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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:

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21:31

Rivals in a Tight Embrace Russia, China, and the...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/09/28

This podcast episode by Alevtina Solovyeva traces Central Asia as the enduring crossroads “between empires,” where caravan routes outlast the borders drawn over them. It opens with the Silk Roads: trade as the region’s original superpower – moving goods, ideas, and identities. The narrative then tracks how Qing–Russian rivalry and the 19th century “Great Game” layered governors, railways, and taxes onto steppe and peoples, then the Soviet period engineered republics, industries, and pipelines while

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57:41

Yu Zhang, "Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/09/20

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What then was the special

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60:47

Christopher Joby, "Christian Mission in...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/09/19

How do new ideas and beliefs take root when they cross cultural and linguistic borders? In seventeenth-century Taiwan, both Dutch and Spanish missionaries tried to replace Indigenous gods, practices, and laws with their own Christian traditions. Christopher Joby’s Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices (Brill, 2025) explores this moment in history through a new lens: reception. Rather than focusing only on what missionaries brought, he

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41:51

Sarah McLaughlin, "Authoritarians in the Academy: How...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/09/07

In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes infiltrating American academia. In Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin exposes how higher education institutions, long considered bastions of free thought, are compromising their values for financial gain and global partnerships.This groundbreaking investigation reveals the subtle yet sweeping influence of authoritarian governments

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50:55

Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/31

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access

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52:05

The end of aid? US, China, and the future of development

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/28

In early 2025, headlines announced that the Trump administration would move to dramatically slash USAID—the United States’ flagship development agency. For many, the move was surprising, even self-defeating: why would a president so focused on countering China weaken one of Washington’s most effective tools of soft power? At the same time, China’s development finance continues to expand, and geopolitical competition over infrastructure intensifies, raising alarm bells across Washington and beyond

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62:50

Dan Wang, "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/26

Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, and previously a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before that, he was an analyst focused on China’s technology capabilities at Gavekal Dragonomics, based across Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Dan is perhaps best known for a series of annual letters, published between 2017-2023, which encapsulate his reflections on Chinese society; his writing has also appeared in other outlets including Foreign

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29:38

Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/21

I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia’s honesty is rewarded with exile.That opening–and the other developments in Lear’s

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49:10

Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks, "Command of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/21

Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. The conventional wisdom is that China's economic power is very close to America's and that Washington cannot undertake a broad economic cutoff of China without hurting itself as much or more. This book demonstrates the conventional wisdom is wrong on both fronts. In peacetime, America's lead in economic power

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27:47

Chile’s Growing Interests in China

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/19

Chile holds the distinction of being the first South American nation to forge diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China, as well as the first in Latin America to enter into a free trade agreement with China. Despite the nearly 24-hour journey required to travel between the two countries, this considerable distance has not hindered the expanding interactions between them. The presence of various waves of the Chinese diaspora in Chile, while often overlooked, is a real aspect of the

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51:50

Isabella M. Weber, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/17

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization - but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy

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72:16

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/08

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep

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75:46

Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/07

Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding relationship with the sea. Through the lives of pirates, maritime advisors, cartographers, admirals, writers, and travelers, Ronald C. Po brings maritime China to life — revealing a world far more connected and sea-orientated than often assumed. Richly detailed and captivating, Shaping the Blue Dragon should interest those in Chinese history, East Asian

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46:29

Professional Chat: Home, Migrant Workers, and Decent...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/06

Better Innovations, to talk about Taiwan as a home for migrant workers, and decent work in supply chains. After a brief overview of key risks in this area, we touched upon Taiwan’s major legislation to date in a global context, and addressed the importance of economic diplomacy for Taiwan – being seen as a responsible global actor in business and human rights. Drawing on our guest’s experience as a practitioner, we then explored how Taiwanese suppliers see their role as leaders in improving labour

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91:18

Toby Lincoln, "An Urban History of China" (Cambridge...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/04

In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a

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43:57

Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/03

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehensive analysis of key international crises, including the Berlin, Taiwan Straits, and Cuban Missile Crises, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Reiter provides

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47:19

David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/03

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the

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75:26

The Nomadic Origin of the State

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/08/01

Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as peripheral appendages to a centralized, agriculturalist empire. In his work, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene argues against what he calls “the Sinocentric paradigm” in favor of an interpretation of nomadic pastoralism as the origin of the premodern state. In this interview, we discuss the conquest theory of state formation, how mobility is essential to state control,

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76:11

Scott Pearce, "Northern Wei (386-534): A New Form of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/07/30

Emerging from collapse of the Han empire, the founders of Northern Wei had come south from the grasslands of Inner Asia to conquer the rich farmlands of the Yellow River plains. Northern Wei was, in fact, the first of the so-called "conquest dynasties" complex states seen repeatedly in East Asian history in which Inner Asian peoples ruled parts of the Chinese world.An innovative contribution to East Asian and Chinese history of the medieval period, Northern Wei (386-534) combines received

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76:16

Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/07/26

Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017), was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy" by The New York Review of Books, and The Economist, who included the book on its Best of 2017 list, said the book, "Shows how a resurgence of faith is quietly changing the country." The Guardian said the book is "full of moving encounters with Chinese citizens ... Johnson succeeds in having produced a nuanced group portrait of Chinese citizens striving

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1,035 results

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