New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Erin Y. Huang, "Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility" (Duke UP, 2020)
September 26, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourErin Y. Huang’s Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke UP, 2020) is an expansive and ambitious book that explores the affective territory of “neoliberal post-socialist China” as it manifests in contemporary Chinese (language) cinema. Pushing beyond the geographic boundaries of the PRC and the confines of art cinema, Huang’s book reads the post-socialist condition as it manifests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and across a variety of film genres. The term urban horro...
Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
September 24, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutesOnce a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and ...
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture" (U Washington Press, 2021)
September 23, 2021 08:00 - 38 minutesOne would think that comparing civilizations as far removed in time and space as Ancient Egypt and Ancient China might not reveal much. Yet Professor Tony Barbieri’s Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021) gleans much from a deeply-researched comparison of political structures, diplomatic relations, legal systems, ideas of the afterlife, and other aspects. In other words, despite being separated by thousands of years and thousands of k...
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Chinese-Inspired Architecture
September 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHoward chats with Dang Qun, one of the three founding partners of Beijing-based MAD architects, about aesthetics, history, cultural distinctiveness and architecture's unique balance of the concrete and ethereal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
M. W. Shores, "The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
September 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourRakugo, a popular form of comic storytelling, has played a major role in Japanese culture and society. Developed during the Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods, it is still popular today, with many contemporary Japanese comedians having originally trained as rakugo artists. Rakugo is divided into two distinct strands, the Tokyo tradition and the Osaka tradition, with the latter having previously been largely overlooked. This pioneering study of the Kamigata (Osaka) rakugo tradition ...
Dafydd Fell, "Taiwan's Green Parties: Alternative Politics in Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
September 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourExamining the Green Party Taiwan (GPT) since its establishment through the aftermath of the most recent national elections in January 2020, Dafydd Fell’s Taiwan’s Green Parties: Alternative Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2021) focuses on Taiwan’s most important movement party over the last two and a half decades. Despite its limited electoral impact, its leaders have played a critical role in a range of social movements, including anti-nuclear and LGBT rights campaigns. Plotting the party’s e...
Liang Luo, "The Global White Snake" (U Michigan Press, 2021)
September 17, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourLiang Luo's book The Global White Snake (U Michigan Press, 2021) examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them...
Hoyt Long, "The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2021)
September 14, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021), Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Liter...
Shen Yang, "More Than One Child: Memoirs of an Illegal Daughter" (Balestier Press, 2021)
September 13, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes'I broke a law simply by being born.' In the late 1980s, Shen Yang was born during the fiercest years of China's One-Child Policy. As the second daughter of the family, she was a massive liability - an excess child, a product of illegal birth. From being raised by her grandparents in a remote village as soon as she was born, to being whisked away to her aunt's home in a distant faraway city, Shen Yang's existence was doomed to be shrouded in the utmost secrecy and silence. Armed with a false ...
Porn, Privacy and Pain: The Rise of Image-based Abuse in Asia
September 10, 2021 08:00 - 28 minutesWhat is image-based abuse? Why has it been on the rise in Asia, especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic? What has been done to tackle the issue? Raquel Carvalho, Asia Correspondent for the South China Morning Post, shares the story of how a group of journalists across some Asian newsrooms collaborated in a months-long investigation and uncover the stories inside the online groups spreading stolen sexual images of women and children, how the victims are struggling to have such content removed fr...
Su Yun Kim, "Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905-1945" (Cornell UP, 2020)
September 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAs in colonial situations elsewhere, Korean experiences of Japanese empire featured many attempts by the imperial authorities to regulate intimate aspects of Korean life, including intermarriage between colonizer and colonized peoples. While official messaging and policy promoted Korean-Japanese unions, cultural output including films, short stories and novels from the time also focused on the topic, including works by Korean writers authored in both Korean and Japanese languages. In Imperial...
Jan Bardsley, "Maiko Masquerade: Crafting Geisha Girlhood in Japan" (U California Press, 2021)
September 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMaiko Masquerade: Crafting Geisha Girlhood in Japan (University of California Press, 2021) explores Japanese representations of the maiko, or apprentice geisha, in films, manga, and other popular media as an icon of exemplary girlhood. Dr. Jan Bardsley traces how the maiko, long stigmatized as a victim of sexual exploitation, emerges in the 2000s as the chaste keeper of Kyoto’s classical artistic traditions. Insider accounts by maiko and geisha, their leaders and fans, show pride in the train...
Anthony S. Rausch, "Resolving the Contemporary Tensions of Regional Places: What Japan Can Teach Us" (2021)
September 03, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesResolving the Contemporary Tensions of Regional Places: What Japan Can Teach Us offers a fresh and unique view of regional society, regional economies and the future of regional places. Anthony S. Rausch takes up contemporary and fundamentally universal regional-place tensions-regional relocation, local finance, and leadership, local economies together with specifically regional economic and cultural revitalization, and the potential in higher education and resident volunteerism for regional ...
Lindsey Miller, "North Korea: Like Nowhere Else" (September, 2021)
September 02, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutesIt’s a cliche to call North Korea the most isolated country in the world. Those of us living outside the country often have very little idea of what life there is like, often only seeing what its government would like us to see: military parades, missile launches, and joyous crowds. Yet Lindsey Miller, author of North Korea: Like Nowhere Else: Two Years of Living in the World's Most Secretive State (September Publishing: 2021) is a window into how ordinary North Koreans live. They are more th...
Austin Dean, "China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937" (Cornell UP, 2020)
September 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits." China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 (Cornell UP, 2020) focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journ...
Zachary M. Howlett, "Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China" (Cornell UP, 2021)
August 27, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEvery year millions of high school seniors in China take the gaokao, China’s standardized college entrance exam. Students, parents, and head teachers all devote years, sweat, and tears to this consequential and chancy exam — even though the ideal of the gaokao as a fair, objective, and scientific measure of individual merit is known to be something of a myth. Why examinees and their families continue to believe in the relative fairness of the gaokao is what Zachary Howlett’s book, Meritocracy...
Jagjeet Lally, "India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World" (Oxford UP, 2021)
August 26, 2021 08:00 - 41 minutesWhen we think about modern trade, we tend to think about the sea: port cities and large ships carrying goods back and forth. It’s a story that tends to put Europe at the center, as the pinnacle of shipping and maritime technology. Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) corrects this narrative. For Jagjeet, the way we talk about globalization misses the continued land trade that happened throughout Central Asia, with India as a hub. Traders trave...
Jason M. Kelly, "Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China's Capitalist Ascent" (Harvard UP, 2021)
August 19, 2021 08:00 - 36 minutesWe think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today. Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Harvard University Press, 2021) Jason M. Kelly is a historian of modern Chi...
Grace M. Cho, "Tastes Like War: A Memoir" (Feminist Press, 2021)
August 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe US military camptowns were established shortly after the Second World War in 1945, appropriating the Japanese comfort stations. The Korean government actively supported the creation of camptowns for its own economic and national security interests. Utilizing the Japanese colonial policy, the US military and the South Korean government sought to control camptown women’s bodies through vaginal examinations, isolation wards, and jails, monitoring women for potential venereal diseases. Denigr...
Tom Phuong Le, "Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century" (Columbia UP, 2021)
August 18, 2021 08:00 - 53 minutesSince the end of World War II, Japan has not sought to remilitarize, and its postwar constitution commits to renouncing aggressive warfare. Yet many inside and outside Japan have asked whether the country should or will return to commanding armed forces amid an increasingly challenging regional and global context and as domestic politics have shifted in favor of demonstrations of national strength. Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foreground...
Jeremy Black, "Strategy and the Second World War: How the War Was Won, and Lost" (Robinson, 2021)
August 18, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutesA concise, accessible account of strategy and the Second World War, Strategy and the Second World War: How the War Was Won, and Lost (Robinson, 2021), by renowned Historian Jeremy Black offers up a new look at this somewhat tired subject. In 1941, the Second World War became global, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union; Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor; and Germany declared war on the United States. In this timely book, which fills a real gap, Black engages with the str...
Kah Seng Loh and Li Yang Hsu, "Tuberculosis: The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018" (Routledge, 2021)
August 16, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesTuberculosis: The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018 (Routledge, 2021), co-written by Dr. Loh, a historian and Dr. Hsu Li Yang, a medical doctor offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the way in the which the disease was managed from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book charts the relationship between disease, society and the state, outlining the struggles of colonial and post-colonial governments to cope with infectious disease and to establish effective public health programm...
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, "ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
August 16, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThere's been a lot of resurgent interest in the Silk Routes lately, particularly looking at the cultural, political, and economic connections between "East" and "West" that challenge long held narratives of a world that only became interconnected in the last half millennium. Even so, it's been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscr...
Hanno Jentzsch, "Harvesting State Support: Institutional Change and Local Agency in Japanese Agriculture" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
August 11, 2021 08:00 - 40 minutesAgriculture has been among the toughest political battlegrounds in postwar Japan and represents an ideal case study in institutional stability and change. Inefficient land use and a rapidly aging workforce have long been undermining the economic viability of the agricultural sector. Yet vested interests in the small-scale, part-time agricultural production structure have obstructed major reforms. Change has instead occurred in more subtle ways. Since the mid-1990s, a gradual reform process ha...
Katie Cummer and Lynne D. DiStefano, "Asian Revitalization: Adaptive Reuse in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)
August 03, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesAdaptive reuse, or using a building for a new purpose, has become popular around the world, but discussion about adaptive reuse in Asia is relatively scarce. As a result, this architectural innovation in Asia, which includes redesigned institutional buildings, awards for cultural heritage conservation projects, and adapted reuse field studies, is overdue for consideration. Asian Revitalization’s review of adaptive reuse begins by comparing the global presence of adaptive reuse to its presence...
Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)
August 03, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourSpies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in ...
Daryl R. Ireland, "John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man" (Baylor UP, 2020)
August 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDubbed the "Billy Sunday of China" for the staggering number of people he led to Christ, John Song has captured the imagination of generations of readers. His story, as it became popular in the West, possessed memorable, if not necessarily true, elements: Song was converted while he studied in New York at Union Theological Seminary in 1927, but his modernist professors placed him in an insane asylum because of his fundamentalism; upon his release, he returned to China and drew enormous crowds...
Chris Miller, "We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin" (Harvard UP, 2021)
July 29, 2021 08:00 - 47 minutesRussia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those who launched them hoped to achieve. Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East A...
Jennifer Pan, "Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for Its Rulers" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDevelopment economists have been doing intensive research in recent years on conditional cash transfer programs as a tool to help get people out of poverty. Meanwhile in the US there has been a lot of talk about Universal Basic Income as a remedy for inequality and social disclocations. On paper, China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee, or Dibao, sounds a lot like Universal Basic Income. Jennifer Pan shows that this tool of poverty alleviation has instead been turned into a tool of surveillance ...
Chenshu Zhou, "Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China" (U California Press, 2021)
July 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAt a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (U California Press, 2021) advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s R...
David Veevers, "The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThis is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies whic...
The Renewable Energy Revolution in East Asia and the Nordics
July 26, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesThe world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries. In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assist...
Popular Protests in the Age of #MilkTeaAlliance
July 23, 2021 08:00 - 37 minutesWhat influence can online and visual activism have on protest movements? With a wave of anti-establishment protests sweeping over East and Southeast Asia over the past couple of years, the online phenomenon of the #MilkTeaAlliance has gained increasing international recognition. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is joined by Wasana Wongsurawat and Mai Corlin Fredriksen to discuss the Milk Tea Alliance. Departing from the Thai and Hong Kong contexts, they exp...
Tonio Andrade, "The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China" (Princeton UP, 2021)
July 22, 2021 04:00 - 54 minutesOn January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous ...
Kailing Xie, "Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations: Perspectives from China’s Privileged Young Women" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
July 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourToday I interviewed Kailing Xie on her recently published book, Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations: Perspectives from China's Privileged Young Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). This book takes a feminist approach to analyse the lives of well-educated urban Chinese women, who were raised to embody the ideals of a modern Chinese nation and are largely the beneficiaries of the policy changes of the post-Mao era. It explores young women’s gendered attitudes to and experiences of marriage, ...
Yujie Zhu and Christina Maags, "Heritage Politics in China: The Power of the Past" (Routledge, 2020)
July 20, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesHeritage Politics in China: The Power of the Past (Routledge, 2020) studies the impact of heritage policies and discourses on the Chinese state and Chinese society. It sheds light on the way Chinese heritage policies have transformed the narratives and cultural practices of the past to serve the interests of the present. As well as reinforcing a collective social identity, heritage in China has served as an instrument of governance and regulation at home and a tool to generate soft power abro...
China's New Data Security Law and Cyber Sovereignty with Rogier Creemers
July 16, 2021 09:00 - 38 minutesWhat is China's new vision for regulating cyberspace? What does its new Data Security Law intend to do? Is China's Personal Information Protection Law comparable to Europe’s GDPR? What are the ramifications of China's plan to become a major global cyberpower in other parts of the world? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Rogier Creemers, an Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese Studies at Leiden University, discusses China's ...
Andrew F. Jones, "Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
July 16, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMusic from East Asia has recently been making its way round the world on waves created and mediated by new technologies and global interconnections. This may seem like something very novel, but as Andrew Jones shows in Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (U Minnesota Press, 2020), popular music from this region – and here specifically varieties of Chinese music – has been riding revolutionary technological and socioeconomic currents for a long time. Events during the ...
Michael Berry, “China, Culturally Speaking” (Open Agenda, 2021)
July 16, 2021 08:00 - 2 hoursChina, Culturally Speaking is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at UCLA and a world-renowned Chinese literary translator and film scholar. After discussing the inspiring influence his English teacher had on him, the conversation covers topics such as the appeal of literary translation, modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the history and development of Chinese cinema, popular culture in m...
Christian C. Lentz, "Contested Territory: Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam" (Yale UP, 2019)
July 15, 2021 08:00 - 33 minutesWhy is Vietnam's modern history so closely associated with a place that lies only just within the country's borders? What was at stake in the contest for the mountainous Black River region that culminated in the legendary French defeat of 1954? How did the different ethnic groups living around Điện Biên Phủ position themselves, when forced to choose between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam? Why did some groups in the region dream of greater autonomy, under a just king, following ...
Yurou Zhong, "Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958" (Columbia UP, 2019)
July 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1928 linguist Yuen Ren Chao had reason to celebrate. The Nationalist government had just recognized his system for writing Chinese, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so he gleefully wrote (using the system) in his diary: "G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hooray!!!" (G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!). He was not the only one excited about the prospect of scraping Chinese characters either. In the global context of phonocentric dominance both the Nationalists and the Communist...
Brooke McCorkle Okazaki, "Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
July 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourBrooke McCorkle Okazaki’s Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour, part of the 33 1/3 music history and culture series, is a joyful romp through the career of the internationally successful Japanese trio, Shonen Knife. The book focuses on the intersection of food, gender, and music for these pioneers of what Okazaki calls “josei rock,” in other words, music by women in the Japanese scene that does not fit into heavily produced and marketed categories such as “girls bands” and “idols.” The book combines his...
Eric C. Rath, "Oishii: The History of Sushi" (Reaktion Books, 2021)
July 14, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesSushi and sashimi are by now a global sensation and have become perhaps the best known of Japanese foods—but they are also the most widely misunderstood. Oishii: The History of Sushi (Reaktion Books, 2020) reveals that sushi began as a fermented food with a sour taste, used as a means to preserve fish. This book, the first history of sushi in English, traces sushi’s development from China to Japan and then internationally, and from street food to high-class cuisine. Included are two dozen his...
Arunabh Ghosh, "Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China" (Princeton UP, 2020)
July 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe first historical study of the development of statistics in Mao-era China, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020) explores how Chinese statisticians attempted to know their new nation through numbers. Exploring the different kinds of statistics available and adopted by the PRC, Arunabh Ghosh details how Chinese statisticians moved away from Soviet-inspired exhaustive enumeration, learned about the then-new techn...
Cees Heere, "Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894-1914" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 07, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesIn 1902, the British government concluded a defensive alliance with Japan, a state that had surprised much of the world with its sudden rise to prominence. For the next two decades, the Anglo-Japanese alliance would hold the balance of power in East Asia, shielding Japan as it cemented its regional position, and allowing Britain to concentrate on meeting the German challenge in Europe. Yet it was also a relationship shaped by its contradictions. Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and ...
The State of the Hong Kong Labor Movement: A Discussion with Bill Taylor
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 32 minutesWhat is happening to the labor movement in Hong Kong? Why was May Day this year such a muted commemoration? And how have recent political upheavals in Hong Kong affected the work of trade unionists there? Bill Taylor, associate professor in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong, discusses the plight of organized labor in Hong Kong with Hong Yu Liu, a PhD student in sociology at the University of Cambridge, who recently spent a month in virtual residency at the Nordic...
Yanzhong Huang, "Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesPopular discussions of China’s growth prospects often focus on the success or failure specific industries. They might address the challenges rising wages pose to the export manufacturing sector, or the emergence of the new data-fueled tech sector. But one of the most important determinants of a country’s long-run economic growth is human capital—the education and health of its people. In Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State (Cambridge UP,...
Allison Alexy, "Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesIn many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Allison Alexy tells the ...
C. Patterson Giersch, "Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China" (Stanford UP, 2020)
June 30, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourTenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2020), C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disemp...
Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
June 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief. Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth centu...