New Books in Chinese Studies

If there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China.It’s an inopportune start to four centuries of trade, diplomacy, imperialism, ideology–and a lot of personal griping between different Russian and Chinese leaders, as charted by Philip Snow’s China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023)Snow writes of Russian territorial grabs, China’s reliance on its northern neighbor for diplomatic support and training, Russia’s confused attitude towards Asia—and then the rapid reversal of power and status with the death of Stalin.In this interview, Philip and I talk about the China-Russia relationship, spanning four centuries–and what that history tells us about China and Russia’s relations today.Philip Snow has traveled extensively in Russia and China since the 1960s and has lived in Hong Kong since 1994. An expert in China’s international relations, he is the author of The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (Cornell University Press: 1989) and The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press: 2003)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China and Russia. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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

I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet I serve as dean of a large faculty of political science in a Chinese university that trains students and provincial cadres to serve the country as Communist Party officials: It’s typically a post reserved for members of the CCP, given the political sensitivity of the work. That’s part of the surprise. The other part is that I’m a Canadian citizen, born and bred in Montreal, without any Chinese ancestry.– Daniel A. Bell, The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat in China (2023)On January 1, 2017, Daniel Bell was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University―the first foreign dean of a political science faculty in mainland China’s history. In The Dean of Shandong, Bell chronicles his experiences as what he calls “a minor bureaucrat,” offering an inside account of the workings of Chinese academia and what they reveal about China’s political system. It wasn’t all smooth sailing―Bell wryly recounts sporadic bungles and misunderstandings―but Bell’s post as dean provides a unique vantage point on China today.Bell, neither a Chinese citizen nor a member of the Chinese Communist Party, was appointed as dean because of his scholarly work on Confucianism―but soon found himself coping with a variety of issues having little to do with scholarship or Confucius. These include the importance of hair color and the prevalence of hair-dyeing among university administrators, both male and female; Shandong’s drinking culture, with endless toasts at every shared meal; and some unintended consequences of an intensely competitive academic meritocracy. As dean, he also confronts weightier matters: the role at the university of the Party secretary, the national anticorruption campaign and its effect on academia (Bell asks provocatively, “What’s wrong with corruption?”), and formal and informal modes of censorship. Considering both the revival of Confucianism in China over the last three decades and what he calls “the Communist comeback” since 2008, Bell predicts that China’s political future is likely to be determined by both Confucianism and Communism.Professor Bell’s other writings mentioned in this episode include:Communitarianism and its Critics (Oxford, 1993) China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, 2008) The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in the Global Age (coauthored Princeton 2011) Ancient Chinese Thought - Modern Chinese Power (Trans. series: Xuetong; co-edited Princeton 2013) The China Model: Political Meritocracy and Limits of Democracy (Princeton, 2015) In this interview two book reviews were discussed: 1) "Confessions of a Sinophile" by James Crabtree in the Financial Times, and 2) "Confessions of a China Apologist" by Gordon G. Chang in The New Criterion. Professor Bell graciously responded to a question about them and adds this post-interview thought for The New Criterion reviewer: ‘since my book is banned in China I wish Mr. Chang would inform the relevant authorities that I'm an apologist for China – it might help to unban the book!’Professor Daniel A. Bell is a Canadian political theorist and currently Chair of Political Theory at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He was previously Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University and professor at Tsinghua University (Schwarzman College and Department of Philosophy). He has authored eight books and edited and/or coedited as many while serving as a series editor for Princeton University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies.Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies.Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women’s Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan.Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center 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

The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the opium trade — but not through the relatively well-trodden history of the ‘Opium Wars.’ Instead, in this wonderfully rich book Peter Thilly investigates the little known social history of the opium trade in coastal southern Fujian province. The Opium Business focuses on the relationship between the state and local businesses, charting how it changed as opium went from contraband to tax staple in the late nineteenth century, and then from tax staple to prohibited commodity in the early twentieth century. While this book is sure to interest anyone keen to learn more about modern Chinese history, the history of capitalism, and the history of global narcotics, this book should also be of interest to anyone looking to read about some truly fascinating individuals who made the 'opium business' happen. By uncovering the history of the tax farmers, roving gangs, smugglers, and 'opium kings' who moved, sold, and hid opium, Thilly's book reminds us that it was people — with competing motivations, complicated backgrounds, and networks of friends — who made the opium trade happen.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Using a multidisciplinary approach and case studies based on fieldwork in nine countries scattered across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania, China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions (Springer, 2023) scrutinizes the frequently ignored agency of the Global South sub-national actors in their interactions with rising China. Diverse case studies engage with two interrelated questions. What are the real economic, political, and social impacts of China’s growing presence in the Global South? And, more critically, how do the state and societies of the Global South frame and interpret their interactions with China amid its rise? Consequently, the volume analyzes how sub-national actors respond to China’s emergence as an increasingly consequential power in the Global South and whether they are attracted by cooperation models proposed by Beijing or deterred by its newfound assertiveness.Each chapter of this volume identifies and fills a gap in the literature on China’s rise by offering a nuanced perspective on its relations with the Global South that captures such variables as social context, intersubjective meanings, and identities. They also illuminate often neglected aspects of China’s role in the international politics of development and identify emerging trends in South-South cooperation. Critically, the central argument of the volume is that the agency of sub-state and non-state actors in developing countries meaningfully influences the evolution of their interactions with China. Far from being passive recipients of Beijing-constructed images and cooperation models, these actors are fully aware of their identity and interests and respond accordingly to China’s increasingly visible presence in the Global South.All chapters are based on extensive fieldwork and intimate knowledge of spaces whose dynamics often seem complicated or obscure to outside observers. Building their analysis on firsthand empirical findings, each contributor provides an improved and nuanced understanding of China’s interactions with diverse, frequently divergent, and complex state-society systems of the Global South. A multidisciplinary approach enriches the volume and allows us to bring together insights from International Relations, Political Geography, Government, Development Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and International Communication Studies.Theodor Tudoroiu is a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago. Anna Kuteleva is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work intertwines international relations, development studies, energy security, and feminist-informed approaches to politics.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How has China’s one-party system dealt with the country’s growing environmental issues? And what implications does its green turn have on people’s everyday realities? Virginie Arantes joins Petra Alderman, associate researcher at NIAS and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, to talk about her book China’s Green Consensus: Participation, Co-optation, and Legitimation that was published by Routledge in 2022.Virginie Arantes is a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that she had an easy out for any boring conversation: For the rest of my life, when I am ‘stalled’ conversationally, it would be a wonderful thing to fall back on: ‘Oh, I must tell you about the time I was captured by Chinese bandits.’Aldrich was one of many foreign grandees traveling on a 1923 Beijing-bound train from Shanghai, captured by the Shandong Provisional Army, a ragtag group of bandits who hoped the American, British, and European hostages might force China’s government and its many warlords to accede to its demands.The hostage situation is the subject of The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China (PublicAffairs, 2023), from James M. Zimmerman, who studies the frantic efforts by diplomats, China’s government and, at times, the hostages and bandits themselves in avoiding a bloody outcome.In this interview, James and I talk about what became known as the “Lincheng Incident,” and how this hostage situation and potential diplomatic disaster may have changed the course of Chinese history.James M. Zimmerman is a Beijing-based lawyer who has lived and worked in China for over 25 years. He is among China's leading foreign lawyers, and is the author of the China Law Deskbook, published by the American Bar Association, and is frequently featured as a political commentator on US-China relations in various print and broadcast media around the globe. He is the former four-term Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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

Denial is a classic symptom of codependency ... Lacking a sense of self, codependent partners tend to be hypersensitive to criticism or negative feedback, preferring instead to deflect it onto others. The resulting denial fuels an escalating cycle of blame and conflict that drives codependent partners apart. Unfortunately, this progressively dysfunctional pathology applies all too well to the conflict between the United States and China. The United States sees its trade deficit as China’s fault, as if its own lack of saving had nothing to do with it. China sees its surplus saving and its related current account and trade surpluses as benevolent support for deficit-prone America, as if its own underfunded social safety net and the resulting suppression of personal consumption were not its own doing. Both economies are steeped in denial over the effects of their self-inflicted saving imbalances. Each then turns that denial into blame directed at the other.– Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale UP, 2022)In the short span of four years, America and China have entered a trade war, a tech war, and a new Cold War. This conflict between the world’s two most powerful nations wouldn’t have happened were it not for an unnecessary clash of false narratives. America falsely blames its trade and technology threats on China yet overlooks its shaky saving foundation. China falsely blames its growth challenges on America’s alleged containment of market-based socialism, ignoring its failed economic rebalancing.In a hard-hitting analysis of both nations’ economies, politics, and policies, Stephen Roach argues that much of the rhetoric on both sides is dangerously misguided, amplified by information distortion, and more a reflection of each nation’s fears and vulnerabilities than a credible assessment of the risks they face. Outlining the disastrous toll of conflict escalation between China and America, Roach offers a new road map to restoring a mutually advantageous relationship.A rare combination of thought leadership on Wall Street and academia places Stephen Roach in the unique position as a leading practitioner of analytical macroeconomics, and he is one of the country’s most influential economists. A forecaster by training in his early days as a Fed economist, Stephen Roach has long been mindful of the perils of historical extrapolation. As seen through that lens, his vision of the “Next China” grew out of this deep respect for the past as a template for the exciting but daunting possibilities of China’s uncertain future. Roach’s focus on the US-China relationship is an outgrowth of the interplay between two major strands of his professional experience — a leading US economist and an influential analyst of a rising China. Roach’s analyses and opinions on China, the United States, and the global economy have long helped to shape policy debates from Beijing to Washington.Professor Stephen Roach is a Senior Fellow of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. He joined the Yale faculty in 2010 after 30 years at Morgan Stanley, mainly as the firm’s chief economist heading up a highly regarded global team followed by several years as the Hong Kong-based Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He was also a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management and has drawn on his rich experience and developed popular new courses on Asia — notably "The Next China" and "The Lessons of Japan." His prolific writings also include two other books Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (2014), and The Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization (2009). The professor’s work has appeared in both domestic and international media, as well as academic journals and in congressional testimony over his long and ongoing career. 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 talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022).Winston Churchill famously described Russia in 1939 as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But as Andrew Small correctly argues here, China’s path forward has often been laid out quite explicitly by its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping in speeches to the Community Party and elsewhere. The totality of those proclamations is that a real battle lies ahead, perhaps even in military terms. Will China continue to back Russia? Will China ultimately invade Taiwan? Why should Western companies be singularly allowed to decide whether to share their advanced technology with China? Where to draw the line between economic reward and risk in a global economy that is nevertheless splintering in significant ways. Those and more topics get covered here by a guest who is currently based in Berlin but has spent considerable amounts of time in Beijing.Andrew Small is a senior transatlantic fellow with the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. His previous book, The China-Pakistan Axis, received broad praise from the likes of the New York Review of Books, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. 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 pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies