New Books in Chinese Studies

Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify with the empire while simultaneously maintaining the distinctions that subjugated them and marking their attempts to self-identify as Japanese as inauthentic, illegitimate forms of “passing” or “posing.” Visions of inclusion encouraged assimilation but also threatened to disrupt the very logic of imperialism itself: If there was no immutable difference between Taiwanese and Japanese subjects, for example, then what justified the subordination of the former to the latter? The chapters emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of empire, together with the contradictions and tensions of its ideologies of race, nation, and ethnicity.The paradoxes of passing, posing, and persuasion opened up unique opportunities for colonial contestation and negotiation in the arenas of cultural production, including theater, fiction, film, magazines, and other media of entertainment and propaganda consumed by audiences in mainland Japan and its colonies. From Meiji adaptations of Shakespeare and interwar mass media and colonial fiction to wartime propaganda films, competing narratives sought to shape how ambiguous identities were performed and read. All empires necessarily engender multiple kinds of border crossings and transgressions; in the case of Japan, the policing and blurring of boundaries often pivoted on the outer markers of ethno-national identification. This book showcases how actors—in multiple senses of the word—from all parts of the empire were able to move in and out of different performative identities, thus troubling its ontological boundaries.Christina Yi is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. Her research field is modern and contemporary Japanese literature, with a particular focus on issues of postcoloniality, language politics, genre, and cultural studies. Yi’s first monograph, Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.Andre Haag is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research explores how the insecurities and terrors of colonialism attendant to the annexation of Korea and internalization of the “Korea Problem” were inscribed within the literature, culture, and vocabularies that circulated within the Japanese imperial metropole.Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea.Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. 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

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard UP, 2024), Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In January 1945, the final year of the Pacific War, Japanese-held Hong Kong became the site of coordinated attacks by the U.S. Navy on Japanese warships and aircraft. Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War (Osprey, 2024) by Steven K. Bailey tells the story of what those air raids were like for the men who lived through them.Target Hong Kong is a work of military history that puts the lives of five U.S. Navy pilots and the Prisoner of War Raymond (“Ray”) Eric Jones at the center of the story. By weaving together records from diaries, oral histories, and US Navy documents, Steven has not only detailed which airstrike happened where, but also explored how both those living in the Stanley Military Internment Camp and those flying over the skies of Hong Kong experienced the war. Detailed, intimate, and filled with illuminating reflections on the ins and outs of working with wartime diaries, and the importance of visiting sites of historical battles, Target Hong Kong is sure to be of interest to those looking to learn more about the history of wartime Hong Kong and the experiences of American servicemen in the Pacific War. It will also interest anyone looking for an absorbing book that brings the events of the Pacific War to life.Readers interested in learning more should also check out Steven’s previous book, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942–1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), as well as “The Battle of Hong Kong: 1941: a Spatial History Project” that Steven references in the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book: A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. 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 late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland.Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century (U California Press, 2024) recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record, painting a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under the Empress Dowager’s leadership.A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Approaching translations of Tolkien's works as stories in their own right, Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation (Bloomsbury, 2024) reads multiple Chinese translations of Tolkien's writing to uncover the new and unique perspectives that enrich the meaning of the original texts.Exploring translations of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin and The Unfinished Tales, Dr. Eric Reinders reveals the mechanics of meaning by literally back-translating the Chinese into English to dig into the conceptual common grounds shared by religion, fantasy and translation, namely the suspension of disbelief, and questions of truth - literal, allegorical and existential. With coverage of themes such as gods and heathens, elves and 'Men', race, mortality and immortality, fate and doom, and language, Dr. Reinder's journey to Chinese Middle-earth and back again drastically alters views on Tolkien's work where even basic genre classification surrounding fantasy literature look different through the lens of Chinese literary expectations.Invoking scholarship in Tolkien studies, fantasy theory and religious and translations studies, this is an ambitious exercises in comparative imagination across cultures that suspends the prejudiced hierarchy of originals over translations.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. Today, I will be talking to Columbia University professor Ying Qian about her new book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2023). The volume enriches our understanding of media’s role in China’s revolutionary history by turning to documentary. Qian guides readers through early documentary practice, left- and right-wing Republican documentary, and documentary as it functioned in the socialist and early postsocialist periods. In reference to socialist documentary, she writes, “As the vanguard of cinema, documentary in the Mao era meant, in principle, to facilitate the dialectical relationship between the masses and the party, not only to aid in their mutual constitution, but also to facilitate a collective formation of knowledge and priorities to direct the unfolding of the revolution” (249). In our interview, we will discover how crucial this understudied genre has been in the 20th century and learn how the mutually constitutive dialectic between documentary form and revolution worked in practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The 2024 Solomon Islands elections were surprisingly peaceful. The deepening economic inequalities, widespread corruption, rogue demagogues manipulating the mob, and other aspects such as the heated debate about the increasing presence and influence of China, did not result in the kind of riots that hit this Pacific Island country twice in the previous decade. In an attempt to explain why, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki to understand Sino-Pacific relations, based on his ethnographic research conducted in Marovo Lagoon, Malaita, and Honiara in 2024.Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. Maggio’s ethnographic research takes a grassroots perspective on a topic that, in recent years, has been investigated only from a top-down, geopolitical perspective: is the Pacific becoming increasingly Chinese? While recognizing the coloniality implicit in such a question, he argues that increasingly sophisticate intercultural relations by young leaders enabled the difficult transition from conflict to peace. His argument is supported by the analysis of artifacts, newspapers, interviews, performances, and data collected with participant observation in Marovo Lagoon, Malaita, and Honiara. Previously, Maggio had an episode on Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific with Nordic Asia Podcast that might interest listeners.Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organized around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term “animal style,” this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. In Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh UP, 2024) Art historian Petya Andreeva’s research shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbors to showcase worldliness and control over the nomadic “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies