Loading...

PODCAST

New Books in Chinese Studies

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

arts books

All Episodes

53:29

Yasmin Cho, "Politics of Tranquility: The Material...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/12/15

Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddhist revival in China, illustrating the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns and exploring the political effects that arise from their nonpolitical daily engagements in the remote, mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment of Yachen Gar.Yasmin Cho's book challenges two assumptions about Tibetan Buddhist communities in China. First, against the assumption that

en

63:43

Liang Qichao, "Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/12/13

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023) brings together a newly translated selection of pre-eminent public intellectual Liang Qichao’s most influential writings, spanning the many phases of his life: his early political awakening in the final decades of the Qing dynasty, his exile in Japan after the failed 1898 reforms, and his later reflections in the 1920s as China struggled to imagine a modern future.Translated by Peter Zarrow, the essays

en

64:35

Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/25

From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (U Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Micah Muscolino explores how the Chinese state imposed the burden of conservation on rural communities and how the communities navigated those demands. Weaving together archival research and oral history

en

72:18

Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/21

What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible?Yanqiu Zheng’s In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974 (U Michigan Press, 2024) traces how China attempted to reshape its international image across a century marked by imperialism, political upheaval, civil war, and Cold War realignments. Beginning in the late Qing, when China’s reputation was battered by foreign

en

54:29

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology,...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/19

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers

en

55:40

Jennifer Yip, "Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/15

How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jennifer Yip (National University of Singapore) looks at China’s military grain systems from field to frontline. Yip examines the bureaucratic processes and deeply human stories of requisitioning, transporting, and storing grain in Nationalist-held China. This forensic look at food helps readers rethink the

en

56:08

Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/08

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War--journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path

en

61:13

13.4 - Zumretay Arkin

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/07

In this episode, Chella Ward and Claudia Radiven were in conversation with Zumretay Arkin, discussing the Uyghur genocide in East Turkestan. Zumretay is Chair of the Women’s Committee at the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The WUC is an international organization acting as an umbrella organization representing and advocating for Uyghurs around the world whether in East Turkestan or the diaspora. In our conversations, we discussed the nature of colonial occupation, genocide, and how organisation and

en

37:05

Strings of Identity: The Horse-Head Fiddle and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/05

In this episode, we trace how the horse-head fiddle has evolved in the People’s Republic of China — from a traditional steppe instrument to a cultural symbol reshaped through state representation and modern performance. We discuss how it is made, taught, and performed in China, how it is portrayed in Chinese institutions, and how young Mongols today engage with the instrument as a way to express identity, creativity, and belonging in contemporary China.Our guest, Ying Song from Zhejiang

en

89:57

Mark L. Clifford, "The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/04

The extraordinary life story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai, a leading Hong Kong democracy activist fighting for freedom of speech who became China’s most famous political prisoner. Jimmy Lai escaped mainland China when he was twelve years old, at the height of a famine that killed tens of millions. In Hong Kong, he hustled and often slept overnight on a table in a clothing factory where he did odd jobs. At twenty-one, he was running a factory. By his mid-twenties, he owned one and was

en

34:27

AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/11/03

How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, exploring how AI reshapes journalistic roles, organisational structures, and governance systems through the lens of China’s media landscape—while drawing comparisons with the US and EU. Dr. Joanne Kuai is a Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and holds a PhD from Karlstad University in Sweden. Her research focuses

en

43:34

Taru Salmenkari, "Global Ideas, Local Adaptations:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/24

Exploring the boundaries, fringes, and inner workings of civil society, Taru Salmenkari investigates local forms of political agency in China in light of the globalization of political values, practices, and institutions in Global Ideas, Local Adaptations: Chinese Activism and the Will to Make Civil Society (Edward Elgar, 2025). She provides a theoretical framework for globalization, examining new forms of governance emerging with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and how these have

en

65:21

Jesse Rodenbiker, "Ecological States: Politics of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/24

Based on two years of extensive fieldwork, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (Cornell UP, 2023) examines ecological policies in the People’s Republic of China to show how campaigns of scientifically based environmental protection transform nature and society. While many point to China’s ecological civilization programs as a new paradigm for global environmental governance, Jesse Rodenbiker argues that ecological redlining extends the reach of the authoritarian

en

38:01

Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/21

What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics?The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters (Columbia Global Reports, 2022) by Megan Walsh takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground

en

101:37

Mia Yinxing Liu, "Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/21

Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration. Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era (U Hawai’i Press, 2019) explores this interplay during the Mao era, a time when cinema, at the forefront of ideological campaigns and purges, was held to strict political guidelines. Through four films―Li Shizhen (1956), Stage Sisters (1964), Early Spring in February (1963),

en

76:13

In Search of Green China: Ma Tianjie on Pan Yue and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/18

A former journalist and environmental campaigner named Pan Yue rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, championing the concept of “ecological civilization.” This green dream combines elements of traditional Chinese culture with eco-Marxism, suggesting a radical reorientation of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Is the idea a serious alternative to sustainable development, as the CCP claims? Or is it just a cynical cover for eco-authoritarianism? We speak with Beijing-based

en

52:59

Michelle Wang, "The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/14

What can a map do, beyond showing us where things are?Michelle Wang's new book, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (U Chicago Press, 2023), explores this question through images painted on bronze, wood, and silk that were buried in tombs between the fourth and second centuries BCE. Wang encourages readers to look at these images as terrestrial diagrams — pictures that didn’t just represent the world, but made worlds. These tools helped the living connect with the dead, linked earthly

en

134:03

Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, "A Chinese...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/10

A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911 is an encyclopaedic reference work documenting the exile years of imperial China’s most famous reformer, Kang Youwei, and the political organization he mobilized in North America and worldwide to transform China’s autocratic empire into a constitutional monarchy. Chinese in Canada, the United States, and Mexico formed at least 160 Chinese Empire Reform Association chapters, incorporating

en

102:23

Joshua Eisenman and David H. Shinn, "China's...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/08

Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased the share of resources it devotes to African countries, expanding military cooperation, technological investment, and educational and cultural programs as well as extending its political influence.China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines the full scope of contemporary political and

en

57:25

Xiaobo Lü, "Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/10/05

How and why did the Chinese Communist Party rise to power in the 1940s at the expense of its Nationalist (KMT) rival? In his new book, Domination and Mobilization: The Rise and Fall of Political Parties in China’s Republican Era (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Professor Xiaobo Lü (UC Berkeley) adopts a new model for thinking about this question. Using new qualitative and quantitative evidence, Lü shows how CCP success was built on dominant leadership and its interaction with a strategy of

en

1,035 results

Similar Podcasts

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

The Moth

The Moth

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a

Stage Whisper

Andrew Cortes and Hope Bird

Scary Stories and Rain

Being Scared