New Books in East Asian Studies

Vaudine England, author of 'Fortune's Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong,' explores the diverse communities that contributed to building Hong Kong in the early days of colonization, highlighting the treatment of mixed heritage individuals and forced Chinese women in the sex industry. The podcast discusses the intermarriages and family connections of a famous Hong Kong family, Stanley Ho's challenging upbringing, and the influential figure, Paul Chader, and his contributions to transforming the city. It also delves into the impact of the Japanese occupation on different communities, challenging simplistic narratives about Hong Kong's history.

In world history, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ranks as a revolutionary watershed, on a par with the American and French Revolutions. In this volume, leading historians from North America, Europe, and Japan employ global history in novel ways to offer fresh economic, social, political, cultural, and military perspectives on the Meiji Restoration and the subsequent creation of the modern Japanese nation-state. Seamlessly mixing meta- and micro-history, The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines how the Japanese state and Japanese people engaged with global trends of the early nineteenth century. The authors also explore the internal military conflicts that marked the 1860s and the process of reconciliation after 1868. They conclude with discussions of how new political, cultural, and diplomatic institutions were created as Japan emerged as a global nation, defined in multiple ways by its place in the world. 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 environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of Stevan Harrell's An Ecological History of Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2023), a comprehensive account of China's transformation since the founding of the People's Republic from the perspective not of the economy but of the biophysical world. Examples throughout illustrate how agricultural, industrial, and urban development have affected the resilience of China's ecosystems—their ability to withstand disturbances and additional growth—and what this means for the country's future.Drawing on decades of research, Harrell demonstrates the local and global impacts of China's miraculous rise. In clear and accessible prose, An Ecological History of Modern China untangles the paradoxes of development and questions the possibility of a future that is both prosperous and sustainable. It is a critical resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in environmental change, Chinese history, and sustainable development.Stevan Harrell is professor emeritus of anthropology and environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington. His many books include Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Twitter. Website.Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Dr. Olga Fedorenko, an ethnographer specializing in South Korean advertising, discusses the clash of advertising freedoms and obligations in late-capitalist South Korea. She explores the historical role of advertising in promoting virtue and the shift in the 21st century towards neoliberal hegemony. The podcast delves into the challenges faced by advertising practitioners, censors, audiences, and activists in navigating this changing landscape.

Ruth Yun-Ju Chen is a historian of mid-imperial China (600–1400). Her research interests lie in the histories of medicine, publishing, and material cultures during this period. Her first book, Good Formulas: Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts, will come out from the University of Washington Press in 2023. This book charts how early print culture reshaped strategies for presenting medical knowledge in Song China (960–1279). Her current project explores the transregional circulation of medical knowledge and aromatic drugs across East Asia and Southeast Asia in Song-Jin-Yuan China (960–1368). She has published articles in Chinese and English language journals and, most recently, “A New Study of Scholar-officials’ Roles in the Printing of Medical Texts in Song China” in the Bulletin of IHP 92.3 (2021) and “The Quest for Efficiency: Knowledge Management in Medical Formularies” in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 80.2 (2021).A bit about the book:Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of empirical evidence in Chinese medicine between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The rise of this new approach to substantiating knowledge, which had appeared only sporadically in earlier medical literature, provides a window into transformations in the construction of textual authority in mid-imperial China.Focusing on medical genres and working extensively with notebooks (biji), Ruth Yun-Ju Chen shows that employing empirical evidence became prominent in conjunction with a publishing boom that enabled wider availability of medical texts and treatises. To convince a more socioculturally diverse readership to believe their claims and to win intertextual debates with contemporaneous authors, many Song medical authors turned to empirical methodology. Revealing a correlation between publishing cultures and changes in persuasion strategies in medical genres, Good Formulas offers new insights into the histories of medicine, knowledge production, and publishing in China. It also provides rich examples for scholars interested in the development of empirical evidence in the premodern world.Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Jae DiBello Takeuchi's Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023) examines dilemmas faced by second language (L2) Japanese speakers as a result of persistent challenges to their legitimacy as speakers of Japanese. Based on an ethnographic interview study with L2-Japanese speakers and their L1-Japanese-speaking friends, co-workers and significant others, the book examines ideologies linked to three core speech styles of Japanese – keigo or polite language, gendered language and regional dialects – to show how such ideologies impact L2-Japanese speakers. The author demonstrates that speaker legitimacy is often tenuous for L2 speakers and argues that, despite increasing numbers of Japanese-speaking foreign residents in Japan, native speaker bias remains a persistent issue for L2-Japanese speakers living and working in Japan. This book extends the discussion of native speaker bias beyond educational contexts, and in the process reveals tensions between how L2 speakers aspire to speak and how L1 speakers expect them to speak.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. 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 host was Adina Zemanek, in conversation with Hsin-Chien Huang, a new media creator with a background in art, design and digital entertainment, whose works have been exhibited and won awards at many renowned international venues. We talked about his experience in creating immersive films, major themes his works have addressed, the role of immersive film in expanding our field of vision and its particularities in terms of storytelling strategies, as well as Taiwan as an environment for producing VR film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Advance Directives in Asia: A Socio-Legal Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2023) , edited by Daisy Cheung and Michael Dunn is the first book to consider the concept of advance directives in Asia. It is unique in its depth and breadth as it brings together an extensive number of Asian jurisdictions to draw out the ways that advance directives are regulated in law and practice across the region. In their analysis Cheung and Dunn provide overall observations towards a concept of "generative accomodation". As a concept, generative accomodation has the potential to foreground new explorations of bioethics in Asia and globally. It also seeks to understand the role of the family in medical decision making. These are key concerns that come through in this comprehensive and groundbreaking book. It will be useful for regulators, Asia scholars, students, and practitioners in the field of health-law and ethics, and end of life care. The book has wider application for scholars in law, ethics and healthcare. Daisy Cheung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law and the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law at The University of Hong Kong.Dr Michael Dunn is an Associate Professor and the Co-Director of Education at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Miya Qiong Xie, an Associate Professor at Dartmouth College, delves into the literary landscapes of Manchuria, an integral yet contested frontier in East Asian literature. She discusses how iconic writers like Xiao Hong and Abe Kobo navigate identity and nationalism through their works, revealing the transnational influences in these narratives. Xie emphasizes the importance of literary territorialization in understanding the complexities of national borders, as authors from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan intertwine their stories, challenging traditional notions of nationhood.

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that–in theory–could return at any point.We’re joined by Michael J. Seth, who joins the show to talk about this development and his latest book, Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World (Tuttle, 2023). The book is about much more than just the war itself, as Seth looks at Korea’s pre- and post-war history, and how South Korea is unique in charting its own development while still, technically, in a state of war.Michael J. Seth is Professor of History at James Madison University. He has authored several books on Korean history including A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: 2010), A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic to the Nineteenth Century (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), and Education Fever: Politics, Society and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press: 2002).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Korea at War. 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/east-asian-studies