "Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan" (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Danny Orbach’s Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press, 2017) provides new insights into the origins of the insubordination that plagued and character...

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Joseph D. Hankins, “Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan” (U of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the Buraku situation in Japan and beyond. ...

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Betsy Perabo, "Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War" (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularl...

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Peter Peverelli, “One Turbulent Year – China 1975” (Boekscout, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China today attracts one of the largest foreign student populations in the world. In 1975, though, very few foreign students were allowed to study in then-isolated China, especially Western student...

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Courtney Bruntz and Brooke Schedneck, "Buddhist Tourism in Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This edited volume is the first book-length study of Buddhist tourism in contemporary Asia in the English language. Featuring chapters from diverse contributors from religious studies, anthropology...

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Melissa McCormick, "The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in...

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Rian Thum, “The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his fascinating new book, Rian Thum explores the craft, materiality, nature, and readership of Uyghur history over the past 300 years. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Pre...

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David Fedman, "Seeds of Control: Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Fedman's Seeds of Control: Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020) is hard to categorize. In a good way. Put simply, it is a broa...

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Nancy S. Steinhardt, "Chinese Architecture: A History" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined...

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Joshua S. Mostow, “Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation” (Brill, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Most...

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Chika Watanabe, "Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO...

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Ernest P. Young, “Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In theory, Christian missionaries plan only on working in a country until an indigenous leadership can take over management of the church. Theory is one thing, but practice is quite another, as Dr....

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Jeremy Friedman, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be reme...

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Melek Ortabasi, “The Undiscovered Country” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melek Ortabasi‘s new book explores the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a writer, folk scholar, “eccentric, dominating crackpot,” “brilliant, versatile iconoclast” and much more. The Undiscovere...

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Kate Harris, "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road" (Dey Street Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Harris — writer, scientist, and extreme cyclist – talks about the trip she made with her friend Mel, tracing Marco Polo’s route across Central Asia and Tibet. The journey is the subject of Har...

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Wai-yee Li, “Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature” (Harvard Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, abo...

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Jakobina Arch, "Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth...

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Kathleen Lopez, “Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History” (UNC Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Successive waves of migration brought thousands of Chinese laborers to Cuba over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coolie trade, which was meant to replace waning supplies of slaves, was ...

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Dean Anthony Brink, “Japanese Poetry and its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is classical Japanese poetry something to be enjoyed in private, an object of study for scholars, or an item of public life teeming with hints about how to understand and deal with our past and our...

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Michael Gibbs Hill, trans., Wang Hui, “China from Empire to Nation-State” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi...

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Lorenzo Andolfatto, "Hundred Days’ Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910" (Brill, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Hundred Days’ Literature, Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910 (Brill, 2019), Lorenzo Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the...

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Clark Chilson, “Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land ...

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T. Brook, M. van Walt van Praag, M. Boltjes, "Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With thorny topics in Asian international relations, sovereignty, territory and borders in the news more or less daily, understanding what is at stake in this vitally important region, and why ther...

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Joan Kee, “Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joan Kee‘s new book is a gorgeous and thoughtful introduction to the history of contemporary art in Korea. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (University of Minnesota Pre...

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Yuen Yuen Ang, "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap" (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I spoke with Dr Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She published in 2016 a great new book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell ...

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Kenneth Brashier, “Public Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ken Brashier’s new book is another tour de force and must-read for scholars of Chinese studies. Public Memory in Early China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) offers a history of identity and ...

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Christopher Rea, "China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Cristopher Rea's China’s Chaplin (Cornell University Press, 2019) introduces the imagination of Xu Zhuodai (1880–1958), a comic dynamo who made Shanghai laugh through...

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Paul Copp, “The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two writ...

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Jonathan D. T. Ward, "China's Vision of Victory" (Atlas Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Someday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union at its h...

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Eugene Y. Park, “A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces this history by focusing on the Miryang Pak family. ...

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Hye-Kyung Lee, "Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings...

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Chun-fang Yu, “Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chan-fang Yu‘s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded...

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Jennifer Hubbert, "China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free sp...

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Yong Zhao, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?” (Jossey-Bass, 2014), from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China has had an amazing developmental path over the past thirty years. Decade long double digit economic growth numbers along with more assertion on the international stage have led to some concer...

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Emily Wilcox, "Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is “Chinese dance,” how did it take shape in during China’s socialist period, and how has this socialist form continued to influence Post-Mao expressive cultures in the People’s Republic of Ch...

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Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers thro...

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Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killi...

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Shengqing Wu, “Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937” (Harvard Asia Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shengqing Wu’s gorgeous new book begins by exploring the image of the treasure pagoda to introduce readers to an aesthetics of ornamental lyricism in Chinese poetry at the turn of the twentieth-cen...

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Marc Gallicchio and Waldo Heinrich, "Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Serious and casual scholars and readers interested in the Pacific War would do well to commit reading Marc Gallicchio’s and Waldo Heinrich’s massive study of the conflict’s last two years, Implacab...

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Todd A. Henry, “Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945” (U of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Todd Henry’s new book is a wonderful study of public space as a laboratory for producing the experiences and engines of colonial society. Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Publi...

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Tsering Döndrup, "The Handsome Monk and Other Stories" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A series of stories ranging from two-page narrative excerpts to 90+ page novellas, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019), translated by Columbia PhD student Christop...

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Leslie Grant, “West Meets East: Best Practices from Expert Teachers in the United States and China” (ASCD, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, there is no singular formula for a great teacher. S...

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Lara Jaishree Netting, “A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture” (Hong Kong UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lara Netting’s new book explores the life, career, and work of one man as a window into the history and associated practices of “Chinese art” during a period of massive transformation in the China ...

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Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, To...

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Albert Park and David Yoo, eds., “Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ...

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Jennifer Dixon, "Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nan...

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Jolyon Thomas, “Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University Of Hawai’i Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The worlds of cinema and illustrated fiction are replete with exciting data for the historian of religion. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University Of Hawa...

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Megan Bryson, “Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Megan Bryson, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, centers gender as an analytical framework in the study of Buddhism. The benefit of this approach is vividly demonstrated in Goddess...

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Hideaki Fujiki, “Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stardom has a history. Hideaki Fujiki‘s new book traces that history through a story of the transformations of Japanese film stars in the early twentieth century. Taking a deeply transnational appr...

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Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, "The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church" (Palgrave, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist...

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Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Co...

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Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that...

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Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of Califo...

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Maren A. Ehlers, "Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outc...

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Christina Laffin, “Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and ...

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Jinhua Dai (ed. Lisa Rofel), "After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have el...

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Craig Clunas, “Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “state” (guo), and mapping the Ming in terms of guo‘s is a w...

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Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, ...

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Wensheng Wang, “White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wensheng Wang‘s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. In White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in...

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F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan,...

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James Carter, “Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Cen...

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Anne A. Cheng, "Ornamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doi...

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Stephen R. Platt, “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War” (Vintage, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of ...

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Kimberly Chong, "Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do management consultants do, and how do they do it? These two deceptively simple questions are at the centre of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in Chin...

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Robert A. Rhoads, et al., “China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert A. Rhoads, Xiaoyang Wang, Xiaoguang Shi, Yongcai Chang are the authors of China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Dr. Rhoad...

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Gregory Smits, "Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Conventional portrayals of early Ryukyu are based on official histories written between 1650 and 1750. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Gregory Smits makes extensive use of scholarship in arch...

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Anne Allison, “Precarious Japan” (Duke University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment he had occupied for 20 years. His is just one of many voices of ...

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David Woodbridge, "Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China" (Brill, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drawing on new archival resources, and opening up an entirely new research agenda in the field, David Woodbridge has written an outstanding new book. Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: T...

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Xiaojue Wang, “Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature ...

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Matthew W. King, "Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncer...

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Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, “The Religious Question in Modern China” University of Chicago Press, 2011 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social phenomena that some people like to call ‘religion’ has long shaped Chinese culture. In the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of what constitutes ‘religion’ has been central to the c...

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Jane Caple, "Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this podcast, I speak with Prof. Jane Caple about her recently published book, Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). The revival of mass monasticism...

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Michelle King, “Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michelle King‘s new book explores the intertwined histories of imperialism and infanticide. Situating the histories of infant killing and abandonment in China within a broader history of these prac...

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Christina Yi, "Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The fact that Korea’s experience of Japanese imperialism plays a role in present-day Japan-Korea relations is no secret to anyone. Questions of guilt, responsibility and atonement continue to bubbl...

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Michael Wert, “Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Wert‘s new book considers the construction of memory around the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration, individuals and groups whose reputations suffered most in the late nineteenth-century tran...

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Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British em...

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Miriam Kingsberg, “Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in...

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Pang Yang Huei, "Strait Rituals: China, Taiwan, and the United States in the Taiwan Strait Crises, 1954-1958" (Hong Kong UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954-55 and 1958 occurred at the height of the Cold War. Mao’s China bombarded Nationalist-controlled islands, and U.S. President Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclea...

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Tobie Meyer-Fong, “What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century Century China” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tobie Meyer-Fong‘s beautifully written and masterfully argued new book explores the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurative) of the Taiping civil war in nineteenth-centur...

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Pu Wang, "The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With questions over how ideas are translated across borders and between languages as acute as ever today, it is sometimes easy to forget that our efforts to understand each other are mediated throu...

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Andrea Bachner, “Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, represented, and transformed. Spanning literature, fil...

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Craig Benjamin, "Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE-250 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late second century BCE, a series of trading route developed between China in the east and Rome’s empire in the west. Craig Benjamin’s Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 1...

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Christopher P. Hanscom, “The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Christopher P. Hanscom explores literary modernism in the work of t...

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Leta Hong Fincher, "Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China" (Verso, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, five activists were detained by the police in China for their plans to distribute anti-sexual harassment stickers. Although such detainments usually...

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Benjamin A. Elman, “Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin A. Elman‘s new book explores the civil examination process and the history of state exam curricula in late imperial China. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvar...

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Federico Varese, "Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories" (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about tr...

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Marc L. Moskowitz, “Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect and control of the Confucian gentleman, the rat...

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Nancy Yunhwa Rao, "Chinatown Opera Theater in North America" (U Illinois Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Pres...

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Emma Teng, “Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1...

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Levi S. Gibbs, "Song King: Connecting People, Places and Past in Contemporary China" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does music link people across time and space? How do singers modulate their repertoires to forge links with audiences both within and across local, regional and national borders? What are the c...

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Patricia Ebrey, “Emperor Huizong” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Hu...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Daisuke Miyao, “The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese cinema. A commentary on the history of modernity, th...

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Suk-Young Kim, "K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Given its expanding multimedia presence in Asia and around the world for many years now, K-pop is a phenomenon that is hard to ignore. This “animal that thrives on excess,” as Suk-Young Kim puts it...

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Joshua Fogel, “Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 C.E.: Relic, Text, Object, Fake” (Brill, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joshua A. Fogel‘s new book is a carefully researched and wonderfully thoughtful exploration of the transformations of an artifact as read through the transformations in the way that artifact has be...

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Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao" (Pantheon, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017), was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy" by The New York Review of Books, and The Econom...

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Scott Cook, “The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation” (Cornell East Asia Program, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s always a joy when I have the opportunity to talk with the author of a book that is clearly a game-changer for its field. In The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Corne...

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Sayaka Chatani, "Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sayaka Chatani’s Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018) tackles the fraught question of how and why young men in marginalize...

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David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its motivating narrative and argumentative core. In A ...

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Emily Baum, "The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Inst...

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Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different places? I...

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Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted bookseller...

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David Tod Roy, “The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei” (Princeton UP, 1993-2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, transl...

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Christopher Goscha, "Vietnam: A New History" (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on the war has perhaps distorted our understanding of ...

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David Novak, “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global circulation and emerges from it. It has...

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Alfredo Toro Hardy, "The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View" (World Scientific Publishing. 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View (World Scientific Publishing Co. 2019) explores the complex interaction of several forces shaping the current world economic situation. Alfred...

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Timothy J. Brook, “Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer” (Bloomsbury, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The...

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Pema Tseden, "Enticement" (SUNY Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement (State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’...

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Andrea S. Goldman, “Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900” (Stanford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film ar...

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Jieun Baek, "North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society" (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a con...

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Darryl E. Flaherty, “Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals in the West enjoyed political participation an...

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Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018) is an absorbing look at the multiple and changing ways that waste—of resources, possessions, time, money, etc....

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Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tok...

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Monica Kim, "The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first major conflict after the 1949 Geneva Conventions, P...

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Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those ...

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Andray Abrahamian, "North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths" (McFarland, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly ...

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Jonathan Fulton, "China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the traditionally dominant role in international oil ...

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Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen, “Ancient Central China” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most exciting approaches in the contemporary study of China is emerging from work that brings together archaeological and historical modes of reading texts and material objects to tell a...

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Van Jackson, "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since ...

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Henrietta Harrison, “The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, balla...

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Derek Hird and Geng Song, "The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age" (Hong Kong UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s global rise has been analysed from many perspectives in recent years. But pressing questions over how understandings of gender – and particularly masculinity – have been changing amidst inc...

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John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. In Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, ...

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Anne Reinhardt, "Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from t...

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Paul O’Connor, “Islam in Hong Kong: Muslims and Everyday Life in China’s World City” (Hong Kong UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does the everyday experience of Muslim minorities look like? We have often heard about what Muslims deal with in the West. But what about Muslim minorities in the East? This was one of the que...

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Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong, "Securing the Belt and Road" (Red Globe Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong’s Securing the Belt and Road, Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments (Red Globe Press, 2018) sig...

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Louise Young, “Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces became a capitalist frontier in a new phase of indu...

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Judd C. Kinzley, "Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the fir...

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Fabian Drixler, “Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle the newborn. It’s an arresting way to begin an i...

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Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Co...

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Christine Yano, “Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bowties, Hello Kitty has inspired tributes from Li...

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Jinping Wang, "In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China 1200-1600" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity moving through time, insights into the endlessly contingent, local and contested events which h...

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Jonathan Hay, “Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) is a study of domestically produced, portable decorative arts in early modern China. Decorative o...

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Chad R. Diehl, "Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both play a central role in any narrative of the end of the East Asia-Pacific War in 1945, yet Hiroshima has consistently drawn more attention in the e...

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John Osburg, “Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Osburg‘s new book explores the rise of elite networks of newly-rich entrepreneurs, managers of state enterprises, and government officials in Chengdu. Based on extensive fieldwork that include...

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

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James A. Milward, “The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Milward‘s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers.The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013) is part of the Oxf...

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Jennifer Altehenger, "Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1989" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, historian Jennifer Altehenger, a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese History at King’s College London, grapples with the complex issue of how authorities and cultural workers a...

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T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., “Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An I...

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Pedith Pui Chan, “The Making of a Modern Art World: Institutionalization and Legitimization of Guohua in Republican Shanghai” (Brill, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Making of a Modern Art World: Institutionalization and Legitimization of Gouhua in Republican Shanghai (Brill, 2017) investigates the production and consumption of guohua (“national painting”) ...

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Matthew W. Mosca, “From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China” (Stanford, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to ...

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Patrick Fuliang Shan, “Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal” (UBC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When he was elected president of China in 1912, Yuan Shikai was hailed as his nation’s George Washington, yet four years later he would die as the leader of a country in turmoil after a failed bid ...

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Beverly Bossler, “Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity” (Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beverly Bossler‘s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries of transformations, it also offers a fascinating ret...

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Sandra Fahy, “Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amidst an atmosphere of hope on the Korean Peninsula over the past year, questions over the wellbeing of North Korea’s population have again come to global attention. But this is far from the first...

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Mark Byington, ed., “Early Korea: The Rediscovery of Kaya in History and Archaeology” (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the series provides surveys of Korean scho...

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Justyna Weronika Kasza, “Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of End? Sh?saku: Between Reading and Writing” (Peter Lang, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In literature, evil can appear in a broad spectrum of shapes, images and motifs. For End? Sh?saku, the problem of evil is central to the reality of human existence, and it has to be accepted as suc...

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Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 1...

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Ching Kwan Lee, “The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investmen...

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Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, “The Lius of Shanghai” (Harvard University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh‘s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius ...

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Martin Saxer and Juan Zhang, eds., “The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders” (Amsterdam UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, a...

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David J. Silbey, “The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China” (Hill and Wang, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer ...

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Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tok...

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Fabio Lanza, “Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully research...

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Elizabeth McGuire, “Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between the...

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William Marotti, “Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note generated a wide-ranging set of debate...

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James M. Dorsey, “China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, bo...

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Perry Link, “An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of C...

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Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgott...

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Ian Condry, “The Soul of Anime” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities ...

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Stephen R. Platt, “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age” (Knopf, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and conti...

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Erica Fox Brindley, “Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China” (SUNY Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmon...

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Nick Kapur, “Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Kapur’s Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) is an ambitious look at the transformations of Japanese society after the massive protests ...

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Jonathan E. Abel, “Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is much to love about Jonathan Abel‘s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) brilliantly takes readers into the performance of...

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Ruth Gamble, “Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tr...

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Nathan Hesselink, “SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Ko...

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Michael Szonyi, “The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the heart of Michael Szonyi’s new book are two questions: 1) How did ordinary people in the Ming deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army?, and 2) What were the broader conseq...

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Aminda M. Smith, “Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Cl...

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N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical M...

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Endymion Wilkinson, “Chinese History: A New Manual” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are some books that are so fundamental to work in an academic field that practitioners refer to them simply by the author’s last name. Many of us had respectfully and affectionately referred ...

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Tom Cliff, “Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang” (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Compared to the provinces’s native Uyghur population, Han Chinese settlers in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not attracted as much scholarly or indeed journalistic attention of late...

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Elizabeth J. Perry, “Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 revol...

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Fabio Lanza, “The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you work in Asian studies as a scholarly field, you should read Fabio Lanza’s new book. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) takes as its c...

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Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’...

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Laura Neitzel, “The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan” (MerwinAsia, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed for: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan (MerwinAsia, 2016) is a chronicle of the large, government-sponsored housing projects called danch...

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Bruce Rusk, “Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, ...

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Denise Y. Ho, “Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyon...

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Kevin Gray Carr, “Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stori...

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Philip Thai, “China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842-1965” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From petty runs to organized trafficking, the illicit activity of smuggling on the China coast was inherently dramatic, but now historian Philip Thai has also identified China’s history of smugglin...

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Barbara R. Ambros, “Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It opens with a parakeet named Homer, and it closes with a dog named Hachiko. In the intervening pages, Barbara Ambros explores the deaths, afterlives, and necrogeographies of pets in contemporary ...

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Lily Wong, “Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure w...

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Michael Gibbs Hill, “Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the liter...

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Zhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull), “The Pidgin Warrior” (Balestier Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just ...

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Richard J. Smith, “The I Ching: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Texts have lives. They grow, travel, transform, fade, and are reborn into new and other lives. In The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012), Richard J. Smith has given us a wonder...

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Andrew B. Kipnis, “From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat” (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have ima...

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Gene Cooper, “The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 M...

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Reginald Jackson, “Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls” (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in ...

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Barak Kushner, “Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup” (Global Oriental, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan...

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Kate McDonald, “Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate McDonald‘s Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) is a thoughtful and provocative study of the spatial politics of Japanese ...

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Jack W. Chen, “The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty” (Harvard Yenching Institute, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After coming to power in a series of violent and deceptive acts, including tricking his father into cuckolding the Emperor, Li Shimin went on to become a ruler whose reign as Emperor Taizong has be...

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Maria Repnikova, “Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite its extraordinary diversity, life in the People’s Republic of China is all too often viewed mainly through the lens of politics, with dynamics of top-down coercion and bottom-up resistance ...

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Thomas David DuBois, “Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia” (Cambridge University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do historians of East Asia sufficiently account for the role of religious communities in the construction of history? Of course, there are histories of the Taiping Rebellion, and groups like Soka G...

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Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body” (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese ...

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Michael David Kaulana Ing, “The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism” (Oxford University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the authors of the one of the most important Confucian ritual texts in early China recognize, explain, and cope with mistakes and dysfunction in ritual? The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early C...

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Michelle C. Wang, “Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang” (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michelle C. Wang’s new book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) joins a growing body of scholarship on esoteric Buddhism in China. Her work is ...

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Cosima Bruno, “Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation” (Brill, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry throug...

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Gordon Mathews, “The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a ma...

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Christopher Bush, “Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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-disciplin...

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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Knowing about China,” Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey Wasserstrom note in the preface to China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), is today “an...

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Jini Kim Watson, “The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jini Kim Watson‘s book links literature, architecture, urban studies, film, and economic history into a wonderfully rich account of the fictions of urban transformation in Singapore, South Korea, a...

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Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China” (NIAS Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has ...

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Shih-Shan Susan Huang, “Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Tra...

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Ross King, “Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the Korean Wave” (University of Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Pla...

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Carl S. Yamamoto, “Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet” (Brill, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of put...

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Ronald P. Loftus, “The Turn Against the Modern: The Critical Essays of Taoka Reiun (1870-1912)” (Association for Asian Studies, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”...

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Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Univ...

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Ji-Yeon O. Jo, “Homing: An Affective Topography of Ethnic Korean Return Migration” (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homin...

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Jason Josephson, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom of religion to Christian missionaries. The chall...

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Michele Zack, “The Lisu: Far from the Ruler” (UP of Colorado, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent years have brought a burgeoning interest in how highland people in mainland Southeast Asia live and communicate along and across the boundaries geographically assigned states whose lowland p...

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Shawn Bender, “Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the 20thcentury, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performance medium. Shawn Bender‘s recent book takes us through...

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Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, “Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations, and Contestations” (Amsterdam UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations, and Contestations (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), edited by Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, gathers authors from a variety of ...

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Giusi Tamburello, “Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia” (Carocci editore, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire...

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Simeon Man, “Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S...

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Qiliang He, “Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949” (Brill, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Using the example of pingtan storytelling to reexamine the history of cultural reform in the People’s Republic of China, Qiliang He‘s new book integrates political history and performance studies t...

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Erik Mueggler, “Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote o...

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Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Pro...

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Holly Gayley, “Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Often when people think of Tibetan Buddhism they have a limited vision of that social reality, perhaps one that imagines monks sitting in meditation or focused on the Dalai Lama. Rarely is the hist...

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Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 Judgme...

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Kathlene Baldanza, “Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from th...

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Alan Christy (trans.), Amino Yoshihiko, “Rethinking Japanese History” (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful ser...

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Ji-Young Lee, “China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ji-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: ...

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Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings” (Bantam Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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David Wanczyk, “Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind” (Swallow Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exce...

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Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare” (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to ...

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Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto, eds., “Rethinking Japanese Studies: Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rethinking Japanese Studies. Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, 2018) is co-edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto. The book tries to look at the discipline of Japanese Studies...

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Marnie Anderson, “A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, t...

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Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering? I...

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Yutao Sun and Seamus Grimes, “China and Global Value Chains” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a ...

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Miryam Sas, “Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to ...

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Vince Cable, "China: Engage!--Avoid The New Cold War" (Bite-Sized Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anyone doing business with China will have been shocked by the speed with which political and economic relations with Western, and some other, countries – like India – have deteriorated in 2020, bu...

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David Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing A...

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Kenneth Brashier, “Ancestral Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Covell F. Meyskens, "Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex...

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Nick Admussen, “Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry” (U Hawaii Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetr...

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Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Paul Jankowski, "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War" (Harper, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled accou...

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Amy Stanley, "Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World" (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I’m writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-ch? in Edo—quite unexpectedly—and I ended up in so much trouble!” This letter, hidden in an arch...

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Craig Clunas, “Chinese Painting and Its Audiences” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his latest book, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences published in 2017 by Princeton University Press, Craig Clunas puts to question the entire concept of “Chinese painting” by looking at how this...

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Roger Hart, “The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination...

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Elizabeth Son, "Embodied Reckonings: 'Comfort Women,' Performance, and Transpacific Redress" (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a bustling city-center of Seoul, women in yellow vests protesting over the “final” resettlement between the Japanese and Korean governments every Wednesday is an iconic sight, testifying to the ...

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Anne Gerritsen, "The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired ...

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Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday, “Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday spent ten years interviewing criminal defense attorneys throughout China in order to compile the evidence on the professional lives of criminal defense attorneys in...

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Daniel Vukovich, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Xiaowei Wang, "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside" (FSG Originals, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, S...

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Stephen H. Whiteman, "Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. ...

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Taisu Zhang, “The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship Property in Preindustrial China and England” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge...

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Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing” (Zone Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do walking backward, water calligraphy, and belting out popular songs in public have in common? All of them can be conceived as techniques for cultivating life, or yangsheng, and they are all ...

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Sebastian Strangio, "In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, wi...

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Tobias Harris, "The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan" (Hurst, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abe Shinz? is seen today through many lenses: as the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Japan; as a pragmatic leader with a consistent policy vision and a commitment to the art of sta...

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Shinshu Roberts, “Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji” (Wisdom Publications, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji (Wisdom Publications, 2018), Shinshu Roberts focuses on the practical study of the inner self and perception of all phe...

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Ethan Segal, “Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers throug...

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David Chai, "Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a radical rereading of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi by bringing to light the role of nothingness in grounding the cosmological and ...

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Sujung Kim, "Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian 'Mediterranean'" (U Hawaii Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shinra Myojin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) is a fascinating study of the transcultural underpinnings of Medieval East Asian Buddhist tr...

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Anna Andreeva, “Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her recent monograph, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017), Anna Andreeva focuses on a complex network of religious sit...

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Merry White, “Coffee Life in Japan” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Merry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes wi...

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David Tobin, "Securing China's Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Greater interest in what is happening in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang in recent years has generated a proportional need for context, and especially insights into the politics and pol...

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Suma Ikeuchi, "Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1990, the Japanese government introduced the Nikkei-jin (Japanese descendant) visa and since then it has attracted more than 190,000 Nikkei Brazilian nationals to Japan. In Jesus Loves Japan: Re...

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Stephen G. Craft, “American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy” (Kentucky UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members o...

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Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008) from 2009-04-04T02:36:29

Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Goering, Albe...

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Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008) from 2009-04-04T02:36:29

Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Goering, Albe...

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Podcasts by New Books in East Asian Studies

All episodes

On Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" from 2022-10-06T08:00

On Inazō Nitobe's "Bushido: The Soul of Japan" from 2022-08-25T08:00

On "The Story of the Stone" from 2022-08-04T08:00

Michael C. Davis, "Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minjeong Kim, "Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and "Multiculturalism" in Rural South Korea" (U Hawai’i Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hank Glassman, “The Face of JizÅ?: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aubrey Menard, "Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East" (PRH SEA, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew McKevitt, “Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charlotte Eubanks, "The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Terry Kleeman, “Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laurence Monnais, C. Michele Thompson, and Ayo Wahlberg, “Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bryan D. Lowe, “Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Field, “Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954” (The Chinese University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Lupke (trans.), "A History of Taiwan Literature" (Cambria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristian Petersen, “Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alan Chong, "Critical Reflections on China’s Belt and Road Initiative" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Powers, “The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

C. Chan and F. de Londras, "China’s National Security: Endangering Hong Kong’s Rule of Law?" (Hart, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin R. Ritzinger, “Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John W. Traphagan, "Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan" (Cambria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bradley Camp Davis, “Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands” (U of Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chris Fenton, "Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business" (Post Hill Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Eisner, “MacArthur’s Spies: The Solider, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in WWII” (Viking, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dennis Frost, “Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Takeshi Morisato, "Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Albert Wu, “From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sam van Schaik, "Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages" (Shambala Publications, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eileen Le Han, “Micro-Blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Rowe, “Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fabio Rambelli, "Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew F. Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Vickers, “Education and Society in Post-Mao China” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karl Gerth, "Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dorothy Ko, “The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China” (U. of Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joshua Esler, "Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese: Mediation and Superscription of the Tibetan Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Society" (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Don Baker, “Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea” (U. Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian R. Dott, "The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Schlesinger, “A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Carter, "Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai" (Norton, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roy Bing Chan, “The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature” (U. Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Morris, “Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zuraidah Ibrahim, "Rebel City: Hong Kong's Year of Water and Fire" (World Scientific, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Timothy Cheek, “The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marcia Yonemoto, “The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan” (U of California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Kevaak, “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking” (Princeton UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann-elise Lewallen, "The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan" (U New Mexico Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carrie J. Preston, “Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lee Ambrozy, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sean Roberts, "The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Li Zhi, “A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Heine, "Readings of D?gen's 'Treasury of the True Dharma Eye'"(Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Phoebe Chow, “Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sören Urbansky, "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Quincy Carroll, “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel” (Inkshares, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Auslin, “Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harriet Evans, "Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jayde Lin Roberts, “Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393