New Books in East Asian Studies

Does Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida´s new administration represent the true beginning of the “Post-Abe” era for Japan? After the one-year transitional administration of Yoshihide Suga, Kishida was able to win a three-year term as head of the LDP, the premiership, and lower house election in fall 2021. Since then Kishida has proven to be reasonably popular, and is leaving his stamp on Japanese foreign policy, abandoning Abe´s close ties with Russian President Putin with a hardline toward Russia. Domestically Kishida promotes a “New Capitalism” that promises a reduction in income inequality compared to Abenomics.In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Paul Midford to look at the new Kishida administration and discuss whether it will set Japan on a new course.Paul Midford is professor of political science at Meiji Gakuin University and the author of a recent book on Japan, “Overcoming Isolationism - Japan’s Leadership in East Asian Security Multilateralism”.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.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. 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 China and the International Human Rights Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Rana Siu Inboden examines the evolution of China’s posture towards the U.N. human rights system since the early 1980s. The book examines in unprecedented details China’s role and impact on the complex negotiations between U.N. members over the International Covenant Against Torture and its optional protocol; the establishment of the U.N. Human Rights Council; and the monitoring powers of the International labour Organization. A former U.S. State Department official in the Bureau of Democracy, Labor and Human Rights, Inboden shows how China, through subtle yet persistent efforts, largely but not entirely successfully managed to constrain the U.N. human rights system. Based on a range of documentary and archival research, as well as extensive interview data, Inboden provides fresh insights into the motivations and influences driving China's conduct and explores China's rising position as a global power. In this interview, Inboden discusses her findings as well as more recent developments under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li's book Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age (Cornell UP, 2022) draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the "samurai age," the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868.The range of methodologies and materials discussed in Cultural Imprints challenges a uniform notion of warrior activity and sensibilities, breaking down an ahistorical, monolithic image of the samurai that developed late in the samurai age and that persists today. Highlighting the memory of warfare and its centrality in the cultural realm, Cultural Imprints demonstrates the warrior's far-reaching, enduring, and varied cultural influence across centuries of Japanese history.Contributors: Monica Bethe, William Fleming, Andrew Goble, Thomas Hare, Luke Roberts, Marimi Tateno, Alison Tokita, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li.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

Defections from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were an important part of the narrative of the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan during the Cold War, but their stories have previously barely been told, less still examined, in English.During the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the ROC government paid much special attention to these anti-communist heroes (fangong yishi). Their choices to leave behind the turmoil of the PRC were a propaganda coup for the Nationalist one-party state in Taiwan, proving the superiority of the "Free China" that they had created there. In Defectors from the PRC to Taiwan, 1960-1989: The Anti-Communist Righteous Warriors (Routledge, 2022), Morris looks at the stories behind these headlines, what the defectors understood about the ROC before they arrived, and how they dealt with the reality of their post-defection lives in Taiwan. He also looks at how these dramatic individual histories of migration were understood to prove essential differences between the two regimes, while at the same time showing important continuities between the two Chinese states.A valuable resource for students and scholars of 20th century China and Taiwan, and of the Cold War and its impact in Asia.Andrew D. Morris is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and studies the modern histories of Taiwan and China. He is the author of Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (University of California Press, 2010) and Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (University of California Press, 2004). He edited the volume Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and co-edited the volume The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004, with David K. Jordan and Marc L. Moskowitz).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

The People’s Republic of China has undergone tumultuous and varied sociocultural developments over the course of its history. In this episode, Dr. Suvi Rautio talks about some of the ways in which people and communities have dealt with the resulting change (or lack of it) based on her ethnographic research. Dr. Rautio is currently working on a research project dealing with Maoist China, drawing from her own family history in Beijing to explore how intellectuals navigated life in China’s capital during social upheaval. By contrast, Dr. Rautio’s previous research has focused on rural village life in Southwest China – she has conducted fieldwork in a traditional Dong ethnic minority village where villagers and authorities try to combine heritage preservation and socioeconomic modernisation. We also discuss how similar struggles between preserving the old and making way for the new have unfolded in modern-day Beijing.Suvi Rautio is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her current project focuses on the transmission of memory and loss among Beijing’s intellectual class during the Maoist era. She has also hosted podcasts on Chinese studies and anthropology in the New Books Network.Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku.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-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

Corey Byrnes’ Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a work of considerable historical and disciplinary depth. Byrnes brings together the Tang dynasty poetry of Du Fu, Song travel writing about the same, late Qing cartographic ventures, texts written by Western travelers in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as contemporary Chinese film and landscape art (among many other sources) to analyze how the Three Gorges region has been written and rewritten. The books’ title, and its critical intervention, turns on the dual meaning of “fixing.” A “fixed” landscape is both a (constructed) space of cultural coherence and a terrain continuously altered to hew to social, political, economic, and even moral demands. By investigating aesthetic forms that seek to represent and mold the Three Gorges, Byrnes investigates how “landscape ideas act materially in the production of space.” The text is rich with sustained close readings of visual and textual landscape aesthetics; such formal analysis is in turn deftly woven into elegant arguments that speak not only to Chinese studies, but disciplines such as media theory and the environmental humanities. I greatly enjoyed our conversation, and the chance to speak to Corey about a book whose first iteration as a graduate project I witnessed in the early days of my own doctorate, an editing process about which you will hear more in the following episode.Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research 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/east-asian-studies

Hakkenden is a classic work of Japanese literature: the story of the eight warriors, born from Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa, has been adapted to manga, movies and anime. And its tropes continue to pop up in Japanese popular culture today.But there’s so much story in Hakkenden that Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One―An Ill-Considered Jest (Cornell University Press: 2021), a new translation by Glynne Walley, doesn’t even get to the eight warriors before it’s end! Glynne’s translation sets the scene for the emergence of the eight dog warriors, translating everything in the book–including the medicine ads the author included to help pay the bills.In this interview, Glynne and I talk about what makes Hakkenden so special, Glynne’s translation choices, and how its themes and tropes persist to the present day.Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon and author ofGood Dogs: Edification, Entertainment & Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2018), the first monograph-length study of Hakkenden, a landmark of premodern Japanese fiction.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hakkenden. Follow on Facebook or 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

Postcolonial feminist scholarship on the formation of gender relations primarily uses the analytic of colonizer-colonized dyad. In her new monograph, Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (Cambridge UP, 2020), Professor Hyaeweol Choi makes an important intervention by examining colonial Korea to propose a new framework that accounts for transnational encounters between national reformists, missionaries, and colonial authorities. Drawing from both major and minor archives in various geographic sites such as Korea, Japan, the US, Sweden, and Denmark, Choi locates the voices of the educated Korean women whose reform rhetoric and activities reflect transnational encounters. Postcolonial studies have shown us how archives are a contentious, political site with prominent feminist scholar Antoinette Burton pointing out the need to understand the interdependence between discursive visibility of minoritized people and their experiences. Through her research, Choi is able to show how educated women, despite their status as an elite minority, points to the larger structure of patriarchy and how it is constantly contested and reshaped by forces such as the state, ideologies of western domesticity, and religion.Gender Politics at Home and Abroad is an important read for scholars and public who are interested in postcolonial feminism, domesticity, transnational history, and colonial modernity. Hyaeweol Choi is a Professor who holds joint appointments with Religious Studies and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is also a C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies. Her publications include Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2013), and Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-era Korea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.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

Political corruption remains … one of the most intriguing and challenging issues in social science research and public policy, perhaps because although it occurs in virtually all polities, its causes, patterns, and consequences often seem unique to each circumstance.– Cadres and Corruption by Xiaobo Lu (2000)Corruption is rampant in many authoritarian regimes, leading most observers to assume that autocrats have little incentive or ability to curb government wrongdoing. Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes – Lessons from East Asia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, shows that meaningful anti-corruption efforts by nondemocracies are more common and more often successful than is typically understood. Drawing on wide-ranging analysis of authoritarian anti-corruption efforts globally and in-depth case studies of key countries such as China, South Korea and Taiwan over time, Dr. Carothers constructs an original theory of authoritarian corruption control. He disputes views that hold democratic or quasi-democratic institutions as necessary for political governance successes and argues that corruption control in authoritarian regimes often depends on a powerful autocratic reformer having a free hand to enact and enforce measures curbing government wrongdoing. His book advances our understanding of authoritarian governance and durability while also opening up new avenues of inquiry about the politics of corruption control in East Asia and beyond.Christopher Carothers is a scholar of comparative politics and most recently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China as a post-doctoral fellow. Professor Carothers research focuses on authoritarianism and corruption control with a regional focus on East Asia, and has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politics and Society and the Journal of Democracy among others.Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. 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 account of the rapid erosion of liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and civil and political rights in Hong Kong, Mark L. Clifford's latest book provides an historically in-depth, vivid political analysis of the rapidly changing situation in Hong Kong. When the British ceased its period of colonial rule in 1997, and Hong Kong was returned to the governance of the People's Republic of China, then Chinese Communist Party Leader, Deng Xiaoping promised that Hong Kong would maintain its way of life for the next 50 years. This way of life, the rule of law, and independent judiciary, a democratically elected government, and the sorts of human rights which shape societies in liberal democracies worldwide, were also guaranteed in Hong Kong's mini-constitution - The Basic Law. However, less than halfway through this "One Country, Two Systems" experiment, Hong Kongers rights and freedoms, and its rule of law and the values which have come to form the basis of a unique Hong Konger identity have been crushed.Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals about its plans to End Freedom Everywhere (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is hard to put down; It is not just the way that Clifford brings to life the characters and pivotal moments in the rising tide of oppression, but also the implications of the situation in Hong Kong for the rest of the world act as a profound warning. This book is unique for its on the ground analysis and the insight it provides in framing Hong Kong as the geopolitical nexus between libertarian values of the West and Communist China's political system.  Mark L. Clifford is the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. A Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, he lived in Asia from 1987 until 2021. Previously, Clifford was executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), and publisher and editor-in-chief of The Standard (Hong Kong). He held senior editorial positions at BusinessWeek and the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Seoul. He has won numerous academic, book, and journalism awards. He was also on the board of directors of Next Digital; the company that published the pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, before it was forced to shutdown in June 2021. 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