New Books in East Asian Studies

During the early decades of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China remained far outside mainstream international science — right? Gordon Barrett’s new book, China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), counters this straightforward narrative and shows a very different side of China’s engagement with the outside world during this period. Barrett shows how scientists became crucial interlocutors for the early PRC, engaging in international and cross-bloc organizations, conferences, and networks. In China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy we follow scientists as they travel to international meetings, advocate for China’s position in international organizations, and correspond with collaborators and peers abroad. Overall, by piecing together a wide range of archival and published materials, Barrett shows how scientists developed transnational networks and interacted closely with overseas counterparts in ways that anticipated and lay the groundwork for China’s emergence as a science and technology powerhouse. Meticulously researched and carefully written, this book is sure to be of interest to those interested in modern Chinese history, science and technology, the Cold War period, and the role that scientists can play in diplomacy and diplomatic work.  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

Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation (Lexington Books, 2022) is the newest monograph from Professor Juwen Zhang of Willamette College. Through a historical survey and analyses of oral traditions like fairy tales, proverbs, and ballads, among others, that are still in vigorous practice in China today, this informative and stimulating book proposes a theoretical framework for interpreting how and why traditions continue or discontinue in any culture. Recently winning the prestigious Chicago Book Prize, the work is an excellent distillation of Professor Zhang's recent work. Timothy Thurston is Associate Professor in the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China (Rutgers UP, 2022) traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.Erin Raffety is a research fellow at the Center for Theological Inquiry, an empirical research consultant at Princeton Theological Seminary, and an associate research scholar at Princeton Seminary's Institute for Youth Ministry. Raffety researches and writes on disability, congregational ministry, and church leadership and is an advocate for disabled people.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Beijing-born Weijian Shan, instead of a secondary school education spent six hard years in the Gobi Desert with the Army Construction Corps.Remarkably, the young Shan made it to a PhD program at UC Berkeley where he met his academic advisor, then Professor Janet Yellen, later U.S. Treasury Secretary. (Somewhat ironically now attending to the insolvencies of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank). Shan goes on to become a Wharton School business professor before moving into investment banking and private equity investing making financial business history with the successful takeover and turnaround of failed banks in South Korea and China.Both generous with his time and patient with my questions, Dr. Shan is currently the CEO at PAG, a private equity firm managing assets of some $50 billion. We discussed the books in chronological order with a few tangents that Shan used to both clarify and instruct such as: his 2006 public debate with World Bank economists about Chinese profitability; why his generation truly is a ‘Lost Generation’; his career and transitions including, among other things, the connection between recent financial crises and the basics of sound financial banking systems; lessons from and advice for business negotiation; the importance of leadership, and his two keys to an ‘ownership’ mentality. All within the context of his well-written and interesting narratives providing personal accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution period in China, as well as historic overseas private equity bank deals as described by the publisher, Wiley and Sons, adapted below: Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America draws a vivid picture of the raw human energy and the will to succeed against all odds. Shan, a former hard laborer who is now one of Asia's best-known financiers, is thoughtful, observant, eloquent, and brutally honest, making him well-positioned to tell the story of a life that is a microcosm of modern China, and of how, improbably, that life became intertwined with America. This powerful and personal perspective on China and America will inform Americans' view of China, humanizing the country, while providing a rare view of America from the prism of a keen foreign observer who lived the American dream. (2019) Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers Saved Korea’s Most Iconic Bank is a riveting tale of one of the most successful buyout deals ever: the acquisition and turnaround of what used to be Korea's largest bank by the Asian arm of an American firm, Newbridge Capital. Full of intrigue and suspense, this insider's account is told by the chief architect of the deal itself, the celebrated author and private equity investor Weijian Shan. With billions of dollars at stake, and the nation's economic future on the line, Newbridge Capital sought to become the first foreign firm in history to take control of one of Korea's most beloved financial institutions. (2020) In Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China, Weijian Shan delivers a compelling account of one of the most significant deals in private equity history: the first and only foreign acquisition of control of a Chinese national bank. Money Machine is the fascinating inside story of the transaction as told by the man who led it, from the intrigues of dealmaking to the complex and uncharted process of securing control by a foreign investor of a Chinese nationwide financial institution, a feat that had never before been attempted, nor has it been repeated. (2023) Keith Krueger teaches at the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com. 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 God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces reiterations and reinterpretations of the deity Susanoo regarding his relationship with Korea vis-a-vis Japan. Through careful examination of mythological texts and other primary sources, David Weiss examines Susanoo’s role in the construction of Korea’s image as Japan’s periphery.This book discusses how ancient Japanese mythology was utilized during the colonial period to justify the annexation of Korea to Japan, with special focus on the god Susanoo. Described as an ambivalent figure and wanderer between the worlds, Susanoo served as a foil to set off the sun goddess, who played an important role in the modern construction of a Japanese national identity. Susanoo inhabited a sinister otherworld, which came to be associated with colonial Korea. Imperialist ideologues were able to build on these interpretations of the Susanoo myth to depict Korea as a dreary realm at the margin of the Japanese empire that made the imperial metropole shine all the more brightly. At the same time, Susanoo was identified as the ancestor of the Korean people. Thus, the colonial subjects were ideologically incorporated into the homogeneous Japanese “family state.” The book situates Susanoo in Japan's cultural memory and shows how the deity, while being repeatedly transformed in order to meet the religious and ideological needs of the day, continued to symbolize the margin of Japan.Raditya Nuradi is a Phd student at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Kate Sylvester’s Women and Martial Art in Japan (Routledge 2023) examines sport, gender, and society in Japan through the author’s extensive experience and ethnographic research as a kendo practitioner both at elite international levels and in Japan. Sylvester focuses on kendo as a university sport, placing her experiences as a veteran (foreign) competitor working within the hierarchies of that system in the context of the ideologies and lived realities of gender in contemporary Japan. In doing so, Women and Martial Art in Japan unpacks the “sporting masculinity” that permeates women’s experiences of sport within a masculinist culture, and places the practice of sport within the idealized and actual life course of Japanese women. 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

In this episode, our host, Niki Alsford, invites Prof Scott Simon, the Chair of Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa, to share his thoughts and reflections on Prof Hu Tai-li 胡台麗, who pioneered documentary ethnography in Taiwan. Prof Simon talks about how he considers Hu's contributions and influence in academia, especially on the subject of ethnic relations in Taiwan. He further shares his insights on Hu’s documentary, The Voices of Orchid Island, and he further addresses the nuclear waste and over-tourism issues beyond what the viewers see in the documentary. In the second part of the interview, Prof Simon talks about his personal research path and how he turns to work on socio-anthropological research of the indigenous people in Taiwan. He also briefly introduces his current research project, “Austronesian Worlds: Human-animal Entanglements in the Pacific Anthropocene”. If you’re one of those who are passionate about socio-anthropological research of Taiwanese indigenous like Prof Simon and our host, Niki, then you will definitely enjoy this brief exchange amongst the two Taiwan specialists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination.Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan’s national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen’s treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide.Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen.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/east-asian-studies

In this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination with the notion of "borders", including borders between humans and machines, men and women, normality and abnormality..., and how these borders can be translated into themes for her fictional creation. Finally, Lin also tells us how literary and philosophical theories such as posthumanism, queer theory, cultural constructivism, inspired and influenced her creative writings. 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 podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Prof Dafydd Fell, Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The two discuss Prof Fell’s most recent book, “Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan” published by Routledge in 2021. In this engaging chat, Prof Fell shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on green parties in Taiwan, the relevance that alternative and small parties may have on the overall evolution of the political debate in Taiwan, and the results of the recent local elections in Taiwan. This podcast is for lovers of Taiwan politics and for anyone interested to know the role of small parties in the broader political process of many countries around 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