New Books in East Asian Studies

Gregory A. Scott's Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the first major work in any language to address the topic of Buddhist monastery reconstructions. This book focuses on reconstructions of Buddhist monasteries in modern China that took place in the period from 1866 to 1966, beginning with the Taiping War in the late Qing and ending with the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China. Making extensive use of Chinese Buddhist periodical sources and incorporating Digital Humanities techniques to collect and analyze data, this monograph argues that the building of Buddhist revival in modern China was done in part through the reconstruction of Buddhist monasteries. Building on and engaging with Holmes Welch’s The Buddhist Revival in China (1968), Dr. Scott provides a new framework for understanding the revival of Buddhism in modern China, that “while Buddhist monastery reconstruction in China operates under the guise of a return to the past, it is in fact a confident, energetic step into the future.”Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism centered in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that were connected to Republican China, Tibet, and imperial Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history.Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) sheds unique light on the operation of what she calls China’s culture of ‘public secrecy’. Focusing on the storied afterlives and artistic re-purposings of photographic images from key junctures of China’s twentieth-century – the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests – Hillenbrand shows how they expose the subtle contours of what it is permissible and what impermissible to know. The book’s highly original and at times haunting exploration of photographic afterlives in art, literature and online offers up a nuanced but also forceful picture of how secrecy reigns in the PRC, and indeed beyond. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Korean Buddhist nun, Kim Iryŏp’s life and philosophy, which takes place from 1896-1971. Park eclectically references philosophers, feminists, and Buddhists from a variety of traditions as the context for the events that led to Iryŏp’s transition from a well-known feminist, and writer to a Buddhist nun. More than a story of Kim Iryŏp’s life, Park’s work sees to provide a platform for Kim Iryŏp’s to speak, and answer the questions, “How and why do women engage with Buddhism?”Trevor McManis is an undergraduate student in the Geography program, at California State University, Stanislaus and an aspiring Buddhist Studies Scholar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of Global Japanese Studies) brings to life more than a century of ideas by examining how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion.How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or - as was more often the case - how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious beliefs? These are some of the questions the book tries to answer, in a tour de force that takes the reader from the Meiji Restoration to the contemporary period. And in doing so, the book makes a significant contribution to two of the most debated topics in the history of evolutionary theory: religion and the political legacy of evolution.Since the introduction of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals - including Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, and Christian thinkers - struggled to formulate a meaningful worldview after Darwin. They often had opposing agendas, and so the debate was quite heated and long-lived: as Godart argues in his book, it took a hundred years of appropriating, translating, thinking, and debating to reconsider the natural world and the relation between nature, science, and the sacred in light of evolutionary theory. Eventually, the drive to find goodness and the divine within nature and evolution shaped much of Japan’s modern intellectual history and changed Japanese understandings of nature, society, and the sacred.Roman Paşca is Assistant Professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Letters, Department of Japanese Philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites.Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public.Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

A beloved Japanese anime move released in 1988, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, as they deal with the separation from their mother who is in the hospital, and their adventures with the forest creatures they meet called the Totoro. In Joe Hisaishi's Soundtrack for My Neighbor Totoro Soundtrack (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Kunio Hara analyzes the film’s score and image song collection composed by Joe Hisaishi. The movie’s catchy theme song, along with the rest of the music, contribute to the film’s nostalgic exploration of children’s inner lives and the power of imagination to combat the very real traumas of childhood. Part of the 33 1/3 Japan Series, this short book explores the collaboration between Hisaishi and Miyazaki Hayao, the film’s creator and director. Hara considers his subject from a variety of perspectives, from a musical analysis of key sections of the score and image album to an investigation of the film’s importance as an icon of Japanese pop culture.Kunio Hara is an Associate Professor of Music History in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina. His research centers on nostalgia, exoticism, and Orientalism in late Romantic opera and music in post-war Japan.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Eunuchs. Nobody liked them, everybody seems to have hated them, but, even so, they were an essential part of many states – even in the Qing. Norman A. Kutcher's book Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule (University of California Press, 2018) looks at these little-acknowledged eunuchs, focusing on how the first Qing emperors managed their eunuchs, and in turn what their various management styles reveals about them. Drawing on case reports of crimes committed by eunuchs, official documents, and imperially-commissioned works, Kutcher explores both the rhetoric and reality of eunuch management, revealing countless gaps between the two.Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book expertly reveals all that this gap tells us about eunuchs and the emperors who tried to rule them, and in this interview, Norman provides a look at some of the inspirations and moments that went into the crafting of it.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She is interested in translation, Manchu language books, and anything that involves a good kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Is a rising power – like China – a threat to the world order? The conventional wisdom in international relations says that power transitions – particularly increases in military power – are intrinsically destabilizing to the international order. In her new book The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers (Oxford UP, 2020), Michelle Murray counters that political actors and scholars of politics should focus on how the actions of rising powers are interpreted or perceived by other nations. Murray encourages us to see power transitions as struggles for recognition: social constructs aimed at forming identities. Social uncertainty shapes the struggle for recognition – especially misrecognition by other nations.Murray contrasts two case studies – Germany’s naval build-up before WWI and the United States’s expansion of power after the Spanish-American War of 1898 – to argue that military capabilities do not adequately account for why Germany was viewed as a threat by European powers but the United States was welcomed by Great Britain as a friendly power. Murray looks at the ways in which establishing and maintaining identity is uncertain because these identities are unpredictably perceived (or mis-perceived) by other powers. Her research explores the many ways in which states navigate identity formation under conditions of anarchy. The podcast includes interesting reflections on how China’s identity – as an ally or threat – might be shaped in the future.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

What are the arguments in favor of social hierarchies? Are there differences in how hierarchy is viewed and valued in China compared with other countries? Which forms of social hierarchy are morally justified and how can they be promoted in the future?Drawing on a wide range of philosophical arguments, historical examples, and social science evidence from various cultural traditions, Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei have developed their argument that different hierarchical principles should govern distinct kinds of social relations with chapters devoted to citizens, countries, animals and machines. In Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World (Princeton University Press, 2020) the authors take aim at the egalitarian ideal of individual rights as being too narrow, and not necessarily the right one for all societies. Available in hardcover and Kindle editions ‘Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.’Daniel A. Bell is dean of the school of political science and public administration at Shandong University, and Wang Pei is an assistant professor at Fudan University’s China Institute. Currently, both are working on the Chinese translation of their book. The interview was conducted in Shanghai about two months after the initial outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China.Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies