New Books in Chinese Studies

The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: the maritime public sphere expanded from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the Asian continent, curious individuals confronted the challenges of studying each other’s cultures by using the infrastructure of empire for their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, or Chinese or Urdu, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the vastly different regions that European geographers labeled “Asia.”How did people from different parts of Asia encounter and come to understand and interpret each other’s cultures in the modern period? What did they make of the languages, histories, literary cultures, religious traditions, and broader societies of the countries and regions that they encountered? Nile Green’s How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale University Press, 2023) attempts to answer these questions through analyzing a wide range of primary sources in different languages from across Asia and paying attention to the often-forgotten individuals who became the interpreters within their own countries for the distant cultures and societies that they encountered.Yet comprehension does not always keep pace with connection. Far from flowing smoothly, inter-Asian understanding faced obstacles of many kinds, especially on a landmass with so many scripts and languages. Here is the dramatic story of cross-cultural knowledge on the world’s largest continent, exposing the roots of enduring fractures in Asian unity.How Asia Found Herself is the 2023 winner of the Bentley Book Prize for best book in world history from the World History Association.Nile Green is Professor and Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is a historian of the multiple globalizations of Islam and Muslims, and the author of multiple books and articles. His research truly spans the world and having begun his research as a historian of India and Pakistan, he has subsequently traced multiple Muslim networks across the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Japan, and even Europe and North America.Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735.Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed.”Marco Caboara is the Digital Scholarship & Archives Manager at the Lee Shau Kee Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.In this interview, Marco and I talk about this project, what it says about how Europeans understood China, and his favorite maps in the collection.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Regnum Chinae. 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

In The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Harvard UP, 2023), Dr. Xin Zhang tells the story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang.On July 21, 1842, numerous women in the southeastern Chinese city of Zhenjiang chose to end their lives rather than succumb to invading British soldiers. These events, occurring during the First Opium War (1839-42), exemplify the various ways in which global changes encroached upon local Chinese communities in the nineteenth century. Previous historical accounts have primarily depicted this encounter as a European challenge to a submissive China, while others sought to uncover the nation's "authentic" history through native sources. In contrast, this book presents a groundbreaking approach to modern Chinese history, focusing on the intricate negotiations between local societies and global transformations.This unique "glocal" perspective is developed through three case studies that explore warfare, commerce, and technology in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By avoiding a narrow European or Chinese standpoint, these case studies meticulously illustrate how wider processes of modern imperialism, economic integration, and technological progress reconfigured the fabric of everyday life. The book vividly portrays the experiences of ordinary Chinese individuals as they grapple with forces that reshaped the entire world. Terrified residents of towns resort to self-destruction to evade British soldiers, unscrupulous brokers exploit prostitutes to facilitate their business dealings, and small-scale merchants embrace steam-powered ships for the first time to transport their goods to market.Ultimately, this book reveals how the forces of globalization in the 1800s were filtered through local idiosyncrasies, with no single region of the world serving as an ultimate "core," including Europe. It challenges the notion of a centralized world and proves that not only is the world flat, but it lacks a defined center.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

Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories (Scribner: 2023) jumps from character to character, location to location, time period to time period. Two cooks working for Madame Chiang-Kai Shek. A dancer, exiled to Shanghai’s Wukang Mansion. Three women, gathering in a French cathedral, finding strength in each other decades after the protests in Tiananmen.These six interconnected stories make up this debut novel from accomplished poet and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who joins us today, sharing on what guides her when she’s writing, and the importance of the number six in this debut.Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a fiction writer, poet, musician, translator, and editor. She writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press: 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press: 2016), and fifteen books of translation. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Best Translated Book Award among other honors, she was a 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Dear Chrysanthemums. 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

Lena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of shouchaoben, or hand-written fiction, that entertained Chinese readers throughout the “long 1970s,” a period spanning the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in the late 70s and early 1980s. These manuscripts, copies of otherwise unavailable, often foreign, fiction and poetry, as well as original novels and poems, were “texts in motion.” They circulated throughout China together with their copiers and readers, youth sent-down during the Cultural Revolution, and often followed characters who were likewise moving, spies and scientists traveling within and beyond China. Moreover, the text itself was just as unstable as its readers and characters were mobile: frequent copying resulted in the proliferation of multiple versions of any given narrative, thus troubling the clear-cut distinction between readers and authors. Henningsen’s careful survey of shouchaoben and related book forms, including “internal publications,” sketches out a lively and cosmopolitan reading culture. In the book, she shows that despite assumptions of cultural insularity and uniformity, paying attention to “reading acts” during the Cultural Revolution period shows that the “long 1970s” are not an abrupt, anomalous rupture in Chinese literary history, but a period that can be more fruitfully described in terms of continuities. Please join me for a conversation with Lena Henningsen in exploring the rich archive of shouchaoben. Make sure to also visit ReadChina, to learn more about Henningsen's European Research Council grant funded research on Reading Acts in China and discover the resources her team has compiled here.Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In part two of our conversation about his book The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (Basic Books, 2022), Nicholas Morton, Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, joins me to share more about his research into Mongol imperial expansion and the Mongol conquests of the Near East. In this episode, we talk about practices of Mongol nomadism and mobility; how Mongol identity can be defined and understood; and where and when the Mongol empire finally collapsed.Part one is here. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The host of this episode, Adina Zemanek, interviewed Chee-Hann Wu, who obtained her PhD in Drama and Theatre from the University of California, Irvine and UC San Diego. They talked about the following themes: horror videogames in Taiwan and historical trauma; the potential roles of such games for local and international audiences, and thus for Taiwan's cultural diplomacy; traditional puppetry and avatars; and recent state support for local game production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the official ideology by which Qing China was governed. In State and Family in China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Yue Du examines the relationship between politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949, focusing on changes in family law, parent-child relationships, and the changing nature of the Chinese state during this period. This book highlights how the Qing dynasty treated the state-sponsored parent-child hierarchy as the axis around which Chinese family and political power relations were constructed and maintained. It shows how following the fall of the Qing in 1911, reform of filial piety law in the Republic of China became the basis of state-directed family reform, playing a central role in China's transition from empire to nation-state.Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Opium is an awkward commodity. For the West, it’s a reminder of some of the shadier and best forgotten parts of its history. For China (and a few other countries), it’s a symbol of national humiliation, left to the past–unless it needs to shame a foreign country.But the opium trade survived for decades, through to the end of the Second World War. How did that trade actually work? How was it possible to trade a good that was, at best, tolerated in the strange gap between legal and illegal. This trade is what Peter Thilly covers in his book The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022).In this interview, Peter and I talk about opium, how people traded this quasi-legal good, and the changing opium trade–including a surprising source of illicit drugs in the region.Peter Thilly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is currently working on a global microhistory of the 1853 Small Sword Uprising.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Opium Business. 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

Nationalism is pervasive in China today. Yet nationalism is not entrenched in China's intellectual tradition. Over the course of the twentieth century, the combined forces of cultural, social, and political transformations nourished its development, but resistance to it has persisted. In World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021),  Xin Fan examines the ways in which historians working on the world beyond China from within China have attempted to construct narratives that challenge nationalist readings of the Chinese past and the influence that these historians have had on the formation of Chinese identity. He traces the ways in which generations of historians, from the late Qing through the Republican period, through the Mao period to the relative moment of 'opening' in the 1980s, have attempted to break cross-cultural boundaries in writing an alternative to the national narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies