New Books in Chinese Studies

Chen examines the Chinese Nationalist government's distinctive support for private Muslim teachers schools between the 1920s and 1940s, and explores the complex relationship between these institutions and the Chinese state during the Republican period. In 1933, the government issued the Teachers Schools Regulations, mandating that all teachers schools be state-run. However, the Nationalists viewed private Muslim teachers schools as valuable allies in their efforts to assert influence in China’s Muslim-dominated northwestern frontier region and deliberately refrained from enforcing the 1933 Teachers Schools Regulations on them. Instead, the government applied the 1933 Amended Private Schools Regulations, which did not specifically address teachers schools, to govern Muslim teachers schools. By charting the evolving dynamics between the Nationalist state and Chinese Hui Muslims, Hui Muslims in the Shaping of Modern China: Education, Frontier Politics, and Nation-State (Routledge, 2025) reevaluates the Hui Muslims’ role in shaping modern China. Offering crucial context on the role of Islam in modern China, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of Chinese history, as well as for policymakers and journalists interested in religion in China. Bin Chen is Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University, and his research interests include China’s modern transition and Islam in China. His publications have appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Modern Chinese History, International Journal of Asian Studies, and others. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (Harvard UP, 2025), provides a detailed, research-driven survey of the gaokao, China's high-stakes college entrance exam. Authors Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li--past test-takers themselves--show how the exam system shapes schooling, serves state interests, inspires individualistic attitudes, and has lately become a touchstone in US education debates.   Ruixue Jia is a professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. She also serves as co-director of the China Data Lab, executive secretary of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies (ACES) and co-chair of the China Economic Summer Institute (CESI). Hongbin Li is the James Liang Chair, Faculty Co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University.  Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Routledge, 2025) edited by Ville Sinkkonen, Veera Laine, Matti Puranen addresses the ultimate question. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs), Matti Puranen (Finnish National Defense University and University of Helsinki), and Bart Gaens (Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the International Centre for Defense and Security) about the ambition of this new book and several key takeaways concerning particularly the US, China, and India from this book. The book’s analysis also offers normative prescriptions on how to avoid a tragic race to the bottom – a fragmented world of competing orders where states are unable to address shared global crises and challenges such as pandemics, cross-border crime, climate tragedies, and armed conflict. With this, it concludes by recognising the importance of agency as well as political imagination in navigating the crisis-ridden ordering moment of the international system. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in global order studies and governance, geopolitics, regional studies, foreign policy analysis as well as more broadly to international relations and security, political history, human geography, and policymakers. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Studying Chinese media has never been a stable intellectual enterprise. As Professor Yuezhi Zhao once observed, it often resembles aiming at a target that appears clear from a distance but becomes elusive on closer inspection. Over the past decade, that target has grown even more fragmented and mobile. Media systems across the Chinese-speaking world—including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and transnational Chinese communities—have been reshaped by rapid technological transformation, intensifying geopolitical rivalry, and profound political change. It is against this backdrop that the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media has been published. Rather than simply updating a reference work, this edition reflects a field fundamentally reconfigured. Assumptions formed before the full societal penetration of digital platforms and social media now require serious reconsideration. The digital is no longer one topic among many; it is central to understanding contemporary political, cultural, and economic life. In this podcast conversation, co-editors Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley and Dr Yiben Ma reflect on the making of the new volume. Dr Ma contributed to the first edition (2015) and joined the editorial team for the second edition, also authoring a new chapter. After introducing the book and outlining its scope, they share seven key reflections as editors and scholars of Chinese media: Digital transformation as the organising principle Scholarship grounded in lived experience A regional lens without isolation Expanding the field beyond institutional narratives The limits of global communication strategy Hong Kong: accelerated transformation Macao: continuity and quiet change The second edition comprises 29 chapters, in addition to an extensive introduction. Despite striving for breadth and balance, the editors recognise that many areas remain underexplored and warrant sustained attention. They hope the volume will stimulate further research and dialogue. As global uncertainty deepens and information politics become increasingly consequential, the study of Chinese media can no longer be regarded as a specialised regional concern. It is central to understanding how power, technology, and communication interact in the contemporary world. In this sense, the handbook contributes not only to Chinese media studies but also to the broader field of media and communications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the internet–even one behind the Great Firewall–would bring about a more open China. As President Bill Clinton famously quipped in 2000, Beijing trying to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.” Things don’t look quite so certain now. China’s internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators, and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing. Yi-Ling Liu charts the story of the Chinese internet in her book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet (Knopf, 2026), with profiles of creators like Ma Baoli, the founder of one of China’s, and the world’s, largest gay dating apps, or Chinese hip hop pioneer Kafe Hu. Yi-Ling’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, and The New York Review of Books. She has been a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Wall Dancers . Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (Harvard UP, 2025), Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the Left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia. Hang Tu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and Deputy Director of the CCKF–NUS Southeast Asia Center for Chinese Studies. A scholar of Chinese literature and thought, his research focuses on the cultural politics of emotion in modern and contemporary China. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, MCLC, and Prism. Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on modern Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Cambridge UP, 2025) challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. Their findings reveal how Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba, have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. Meanwhile, citizens voluntarily produce data, incentivizing platform firms to cater to their needs and motivating resistance by platforms. Authors Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo unveil the intricate mechanisms linking the state, platform firms, and citizens in the digital governance of authoritarian states. Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Centre for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School. Ting Luo is an Associate Professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

When it comes to the global challenges posed by climate change and environmental issues, China has been presented both as a source of problems and a provider of solutions. In this episode, we examine the current state of China’s climate and environmental policies with Dr. Hermann Aubié, whose research focuses on China’s climate and air quality governance and its policy relevance for EU-China relations. What is the on-the-ground reality of climate and air quality efforts in China at the moment, and how can the European Union leverage its relationship with China to tackle climate change amidst growing global uncertainty? Dr. Hermann Aubié is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Climate Change, Energy and Environmental Law at the University of Eastern Finland and is also affiliated to the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku. Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher 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 following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge, 2025), Ning Leng shows how Chinese officials systematically treat formally private firms as political instruments, extracting services that advance careers and maintain social control—often at the expense of business interests, economic efficiency and sustainable development. Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco and is the Director of USF's Master's Program in International and Development Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States. Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities (Fordham UP, 2025) by Dr. Gaoheng Zhang designs a novel analytical framework to approach transcultural food mobilities, a culinary phenomenon that has been with us for decades as a result of colonialism and globalization.Why is it surprising for some of us to read the pairing of “Chinese” with “pizzas” and “Italian” with “dumplings,” such as proposed in the book’s title? After all, in some regions of the two countries, Italians eat frequently dumplings, and Chinese frequently make baked, steamed, or fried flatbread with toppings or fillings. Furthermore, when dumplings are made in Italy by Chinese migrants or Chinese Italians, or when pizzas are made in China by Italian migrants, Chinese Italians, or Chinese without apparent ties with Italy, are these culinary products Chinese, Italian, Chinese-Italian, or something else? Why do we need to care for such labeling dilemmas?This book shows how China-Italy food mobilities relayed in popular culture helped forge Chi­nese and Italians’ socioeconomic identities in recent decades by fundamentally shaping contempo­rary Chinese and Italian consumer cultures. This book addresses China-Italy food cultures against the backdrops of two epoch-making socioeconomic processes. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy, thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italian culinary tourism. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, together with American hamburgers and fried chicken, the American food chain Pizza Hut’s pizzas and spaghetti were the first non-Asian foods that post-Mao Chinese customers recognized as “Western.” The book proposes a critical framework that analyzes transcultural food mobilities by seriously assessing the confluence of diverse mobilities and their impact on food cultures. Ulti­mately, the study shows that a sophisticated interpretation of transcultural food mobilities can help address alterity and build understanding in a world of increasing political and cultural polarization. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on Earth" ethos to Hong Kong—with unhappy results. Focusing on the attempted localization and indigenization of this idea in a globalized transnational park, the book delves into the three-way dynamics of an American culture-corporation's intentions, China's government investment, and Hong Kong. The triple actors introduce an especially complex case as two of the world's most powerful entities, the nominally Communist state of China and corporate behemoth Disney, come together for a project in the third space of Hong Kong. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success. Jenny Banh is a keynote speaker, curriculum developer, and professor of Asian American Studies and Anthropology at California State University, Fresno. Her current research examines the barriers/bridges to Southeast Asian American students, Asian Foodways, and a Hong Kong corporation. In her community work, she has conducted, coded, and transcribed over 40 oral histories of Southeast Asian Americans who live in California’s Central Valley. She donated all the oral histories to the school’s library to create the Central Valley Southeast Asian American Successful Voices Archive. Recently, she helped to co-create the ASAM-Asian Major, nineteen new Asian American studies courses, and three certificates. She has been awarded two teaching awards and four service awards. Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Transnational marriage migration is among the many features of cross-border mobility that characterise the globalised world. This is also the case in the Taiwan Strait, where the complicated political situation between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland adds a unique dimension to the phenomenon. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Lara Momesso, whose new book Cross-Border Intimacies: Affect and Emotions in Marriage Migration Between China and Taiwan (Manchester, 2025) builds on fifteen years of research and fieldwork to examine the complexities and political entanglements of family formation across the Taiwan Strait. Dr. Lara Momesso is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Lancashire and is also affiliated with the European Research Centre of Contemporary Taiwan and the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS. She is also an editor-in-chief of the Asia Pacific Viewpoint and hosts the podcasts Taiwan on Air and Voices of Lancashire. Ari-Joonas Pitkänen is a Doctoral Researcher 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 following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A provocative collaborative project, China as Context challenges the marginalization of Chinese-grounded ideas in academia, arguing that neglecting China distorts our understanding of global complexities. Through diverse ethnographic perspectives, this volume repositions China, urging a holistic, post-global approach to the social sciences amid shifting global dynamics. Decades-old calls to recognise China’s significance for anthropological theory and the social sciences are more urgent than ever. Yet, Chinese-grounded ideas remain marginal, with China often seen as a distant “Other” rather than a source of widely applicable theory. Drawing on East Asian postcolonial scholarship, this volume argues that without taking China seriously as a knowledge producer and a key agent in a post-global world, social scientists risk misinterpreting the global present. As Western globalisation wanes and anthropology reassesses the relationship between ethnography and theory, we show how “China” must be understood as an ordinary, integral context for research worldwide. China as Context is edited by Di Wu, Andrea Pia, and Ed Pulford. Di Wu is an Anthropologist and Associate Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Anthropology, Zhejiang University, the People’s Republic of China. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How do we compare across languages, media, and histories, all without flattening differences? And what might Hong Kong teach us about doing comparison differently? Alvin K. Wong examines these and other questions in Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Duke UP, 2025), a wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of queerness in Hong Kong. Bringing together Sinophone literature, independent and commercial cinema, documentary films, and visual art, the book asks how Hong Kong’s queer productions might help us rethink the work of comparison itself. Rather than treating Hong Kong as a marginal or derivative space — a space defined by British colonialism, China-centrism, or global capitalism — this book approaches the city as a site of methodological possibilities. The key concept the book advances, “unruly comparison,” replacing neat equivalences and stable categories with incommensurability and transnational connections and linking Hong Kong to other places, times, and queer spaces across the Sinophone. Theoretically deft, the book is filled with a wide range of fascinating material, including work by filmmakers including Wong Kar-wai, Scud, and Fruit Chan; transnational and transgender visual cultures; documentaries about Southeast Asian domestic workers and queer intimacies; and poetry about language and precarity. This book will appeal to those interested in queer theory, Hong Kong studies, Sinophone studies, and comparative approaches. Listeners should also check out Alvin Wong's co-edited volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies(Routledge, 2020) and the Society of Sinophone Studies webpage (of which Alvin is currently chair!).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel (Cornell UP, 2023) uses the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan) to examine the world of print in early modern China. Scott W. Gregory traces the way this beloved novel about outlaw heroes, honor, corruption, and brotherhood was adapted and changed by different editor-publishers. While in other contexts print and printing brought stability to texts, Scott shows how in the Ming print itself was an agent of textual change. Bandits in Print is a refreshing take on this traditional novel, one that highlights how malleable Water Margin really was. This book is sure to appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, Ming history, and print culture, as well as those who want to know more about the interaction between manuscript and print in the early modern world. In addition to being an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, Scott is also co-director of the Center for East Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How has China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed itself into one of the most assertive diplomatic actors on the global stage? What explains the rise of “wolf warrior” practices, and how should we interpret Beijing’s evolving diplomatic identity? In this episode, Duncan McCargo speaks with Dylan Loh, an Associate Professor in the Public Policy and Global Affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University (Dr. Dylan M.H. Loh - Associate Professor | International Relations Scholar | Chinese Foreign Policy), about his award-winning new book China’s Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dylan Loh unpacks how Chinese diplomats craft narratives and balance assertiveness with professionalism, touching on institutional habitus, ritualised loyalty, and China’s bid for discourse power on platforms like X. This conversation offers timely insights for anyone interested in Chinese foreign policy, diplomacy, and the future of great-power relations. Host: Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University. Podcast Editing: Ishaan Krishnan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation. This book is open access, you can find the download link here. You can find the statistics and social network analysis in this book as well as links to Prof. Mazanec's codes in this book.  You can find the online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference.  The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that "Chinese" identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy--described as "harmony"--with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one's position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today's multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race. For readers interested in how GCB and the Greek philosophical justification of GCB, domination, and destruction of barbarians still inform productions and consumptions of racist ideology as embodied in The Turner Diaries, see for example, here, here, and here.  Readers interested in the Vāda project that employs Indian epistemology to evaluate contemporary political claims, see here.  Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies