New Books in Chinese Studies

Transnational marriage migration is among the many features of cross-border mobility that characterise the globalised world. This is also the case in the Taiwan Strait, where the complicated political situation between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland adds a unique dimension to the phenomenon. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Lara Momesso, whose new book Cross-Border Intimacies: Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration Between China and Taiwan (Manchester, 2025) builds on fifteen years of research and fieldwork to examine the complexities and political entanglements of family formation across the Taiwan Strait. Dr. Lara Momesso is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Lancashire and is also affiliated with the European Research Centre of Contemporary Taiwan and the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS. She is also an editor-in-chief of the Asia Pacific Viewpoint and hosts the podcasts Taiwan on Air and Voices of Lancashire. Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A provocative collaborative project, China as Context challenges the marginalization of Chinese-grounded ideas in academia, arguing that neglecting China distorts our understanding of global complexities. Through diverse ethnographic perspectives, this volume repositions China, urging a holistic, post-global approach to the social sciences amid shifting global dynamics. Decades-old calls to recognise China’s significance for anthropological theory and the social sciences are more urgent than ever. Yet, Chinese-grounded ideas remain marginal, with China often seen as a distant “Other” rather than a source of widely applicable theory. Drawing on East Asian postcolonial scholarship, this volume argues that without taking China seriously as a knowledge producer and a key agent in a post-global world, social scientists risk misinterpreting the global present. As Western globalisation wanes and anthropology reassesses the relationship between ethnography and theory, we show how “China” must be understood as an ordinary, integral context for research worldwide. China as Context is edited by Di Wu, Andrea Pia, and Ed Pulford. Di Wu is an Anthropologist and Associate Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Anthropology, Zhejiang University, the People’s Republic of China. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How do we compare across languages, media, and histories, all without flattening differences? And what might Hong Kong teach us about doing comparison differently? Alvin K. Wong examines these and other questions in Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Duke UP, 2025), a wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of queerness in Hong Kong. Bringing together Sinophone literature, independent and commercial cinema, documentary films, and visual art, the book asks how Hong Kong’s queer productions might help us rethink the work of comparison itself. Rather than treating Hong Kong as a marginal or derivative space — a space defined by British colonialism, China-centrism, or global capitalism — this book approaches the city as a site of methodological possibilities. The key concept the book advances, “unruly comparison,” replacing neat equivalences and stable categories with incommensurability and transnational connections and linking Hong Kong to other places, times, and queer spaces across the Sinophone. Theoretically deft, the book is filled with a wide range of fascinating material, including work by filmmakers including Wong Kar-wai, Scud, and Fruit Chan; transnational and transgender visual cultures; documentaries about Southeast Asian domestic workers and queer intimacies; and poetry about language and precarity. This book will appeal to those interested in queer theory, Hong Kong studies, Sinophone studies, and comparative approaches. Listeners should also check out Alvin Wong's co-edited volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies(Routledge, 2020) and the Society of Sinophone Studies webpage (of which Alvin is currently chair!).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel (Cornell UP, 2023) uses the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan) to examine the world of print in early modern China. Scott W. Gregory traces the way this beloved novel about outlaw heroes, honor, corruption, and brotherhood was adapted and changed by different editor-publishers. While in other contexts print and printing brought stability to texts, Scott shows how in the Ming print itself was an agent of textual change.Bandits in Print is a refreshing take on this traditional novel, one that highlights how malleable Water Margin really was. This book is sure to appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, Ming history, and print culture, as well as those who want to know more about the interaction between manuscript and print in the early modern world.In addition to being an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, Scott is also co-director of the Center for East Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Dylan Loh, an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University and author of a book on Chinese diplomacy, dives into the assertive tactics of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He discusses the intriguing rise of 'wolf warrior' diplomacy and how these practices reflect Beijing's evolving identity on the world stage. Loh also shares insights from his extensive interviews and emphasizes the importance of diplomats in shaping policy. Plus, he teases his future work on China's discourse power and its implications for global relations.

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation. This book is open access, you can find the download link here. You can find the statistics and social network analysis in this book as well as links to Prof. Mazanec's codes in this book.  You can find the online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here. Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived.It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press: 2024) Kerry’s book covers incidents like the MacCartney embassy, the East India Company, the Anglo-Chinese wars, the Communist takeover in 1949, and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Reversal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this episode of New Books Network, Laura Goldberg speaks with Thomas David DuBois, Professor at Beijing Normal University, about his book China in Seven Banquets, which traces Chinese history through seven extraordinary meals. Gastronomy and dining rituals offer a revealing historical framework: they make visible social order, ethical values, and political power, expressed through ingredients, preparation, display, and etiquette. DuBois shares stories of early ritual feasts shaped by Confucian thought and of vast imperial banquets with hundreds of dishes – diving into fermented meat sauces, courtly excess, and the arrival of new foods via the Silk Road. Conversation also turns to the modern period, considering the globalization of Chinese cuisine and the circulation of foreign foods within China. A feast from film – in the opening sequence of cult classic Eat, Drink, Man, Woman – is explored, as is the potential of food security impacting China’s culinary future. In addition, DuBois shares how he recreated dozens of traditional recipes using modern kitchen techniques – all of which he includes in the book for the intrepid home cook. Thoughtful and engaging, the discussion invites listeners to see meals not simply as nourishment, but as moments where culture, power, and history come together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Today, anthropologist Professor Anru Lee is joining NBN as a guest host to interview me, Suvi Rautio, on my new book, The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade published by Palgrave in 2024. In China, heritage projects are sprouting across the countryside carrying the promise of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” as a call for the great revival and rejuvenation of the nation. Suvi’s book unravels the workings behind these promises through the story of remaking Meili, a Dong ethnic minority village nestled along the margins of China, into a “Traditional Village” heritage site. In a past riven by deep political and societal disruptions, Meili becomes a medium for contesting, mediating and continuously inventing representations of tradition that aligns with the Chinese Communist Party’s mission towards continuity and stability. The outcome is an original depiction of the compromises that shape heritage-making in a rural ethnic corner of China. Filled with rich, fine-grained narrative and analysis, Suvi Rautio offers a unique lens to complicate the narrative of how heritage projects function by demonstrating the politics involved in inventing tradition and its far-reaching consequences in contemporary China today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies