New Books in Chinese Studies

Bestselling author and illustrator Grace Lin explores the myths and stories behind American Chinese food in her new book 'Chinese Menu'. From scallion pancakes to wonton soup, she uncovers the magical tales and historical roots of these beloved dishes. Separated into courses like a Chinese menu, her book features squabbling dragons, magical fruits, and hungry monks. This enchanting journey will leave you with a deeper appreciation for the resilience and triumph behind this undeniably American cuisine.

Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Bernardine's Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, discusses Bernardine's life in interwar Shanghai, her connections with influential figures such as Lin Yutang and Anna May Wong, and the challenges of researching and writing her story.

We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing how “modernity claims” try either to erase the past or to master it for our own uses, we can appreciate what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity."Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice InstituteFeatured Scholar:Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard UniversitySpecial thanks: Travis DeCook, Rokhaya Dieng, Gina Elia, Thomas A. Lewis For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, visit https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/season-ii. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Dr. Amy Matthewson explores cartoons of China in Punch magazine, reflecting and shaping British attitudes in the Victorian era. They discuss the complexities of caricature, negative representations of China, and the legacy on British and Chinese communities today. Despite difficulties in finding the everyday Chinese voice, they highlight ongoing projects and future endeavors.

The Qing dynasty's office purchase system (juanna) allowed men to legally and openly pay for appointments in the civil service — enabling them to skip the much-lauded civil service examination entirely. Thoroughly forgotten by historians and often dismissed as "corruption," Lawrence Zhang's meticulous book, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), unpacks this system. Through a thorough analysis of archival and other print sources — including personnel files, lists of buyers, and late Qing novels — Zhang shows that office purchase was widespread, common, and an important part of the state's recruitment strategy.  By upending the "ladder of success" narrative of the Qing, Zhang's book challenges the characterization of the Qing as a meritocracy and calls into question how we (and historians) today think of merit. As he writes in the book: "The link between wealth and power has always been one of the most important relationships in any organized society. Rarely do we get a chance to understand it as a fresh problem that undermines so many existing assumptions about a society we thought we knew well. Office purchase is precisely such a system" (p. 266). Listeners interested in bureaucracy, Chinese history, examination systems, and the lengths that parents will go to to ensure their children's success should seek it out.Listeners especially interested in meritocracy might also want to check out the edited volume mentioned in the episode (which Lawrence Zhang also contributed to!): Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2022). It was also discussed on another NBN podcast, hosted by Nicholas Gordon, over here.   Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples—the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths—all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world. Professor Kenneth W. Harl’s newest book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2023) vividly re-creates the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever ready to learn from their more advanced neighbors. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own. 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, our host, Ti-han, invited Dr Darryl Sterk, a Canadian eco-translator who is now based in Lingnan University in Hong Kong and dedicated his work in Taiwanese eco-literature and translation. In our conversation, Darryl told us how he ends up choosing a career path for eco-translation and how he defines “eco-translation” in his own way. He also shared with us his translation experience more in details by drawing reference to Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle. Furthermore, facing challenges of AI (artificial intelligence) in the field of translation, Darryl also chatted with us what kind of unique feature that human translators can offer but a machine is unable to provide so far. 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

Explore the fascinating history of China's relations with the West through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators. Learn about the roles and experiences of the interpreters at the 1793 British embassy to China and how tensions between cultures culminated in the Opium Wars. Discover how the Qing court manufactured ignorance about the British by repressing cultural go-betweens. Delve into the unique translation styles and philosophies of the interpreters and their connections to the East India Company. Listen to the extraordinary stories of these translators and their future projects.

A dictator's power is secure, the authors begin in this muscular, impressive study, only as long as citizens believe in it. When citizens suddenly believe otherwise, a dictator's power is anything but, as the Soviet Union's collapse revealed. This conviction – that power rests ultimately on citizens' beliefs – compels the world's autocrats to invest in sophisticated propaganda.Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Erin Baggott Carter and Dr. Brett L. Carter draws on the first global data set of autocratic propaganda, encompassing nearly eight million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. The authors document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and its opponents, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it.The book explains why Russian President Vladimir uses Donald Trump as a propaganda tool and why Chinese state propaganda is more effusive than any point since the Cultural Revolution.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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