New Books in Chinese Studies

In December 1937, Bernhard Sindberg arrives at a cement factory outside of Nanjing. He’s one of just two foreigners, and he gets there just weeks before the Japanese invade and commit the now infamous atrocities in the Chinese city.As the writer Peter Harmsen notes, Bernhard’s background isn’t particularly compelling: He’s bounced from job to job, and is known for butting heads with his colleagues and superiors. But as Harmsen explains in his book Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing (Casemate: 2024), the Danish man ends up doing something extraordinary: Setting up a refugee camp and using every ounce of political capital and sheer bullheadedness to protect tens of thousands of Chinese trying to escape the fighting.In this interview, Peter and I talk about Bernhard, his less-than-illustrious path to China, and what his deeds in Nanjing tell us about the nature of heroism.Peter Harmsen is the author of Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate: 2015) and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City (Casemate: 2015), as well as the War in the Far East trilogy. He studied history at National Taiwan University and has been a foreign correspondent in East Asia for more than two decades.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bernhard Sindberg. 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

Christine Tan argues that the most fruitful way to read the Zhuangzi, if one is seeking political and ethical insight, is through the Jin Dynasty commentator Guo Xiang. In Freedom’s Frailty: Self-Realization in the Neo-Daoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi (SUNY Press, 2024), she lays out her reasoning for this position, offering her interpretation of Guo’s conception of freedom in relationship to Anglo-European philosophers like Isaiah Berlin. Explaining what she calls Guo’s “logic of convergence,” on which opposites are brought together, Tan unpacks Guo’s hermeneutic approach to the Zhuangzi and his use of self-realization (zide) as a tool to bring about political transformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Indoctrinating the Youth: Secondary Education in Wartime China and Postwar Taiwan, 1937-1960 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines how the Guomindang (GMD or Nationalists) sought to maintain control of middle-school students and cultivate their political loyalty over the trajectory of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and postwar Taiwan. During the Sino-Japanese War the Nationalists managed middle-school refugee students by merging schools, publishing and distributing updated textbooks, and assisting students as they migrated to the interior with their principals and teachers. In Taiwan, the China Youth Corps (CYC) became a symbol of the regime’s successful establishment. Tracing Nationalist efforts to indoctrinate ideology and martial spirit, Jennifer Liu investigates how GMD leaders Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo tried to build support among young people in their efforts to stabilize Taiwanese society under their rule. By comparing two key youth organizations—the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps in China, and the CYC on Taiwan—Liu uses education as a lens to analyze state-building in modern China.Liu’s careful analysis of the inner workings of GMD youth organizations also illuminates the day-to-day operations of military training in gender-segregated upper-middle schools—including how the government selected instructors and the skills taught to students. According to Liu, mandatory military training contributed to preventing major protest against the government but the policy was not without critics. Intellectuals, parents, and students voiced their dissent at what they perceived as excessive control by a repressive government and a waste of resources interfering with academics. The government-mandated civics curriculum, including government-approved textbooks and standards, reveals the characteristics and duties GMD officials believed modern citizens of the next generation should possess. Through provisions for refugee students, youth organizations, military training, and civics classes, GMD secondary education policy played a critical role in the process of state building in both modern China and Taiwan.Skillfully combining archival work in Nanjing and Taipei, along with oral interviews with former students and CYC administrators, instructors, and members, Liu offers a unique perspective toward a balanced assessment of Nationalist Party rule.Jennifer Liu is associate professor of East Asian history at Central Michigan University. She specializes in the political and social history of twentieth-century China, particularly education, youth culture, studen​t protest, and ethnic identity.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

During the Qing dynasty in China, a wide variety of people participated in a lottery game named weixing (“surname guessing”), which had participants placing bets on the surnames of civil service examination candidates. A fiercely competitive process, those who passed the various levels of the civil service and military examinations could climb the social ladder and obtain status in their communities and be considered for important positions in the government and military. The results of these examinations were not only highly anticipated by the exam takers themselves but also–with the introduction of weixing–by an enthusiastic community of players who bet on the success of candidates with less common surnames.In this episode, En Li, assistant professor of modern East Asian history at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Betting on the Civil Service Exmaninations: The Lottery in Late Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2023), explores the fascinating history of this lottery game–from the longer history of games and betting in China and the origin of weixing to its regulation by the government to raise revenue and the spread of the game beyond China’s borders through Chinese diasporic communities to Southeast Asia and North America. The book considers the game from multiple perspectives–government officials, players, and lottery game runners. En Li thoughtfully reflects on the book and the process of producing it and points to the larger significance of both weixing and the civil service examinations in Chinese society and life and the risk, reward, and loss involved.Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular interest in esoteric teachings. What made these Buddhists dissatisfied with Chinese Buddhism, and what did they think other Buddhist traditions could offer? Which elements did they choose to follow, and which ones did they disregard? And how do their experiences recast the wider story of twentieth-century pan-Asian Buddhist reform movements?Based on a wide range of previously unexplored Chinese sources, Esoteric Buddhism in China: Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949 (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how esoteric Buddhist traditions have shaped the Chinese religious landscape. Wei Wu examines cross-cultural religious transmission of ideas from Japanese and Tibetan traditions, considering the various esoteric currents within Chinese Buddhist communities and how Chinese individuals and groups engaged with newly translated ideas and practices. She argues that Chinese Buddhists’ assimilation of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional elements of Tibetan and Japanese esoteric Buddhism was not a simple replication but an active process of creating new meanings. Their visions of Buddhism in the modern world, as well as early twentieth-century discourses of nation building and religious reform, shaped the reception of esoteric traditions. By analyzing the Chinese interpretation and strategic adaptations of esoteric Buddhism, this book sheds new light on the intellectual development, ritual performances, and institutional formations of Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century.To understand the broader forces that shaped the debates about esoteric Buddhism in modern China, please also check Wu Wei's article, "Buddhism and Superstition: Buddhist Apologetics in the Anti-Superstition Campaigns in Modern China," which is open access and 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

Today I had the great pleasure of talking to Associate Professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee on her new book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 (U California Press, 2024). Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978-80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.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

In his latest book At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China (Duke UP, 2022), Ban Wang uses an ecocritical lens to examine anthropocentrism, technoscientific hubris, and ecologically destructive modes of production in modern China. Analyzing modern discourse, literature, film, and science fiction, Wang asserts that the domination of nature and labor under capitalism and technocrats is the culprit of ecological crises and human alienation. Alternatively, Wang argues, utopianisms of nonalienated labor keep alive the ideals of resonance between humans and Earth.Ban Wang is the William Haas Endowed Chair Professor in Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (Duke UP, 2022), Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford UP, 2004), History and Memory: A Critique of Global Modernity (Oxford UP, 2004), Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (Edwin Mellen, 2002), and The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century (Stanford UP, 1997).Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories. 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

Even as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern for both intellectuals and those seeking to rule the states and empires which have occupied the space now forming the People’s Republic of China.Today’s Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is no exception to this, and indeed is making unusually strenuous efforts to circumscribe an acceptable vision of the past. Yet, as Ian Johnson’s beautifully put together and captivatingly written new book Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (Oxford UP, 2023) shows, no small number of scholars, film-makers, artists, writers and researchers continue to work to ensure that less convenient histories endure into the future. Based on years of research and experience, this is a powerful – and ultimately cautiously hopeful – book about the possibility for ordinary people to keep hold of often-painful but vitally important pasts. Working to make this more likely, Ian Johnson also heads the China Unofficial Archives project.Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and socialism and empire in Eurasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies