New Books in East Asian 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/east-asian-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/east-asian-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/east-asian-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/east-asian-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/east-asian-studies

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Yan Sun, Professor of Chinese politics at Queens College and the Graduate Center, to discuss the origins of the ethnic divisions in China and their contemporary effects. Yan addresses the imperial administrative system and the historical incorporation of non-core peoples into it. Furthermore, she discusses the complexities of the Uighur, Tibetan, and Mongol claims to autonomy and the role of ethnic elites in their rise. Finally, she explains the role of ethnic assimilation and China's territorial claims in the central government's view of the war on Ukraine and how Western media often portrays China as a monolith without delving into the nuances of Chinese society and domestic politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Uncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura Dykstra’s Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard UP, 2022) shows, one relatively uncontested pole of political power is perfectly capable of generating uncertainty on its own including, paradoxically, through the very act of seeking surety.As Dykstra documents in a fabulously intricate study of administrative and court documents, searches for routinised and carefully monitored ways of running the empire during the Qing dynasty (1636-1911) motivated a range of reforms to the bureaucracy and those that managed it. Over the course of the dynasty’s first centuries these were relatively successful in granting the central authorities in Beijing greater oversight. Yet the imperial centre did not always like what it saw, and the more it got to know about activities in the provinces, the more it came to doubt whether all was well across the realm, a process which eventually culminated in a vast crisis of imperial self-knowledge.Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Jonathan Abel’s The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (U of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a history of our relationships to new media. The book centers on different modalities of mimesis and mediation and more as it explores the important transformation of “new media” into “the new real.” Abel describes this “new real” as the phase when the newer, better, faster, more realistic media of marketing hype becomes absorbed into the fabric of society and daily life. The New Real uses diverse case studies from over a century of modern Japanese history―including stereoscopic photographs, the phonograph, the television, video games, and even emoji―to explore the social effects of the new real.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000 residents in the Tōhoku region lost their lives, with many hundreds of thousands more injured, displaced, and left with horrific loss. Dr. Pilvi Posio shares her PhD research based on eight months of fieldwork in the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi prefecture, where 635 residents lost their lives. She began her research on long-term community recovery four years after the disaster, when national focus was shifting from recovery and restoration (fukkyū 復旧) to reconstruction (fukkō 復興 ). Learn how large-scale, government-funded initiatives, including the construction of three new compact cities away from the immediate coastal area, had the unintended effect of causing "reconstruction disaster” by aggravating resident anxieties and accelerating depopulation. In presenting her concept of Aspired Communities, Dr. Posio argues that community is best viewed not as a static, territorially-bound identity, but as a dynamic process, one which is continually constituted from a future-oriented outlook of collective aspiration.Pilvi Posio is a senior researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently working on sustainability issues in Asia. Her dissertation can be found here.Satoko Naito received her PhD in Japanese literature from Columbia University and teaches as a docent at CEAS.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, 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-a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China's Hidden Past (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), the author Robert J. Antony provides glimpses into China’s hidden past through the native’s point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical consciousness as revealed in people’s everyday lives and as expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions, language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences. The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and treated by officials as rogues and criminals. They were denizens of the underworld of “rivers and lakes” (jianghu), a sociocultural category that includes bandits, sorcerers, conmen, and prostitutes. To get at their silent history the author spent decades conducting field research in rural areas of southern China, collecting rarely used unconventional sources—folklore, legends, myths, rumors, and hearsay—that reveal nuggets of new information and insights not found in the conventional sources in libraries and archives. This book challenges many commonplace assumptions about how academics write history by offering alternative possibilities for China’s past.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/east-asian-studies