Asian Review of Books

Everyone looks to Singapore as a role model for what they want their country to be. Several countries from China to Rwanda hope to emulate its high administrative competence, standard of living, and “social harmony.” Post-Brexit Britain wants to copy the city-state’s assertive and independent position in the world economy and its aggressive support for international business. Housing policy advocates look to Singapore and its 90% home ownership rate.But these are all simplistic views of the city-state, that miss its history, its opportunities, and its challenges. Jeevan Vasagar’s Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia (Pegasus Books: 2022), delves into those more complicated details, giving a better portrayal of the city and the choices it’s made as it tries to navigate a more complicated global environment.In this interview, Jeevan and I talk about, well, Singapore: its history, its leadership, and its policies. We’ll talk about how its administration is trying to chart a future for the country—and whether that might be successful.Jeevan Vasagar is the Environment Editor for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and was formerly the Financial Times Correspondent for Singapore and Malaysia. He can be followed on Twitter at @jeevanvasagar.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Lion City. 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/asian-review

One would think that comparing civilizations as far removed in time and space as Ancient Egypt and Ancient China might not reveal much. Yet Professor Tony Barbieri’s Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture (University of Washington Press: 2021) gleans much from a deeply-researched comparison of political structures, diplomatic relations, legal systems, ideas of the afterlife, and other aspects.In other words, despite being separated by thousands of years and thousands of kilometers, the proto-empires of Egypt and China have a surprising amount of things in common.A lecture detailing Professor Barbieri’s book can be found on YouTube here.In this interview, Professor Barbieri and I talk about the various similarities and differences between these two ancient civilizations, and what we can learn from engaging in such a comparative study.Anthony J. Barbieri-Low is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara. His book Artisans in Early Imperial China won top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and International Convention of Asia Scholars. He can be followed on Twitter at @ABarbieriLowYou can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ancient Egypt and Early China. 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/asian-review

The horse is an important symbol in India’s culture, as shown by the many stories and works we see of Indian royalty and adventurers on horseback. As noted by Mughal chronicler Abu Fazl, “The horse is a means of attaining personal excellence.” Yet the horse isn’t native to India, with thousands of horses imported from Central Asia and the Middle East to meet the demands of India’s ridersYashaswini Chandra’s The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback (Picador India: 2021) uses the horse as a way to discuss and frame India’s history. The book covers caravan trade routes, the Mughal empire, the Rajput horse warriors, and others to outline how India’s politics and economics changed throughout history.We’re joined again by David Chaffetz, who’s a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou.In this interview, the three of us talk about the central role the horse plays in Indian history, and how understanding the horse may help us to understand the power structures of the subcontinent.Yashaswini Chandra has a PhD in History of Art from SOAS University of London, where she was also a teaching fellow. She has been visiting faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Ashoka University, Sonipat. She worked for Sahapedia, an open online resource on the arts, cultures and histories of India, for many years, managing the multi-volume documentation of the President’s House in New Delhi and an institutional collaboration with Rupayan Sansthan, Jodhpur. She previously co-edited Right of the Line: The President’s Bodyguard on the household cavalry of the Indian head of state. Yashaswini is an avid horsewoman. She can be followed on Twitter at @Yashaswini_Ch.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Tale of the Horse. 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/asian-review

The story of Alexander the Great has inspired conquerors and would-be conquerors throughout history. Alexander’s sweep through the Middle East and Central Asia left behind evidence of his mark on history--namely, in the several cities that he founded, and that sprung up to govern the kingdoms he left behind.One man looking for evidence of Alexander was Charles Masson: a deserter from the East India Company who reinvented himself as an archaeologist and scholar in Afghanistan. Academic, traveller, writer and unwilling spy, Masson’s story is told in Professor Edmund Richardson’s book Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City (Bloomsbury, 2021)We’re joined in this interview by David Chaffetz, who’s a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou.In this interview, the three of us talk about Charles Masson and his experiences in Afghanistan. We talk about what drove this man to embark on his archaeological calling, and how his story meshes with the story of the East India Company and Afghanistan. And we end on what Massey’s story and observations teach us about how to understand Afghanistan today.Edmund Richardson is Professor of Classics at Durham University. He has published Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity, and was named one of the BBC’s New Generation Thinkers in 2016.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Alexandria: The Quest For the Lost City. 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/asian-review

It’s a cliche to call North Korea the most isolated country in the world. Those of us living outside the country often have very little idea of what life there is like, often only seeing what its government would like us to see: military parades, missile launches, and joyous crowds.Yet Lindsey Miller, author of North Korea: Like Nowhere Else: Two Years of Living in the World's Most Secretive State (September Publishing: 2021) is a window into how ordinary North Koreans live. They are more than the stereotypes portrayed by their government or by those looking in from outside of the country, as revealed by the photos and stories Lindsey tells in her book.In this interview, Lindsey and I talk about what it was like to live in North Korea, some of the Koreans she met on her stay, and why some of the narratives about the country can be so hard to shift.Lindsey Miller is a musical director and award-winning composer. For the last ten years, she has worked in theatres across the UK, Europe, North America and Asia and has most recently worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. During 2017–19, Lindsey lived in Pyongyang, North Korea, while accompanying her husband on a diplomatic posting. She can be followed on Twitter at @LindseyMiller87.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of North Korea: Like Nowhere Else. 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/asian-review

When we think about modern trade, we tend to think about the sea: port cities and large ships carrying goods back and forth. It’s a story that tends to put Europe at the center, as the pinnacle of shipping and maritime technology.Jagjeet Lally’s India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (Hurst, 2021) corrects this narrative. For Jagjeet, the way we talk about globalization misses the continued land trade that happened throughout Central Asia, with India as a hub. Traders traveled through today’s India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, sharing commodities and goods, culture and information, under both Indian and British rulers.In this interview, Jagjeet and I talk about the Indian caravan trade, and the routes traders took as they transported goods, cultures and ideas across Central Asia. We’ll also talk about what we miss in the way we talk about globalization in the present.Jagjeet is Associate Professor in the History of Early Modern and Modern India at University College London, where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India and the Silk Roads. 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/asian-review

We think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today.Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Harvard University Press, 2021)Jason M. Kelly is a historian of modern China with interests in Chinese foreign relations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, commerce and diplomacy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international history. He is currently an assistant professor in the Strategy & Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.The views he expressed in this interview are his own, and not those of the U.S. Naval War College.We’re joined in this interview by fellow NBN host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. Sarah is a PHD candidate at Harvard University that studies Qing China and, like Jason, is a graduate associate at the Fairbank Center.Today, the three of us talk about trade policy in Maoist China, and what that means for our understanding of the country’s attitude towards both the capitalist and socialist worlds. We also discuss what this history may mean for how we understand China’s attitude towards trade today.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/asian-review

Edison Hark, the star of The Good Asian (Image Comics: 2021), the new comic series written by Pornsak Pichetshote and illustrated by Alexandre Tefenkgi, never signed up to investigate a murder in Chinatown. As the only Chinese-American law enforcement officer in the United States, he travels to San Francisco in 1936 to help find a Chinese maid who has run away from the household of the man who raised him. But he stumbles upon a crime scene that harkens back to an old crime legend: a hitman for the old Tongs, back for revenge.But while The Good Asian tells a thrilling noir story of crime, detectives and investigations, it also tells the story of the Chinese community, who at the time were still under scrutiny under laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act. The comic grapples with ideas of racial prejudice, respectability politics, and identity.In this interview, Pornsak and I talk about the setting and genre of The Good Asian, and what it means to star a Chinese-American lead in such a well-known genre.Pornsak Pichetshote was a Thai-American rising star editor at DC’s Vertigo imprint where he worked on such comics perennials as The Sandman and Swamp Thing. He left Vertigo to become an executive in DC Entertainment’s media team, where he started and oversaw DC TV’s department. He is also the writer of Infidel, also for Image Comics, which was his first work as a writer. He can be followed on Twitter at @real_pornsak, and on Instagram at @real_psak.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Good Asian. 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/asian-review

It’s a common tale: a gunman out for revenge in the American West, whose six-shooter leaves a trail of bodies behind him. But The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), the debut novel from Tom Lin, takes a novel twist on the genre by having its gunman be Ming Tsu: a Chinese man, orphaned in the United States, out on a journey to murder those who press-ganged him to work on the railroads.But The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is more than that, as it delves into the supernatural, the mystical, and the philosophical as Ming continues his journey across the American West.In this interview, Tom and I talk about the setting of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, and his choices around its characters. We’ll also talk about using a Chinese-American main character in a Western-type story: a traditionally “American” genre.Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he is currently in the PhD program at the University of California, Davis.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. 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/asian-review

Russia’s position between Europe and Asia has led to differing conceptions of “what Russia is” to its leaders. Russia’s vast holdings east of the Urals have often inspired those who led Russia to look eastward for national glory, whether through trade, soft power, or outright force. Yet these Russian “pivots to Asia” often ended soon after they began, with outcomes far more limited than what those who launched them hoped to achieve.Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Harvard University Press, 2021) studies many attempts to chart an Asian policy—from bold imperial dreams of a thriving Russian Far East to Soviet efforts to inspire the developing world through soft power—and why all these policies ended up disappointing their drafters.In this interview, Chris and I talk about Russia’s engagement with the Far East, stretching from its initial forays on the Pacific Coast of North America through to the present day. We talk about why “pivots to Asia” are so hard: both for the Russians, and perhaps for other great powers considering the same policy.Chris Miller is an assistant professor of international history at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and co-director of the school's Russia and Eurasia Program. He is the author of Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). He has previously served as the associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He can be followed on Twitter at @crmiller1.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of We Shall Be Masters. 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/asian-review