New Books in Chinese Studies
752 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 days ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of China about their New Books
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Episodes
Film Chat: "Whale Island" (2020)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the film director, Huang Chia-chu about his making of the eco-film, Whale Island (2020). The interview covers the Director's engagement with this amazing project to tell a "sea story" of Taiwan, his encountering with the writer, Liao Hung-chi and the photographer, Jin Lai, his choice of film translated title as well as movie soundtracks. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, h...
Martin K. Dimitrov, "Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesFear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Marti...
Book Chat: "Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions, published by Routledge in 2021. The two scholars chat about novel ethnographic methods, such as itinerant ethnography and digital ethnography, solidarity between migrant women, the role of emotions in research. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in understanding globalisation from the perspective of cont...
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesThe term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing suggests, the term "Silk Road" in fact has many meanings as Professor Tim Winter has been explaining in his book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and w...
Book Chat: "The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang, author of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The two scholars chat about important turning points in the production of the book, the author’s positions. Most importantly, how the author proposes solutions to decolonise trauma and find reconciliation in Taiwan. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in histor...
Birth Rates and the Future of Social Movements: A Discussion with Jack Goldstone
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutes"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the possibilities of regime change in China associated with the role of the youth and their disconten...
Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 12 minutesIn this episode, Chris Gondek interviews author John Palfrey about how diversity and free expression can coexist on a modern campus. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, demands to rename campus landmarks—debate over these issues began in lecture halls and on college quads but ended up on op-ed pages in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on cable news, and on social media. Some of these critiques had merit, but others took a series of ch...
Chien-Wen Kung, "Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s" (Cornell UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFrom the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Chinese community in the region was more vigilant in identifying and rooting out suspected communists from within its midst; none was as committed to mobilizing against the People's Republic of China as the one in the former US colony. Ironically, for all the fears of overseas Chinese communities' ties to the PRC at the time, the example of the Ph...
Aram Hur, "Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesEspecially within the last decade, the word "nationalism" often evokes images of bombastic demagogues and democratic backsliding. But does nationalism always hurt liberal democracy? In Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell UP, 2022), Aram Hur argues that the answer might be "no". Instead, under specific circumstances, national attachments can actually strengthen democracies. Hur—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Uni...
Seiji Shirane, "Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945" (Cornell UP, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSeiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrates that colonial Taiwan was an imperial center in its own right, a political, social, and economic hub for the southern expansion of Japan’s empire led by officials with agendas that did not always match those of the government in Tokyo. In addition to this contribution to the study of Japanese empire, Imperial Gateway highlights two aspects of the ...
Joshua Kurlantzick, "Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesHow is China trying to influence media across Asia and indeed globally? Why has this ambitious project achieved rather mixed results so far? And how should the rest of the world respond? In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, CFR's Josh Kurlantzick talks to NIAS Director Duncan McCargo about his important new book, Beijing's Global Media Offensive (Oxford UP, 2022). His book is a major analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, see...
Pete Millwood, "Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy. Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musi...
Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, "Taiwanese Literature as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOwing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout ...
Ying Zhu, "Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market" (New Press, 2022)
February 18, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesWith her book Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market (New Press, 2022), media scholar Ying Zhu explores the 100+ year relationship between what are now the world's two largest movie markets: China and the United States. Zhu is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University's Academy of Film, and the founder/chief editor of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. Hollywood in China (July 2022, The New Press) is her fourth book, and it offers ...
Challenging the Malayan Nationhood: Imaginations and Activism by the Peranakan Chinese
February 17, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesAre there viable alternatives to the ethnocentric model of nation-state in post-colonial societies? How did the Peranakan, a non-Malay community, imagine a different Malayan nation and strive to materialize it? How might researchers thoroughly investigate the political history of a marginalised group? And do the historical experiences from Malaya offer relevant lessons for resisting present-day ultra-nationalist developments elsewhere? In this episode, Dr. Bernard Keo, a Lecturer at La Trobe ...
Brian Lander, "The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire" (Yale UP, 2022)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesThe King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability t...
Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho, "Material Contradictions in Mao's China" (U Washington Press, 2022)
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesI'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, published in December 2022 by the University of Washington Press. Our editors have brought together ten chapters or “case studies” by scholars in various disciplines, as well as a theoretical and methodological reflection on materiality, contradiction, and "the socialist uncanny" (by Jonathan Bach) that ends the book. The book moves through various types...
Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesAmong all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific p...
The Geopolitics of Microchips: China, the EU, and the US
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 23 minutesWhat would happen if microchips suddenly disappeared from our world? From phones to cars, medical equipment to heating units, they are crucial for the safe and smooth functioning of much of society. While they may not actually disappear anytime soon, we have learned from the COVID pandemic about the real and potential consequences of an essential microchips shortage. Listen to Hermann Aubié, senior researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku in Finland, speak ab...
Iza Ding, "The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
February 03, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesWhat does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell, 2022) shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion ...
Matthew Galway, "The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949-1979" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 30, 2023 05:00 - 1 hourHow do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin, and how do they change once they do? The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979 (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Matthew Galway examines how ideological systems become localized, both in the indigenization of Marxism-Leninism by Mao Zedong and, more significantly, the indigenization of Maoism by the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Galway carefully investigates how Maoism was re...
Benedict Rogers, "The China Nexus: Thirty Years in and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny" (Optimum Publishing, 2022)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the reader through a nexus of the CCP's tyranny; from China's crackdown on its own citizens; through...
Myanmar Jewellers in China
January 27, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutesChina re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the Myanmar side of the border and the Myanmar immigration authorities refused to open the border for fear of COVID surge. This has continued to affect the livelihood of Myanmar jewellers who used to travel to China to do business. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen (University of Helsinki) talks to Juliet Zhu from the Research Institute for Languages ...
Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018)
January 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over time. From the earliest historically recorded systems of segmentary lineage to the incorporation first into local fiefdoms and then into the Chinese state (of both Nationalist and Communist governments), Tibetan pastoralists have maint...
Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journa...
Hung-Yok Ip, "Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence" ( Lexington Books, 2022)
January 09, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesHung-Yok Ip's Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence ( Lexington Books, 2022) examines Mohism as a movement in early China, focusing on the Mohists’ pursuit of power. Fashioning themselves as grassroots activists, the Mohists hoped to impact the elite by gaining entry in its community and influencing it from within. To create a less violent world, they deployed strategies of persuasion and negotiation but did not discard counterviolence in their dealings with the ruling ...
Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesOn September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolon...
Magnus Fiskesjö, "Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2021)
January 01, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was intended only by way of brief introduction. But the article held out the promise of more, and now its ...
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 29, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesWhat does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace? Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy...
Daniel Barish, "Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912" (Columbia UP, 2022)
December 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries all sought to find ways to shape China’s future. For many, as explored in Daniel Barish’s new book, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912 (Columbia UP, 2022), the solution lay not outside the Qing but within it — with the emperor himself. Learning to Rule explores the education of the final three Qing empe...
Buddhist Medicine in Tibet: A Discussion with Bill McGrath
December 26, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I sit down with my friend Bill McGrath, a historian of Tibetan Buddhism and medicine. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on this subject, and we get deep into the weeds in an academic conversation about traditional Tibetan medicine, the category of Buddhist medicine, and Bill's perspectives on magic, religion, and science. We also reminisce about the time that Bill once used a Tibetan mantra to save the day when we ran out of gas driving home from a confer...
Wendi L. Adamek, "Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan" (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourHow should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nuns, monks, and devotees on mountainsides in Baoshan, north central China, and through them, the soteriology of Buddhism in the medieval world. The convents have vanished and the stones weathered, but the skillful work in maintaining co-constitutive relations is as palpable as ever. Thoroughly researched and artfully written, Practicescapes and the...
Annuska Derks et al. "Fragrant Frontier: Global Spice Entanglements from the Sino-Vietnamese Uplands" (NIAS Press, 2022)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutesWhere do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade impact the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands? Annuska Derks and Jean-Francois Rousseau, co- editors with Sarah Turner of the book Fragrant Frontier Global Spice Entanglements in the Sino Vietnamese Uplands, joined Julia Heinle discussing their recently published NIAS Press edited volume. Fragrant Frontier demyst...
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesCritics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A f...
John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesOn July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor. Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global...
Jeremy L. Wallace, "Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 18, 2022 09:00 - 57 minutesFor decades, a few numbers came to define Chinese politics--until those numbers did not count what mattered and what they counted did not measure up. Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China (Oxford UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese government adopted a system of limited, quantified vision in order to survive the disasters unleashed by Mao Zedong's ideological leadership. Political scientist Jeremy Wallace explains how that system worked and analyz...
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 17, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesWhy some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become...
Jingjing Li, "Comparing Husserl's Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
December 17, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesComparing Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara in a Multicultural World: A Journey Beyond Orientalism by Jingjing Li (Bloomsbury, 2022) starts its investigation with a longstanding question in the comparative studies of phenomenology and Yogacara. While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is...
Sean Metzger, "The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization" (Indiana UP, 2020)
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesIn The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical frame through which to understand discourses of globalization: the so-called Chinese Atlantic. Elaborating on and complicating various Atlantic discourses (among them Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”), Metzger follows the flows of Chinese labor and capital throughout the Atlantic world, examining various media and aesthetic practices, among them docu...
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesRevolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levi...
Ying-Chen Peng, "Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi's Image Making" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourYing-chen Peng’s Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making is a beautiful new volume on late Qing imperial art practice from Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2023). Peng’s book, rigorously researched and richly illustrated, presents a revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager through an analysis of her patronage and participation in making art. Each chapter follows Cixi’s her “artfully subversive” command of various media forms, from photography and portraiture, to archit...
Michael X. Wang, "Lost in the Long March" (Overlook Press, 2022)
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesIn 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers That event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long Mar...
Amanda Wangwright, "The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949)" (Brill, 2020)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesThe first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2020) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yuliang, Fang Junbi, Yu Feng, and Liang Baibo—this book argues that women were central to the emerg...
Nicholas de Villiers, "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesA critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queernes...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 39 minutesIf the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead...
Is China's Communist Party Threatened by the Protests?
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesThis week, RBI Director John Torpey talked with William Hurst, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University, about the origins of the protests in China, how they differ from those in 1989, and the possibilities of regime change. Hurst delves into the mobilization and contentious politics of China and its local-central interplay, where protesters act as rational actors who use different strategies of bargaining and signaling. Moreover, Hurst addresses the implications of Xi Jinping's...
Rohan Mukherjee, "Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesWhy do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. International institutions shape the choices of rising states as they pursue equal status with established powers. Open membership rules ...
David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown, "People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 22 minutesEntitled People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown’s new book focuses upon the ways in which ethnic difference is writ through the banalities of everyday life: who one trusts, what one eats, where one shops, even what time one's clocks are set to (Xinjiang being perhaps one of the only places where different ethnic groups live by different time-zones). In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talk to...
John Delury, "Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
December 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAgents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Dr. John Delury reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity—and futility—of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a rem...
Adam Brookes, "Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City" (Atria Books, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe two parallel Palace Museums in Beijing and Taiwan, and their separate collections of thousands of precious artworks and artifacts from imperial times, reflects a key moment in the 1940s when the Republic of China and the People’s Republic became distinct entities. But the very survival of these vast troves of porcelain, sculpture, jade, paintings, books and many other items up to that moment was far from guaranteed given the epochal events unfolding across East Asia in the early part of t...