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

47:07

Chris Aslan, "Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/29

The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn’t the only textile trade that’s made its mark on Central Asia, the subject of Chris Aslan’s latest book Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia (Icon Books, 2024), recently published in paperback.Drawing on over a decade’s worth of experience in countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Aslan notes that there’s really three “roads”: In addition

en

88:02

Jessica X. Zu, "Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/28

Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025) uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogācāra social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the

en

65:22

Luanjiao Hu, "Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/25

Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explores the lived experiences of six women, including the author herself, with physical disabilities in China. The book provides in-depth descriptions of each woman's experiences in different aspects and analyze the commonalities and differences in their experiences through their life courses. The book explores answers to some of these questions: How do

en

44:02

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: The Struggle for Hong...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/24

Given what has happened since – from a global pandemic to wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East – events in Hong Kong in 2019-20 can seem remote when seen from today’s perspective. But the momentous scale and significance of the protests there during those years, and the ensuing crackdown and increasing restrictions on Hong Kong’s distinctive politics and society, continue to resonate, not least for the tens of thousands who have left the territory recently. Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s Vigil – a

en

59:37

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/22

Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-commerce companies—or at least facilitate e-commerce. The sector created giants: Alibaba grew from just 5.5 billion renminbi of revenue in 2010 to 280 billion last year.But how did Chinese e-commerce firms shut out their foreign competition? How did they build trust in the system? Lizhi Liu answers these questions in her latest book, From Click to Boom: The

en

55:51

Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/21

Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway (Stanford UP, 2024) explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China through an examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway,

en

64:04

Kai Shmushko, "Multiple Liminalities of Lay Buddhism...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/20

In the past decades, various forms of Buddhism have emerged in-between, above, and beyond conventional conceptions of religious and spiritual life in China. Multiple Liminalities of Lay Buddhism in Contemporary China: Modalities, Material Culture, and Politics (Leiden UP, 2024) is a qualitative study exploring manifestations of the massive revival of Buddhism among non-monastic people and communities. The book wishes to answer the central question: How do Chinese groups and individuals practice

en

39:56

Lines of Control: India’s Foreign Policy and China

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/19

This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features journalist and analyst Aadil Brar discussing India's foreign policy amidst rising global tensions. The conversation focuses on India’s balancing act between the US, China, and its own strategic autonomy in a contested Indo-Pacific region.Key topics include India’s evolving role as a middle power, responding to China's assertiveness along the India-China border and in the Indo-Pacific, while maintaining its

en

47:15

Qingfei Yin, "State Building in Cold War Asia:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/18

Departing from conventional studies of border hostility in inter-Asian relations, Yin Qingfei explores how two revolutionary states - China and Vietnam - each pursued policies that echoed the other and collaborated in extending their authority to the borderlands from 1949 to 1975. Making use of central and local archival sources in both Chinese and Vietnamese, she reveals how the people living on the border responded to such unprecedentedly aggressive state building and especially how they

en

57:26

Nicholas Borst, "The Bird and the Cage: China’s...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/17

The Chinese Communist Party’s complex and contradictory embrace of capitalism has played a pivotal role in shaping China’s economic reforms since the late 1970s. The Bird and the Cage: China's Economic Contradictions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025) explores the persistent tensions between state control and market forces in China. It shows how these tensions provide a framework to understand Xi Jinping’s recent efforts to tighten control over the Chinese economy. It also evaluates the broader implications

en

55:53

Guo Quan Seng, "Strangers in the Family: Gender,...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/15

In Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (SAPP, 2023), Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942).At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of overseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the

en

69:42

Cora Lingling Xu, "The Time Inheritors: How Time...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/08

Can a student inherit time? What difference does time make to their educational journeys and outcomes? The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China (SUNY Press, 2025) draws on nearly a decade of field research with more than one hundred youth in China to argue that intergenerational transfers of privilege or deprivation are manifested in and through time. Comparing experiences of rural-to-urban, cross-border, and transnational education, Cora Lingling Xu shows

en

45:26

Zev J. Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/03

While other ancient nonalphabetic scripts—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs—are long extinct, Chinese characters, invented over three thousand years ago, are today used by well over a billion people to write Chinese and Japanese. In medieval East Asia, the written Classical Chinese language knit the region together in a common intellectual enterprise that encompassed religion, philosophy, historiography, political theory, art, and literature. Literacy in Classical

en

41:03

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, "The Great...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/05/01

In 1968, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, asserting his control of China 15 years later, Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening up period, putting China on the path to becoming an economic powerhouse.But what happens in between these two critical periods of Chinese history? How does China go from Mao's Cultural Revolution to Deng's embrace of reforms? Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian together fill in this history in The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to

en

67:52

Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/04/28

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and

en

72:47

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/04/23

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex

en

66:35

Tadashi Ishikawa, "Geographies of Gender: Family and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/04/23

In Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire

en

89:25

Margherita Zanasi, "Economic Thought in Modern China:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/04/21

In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier than in Europe. In response to the commercial revolutions of the late 1500s, Chinese intellectuals and officials called for the end of state intervention in the market, recognizing its power to self-regulate. They also noted the elasticity of domestic demand and production, arguing

en

102:23

Christof Lammer, "Performing State Boundaries: Food...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/04/18

On the podcast today I am joined by Christof Lammer, a social anthropologist based at the University of Klagenfurt and inherit fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. Christof is joining me to talk about his new book, Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China published in Open Access by Berghahn Books in 2024.The book delves into intricate political processes in an eco-village in Sichuan, revealing the multiple ways in which the boundary between state and

en

24:38

Frances Yaping Wang, "The Art of State Persuasion:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2025/04/08

Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes? And why does this domestic mobilization sometimes fail to result in aggressive policy measures? The Art of State Persuasion (Oxford UP, 2024) delves into China's strategic use of state propaganda during crucial crisis events, particularly focusing on border disputes. Frances Wang aims to explain the diverse strategies employed in Chinese state media, analyzing why certain disputes are amplified while others are downplayed. This

en

1,035 results

Similar Podcasts

Voice of the Arts

WQED Multimedia

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a

Choice Classic Radio Drama & Horror | Old Time Radio

Choice Classic Radio

Choice Classic Radio Detectives | Old Time Radio

Choice Classic Radio

The Stranger

August von Kotzebue