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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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49:43

Po-Yi Hung, "Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders,...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/19

From misty mountain oolongs to the global boba boom, Taiwan’s teas carry far more than flavor. They embody contested borders, evolving identities, and the complexities of nationhood.Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality(U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Po-Yi Hung traces tea varieties, processing expertise, and merchants across Taiwan and Southeast Asia to reveal how a simple leaf has become a force in global politics.Drawing on decades of fieldwork and extensive archival

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60:30

Dan Du, "This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/18

Popularhistory tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee, making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be the second-largest importer of tea from China. Diverging from British black tea traditions, U.S. consumers preferred green tea, cultivated a particular taste for Oolong tea, and invented the English Breakfast Tea

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63:50

Ting Hui Lau, "Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/17

A series of questions have been sparked by the indigenous urgency of the moment: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism(Stanford University Press, 2026)explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet. Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands,

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51:31

Máximo Badaró, "Pedagogies of Value: Marketing...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/16

Pedagogies of Value: Marketing Foreign Goods in China (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Máximo Badaró explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers, consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how foreign

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52:38

Paul French, "The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/13

The life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, often feels like a spectacle—in no small part due to the 1987 Oscar-winning filmThe Last Emperor. Yet the true story being Puyi, as well as his wife, the empress Wanrong, is more complicated. Two foreigners were asked to tutor both Puyi and Wanrong: Reginald Johnston and Isabel Ingram, both of whom provide fresh insights into how China’s final emperor and empress lived their lives. Historian Paul French draws upon these sources, and others, for his

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31:13

Sima Qian–China’s Grand Historian

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/12

John Ross chats with repeat guest Tim McGirk about Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BC), the Father of Chinese History. He earned this accolade for his monumental work, theShiji(usually translated asRecords of the Grand Historian). It covers more than two thousand years, from the legendary early emperors up to Emperor Wu, under whom Sima Qian lived and fell afoul. Sima Qian would use his history writing to criticize cruel leaders, most notably Qin Shi Huang, the despotic first emperor of China, who burned books

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52:27

Ka-ming Wu, "Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/09

Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations(Leiden University Press, 2026)examines how Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight surveillance regime through volunteering. This book asks how citizens connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research, Ka-ming Wu

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62:41

Monalisa Adhikari, "A Post-Liberal Peace: How...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/08/02

InA Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management(Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of

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76:58

Isabel Heger-Laube, "China’s Landless Peasants and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/07/31

As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes for the affected populations – China’s “landless peasants” - as well as to the construction of divergent narratives about the role of the Chinese state’s measures for them. To provide a so-far missing perspective to

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56:51

Joe Ngai and Nick Leung, "The Next China Is Still...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/07/30

What’s going on in the Chinese economy? China reported GDP growth of just 4.3% last quarter. Consumption is sluggish, exports are booming, electronics manufacturers and chipmakers are reporting huge profits as car sales slump. Joe Ngai and Nick Leung dive into the Chinese economy in their latest bookThe Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era(Scribner,2026),which came out earlier this year. The book is motivated by a question many executives asked amid new U.S

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57:13

Adam Y. Liu, "Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/07/28

Authoritarian Markets explores the political foundations of China's banking boom and its far-reaching impact on the Chinese economy. In 1978 China had no commercial banks. Today it commands the world's largest banking system, with assets equal to 40 percent of global GDP. In Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion (Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Adam Y. Liu argues that this rise was not the product of market reforms but of political bargains and bureaucratic

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75:31

Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/07/09

Most people only know one of the Ryukyu Islands: the island of Okinawa, home to sandy beaches and one of the U.S.’s most important bases in Asia. There are lots of myths about this island chain, which stretch from southern Japan down to the island of Taiwan: That it owed loyalty to China, given its place in the imperial tribute trade; that it was a pacifist kingdom; that it was quasi-sovereign even within Japan.Gregory Smits tackles a lot of these myths in his expansive history of the islands,

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63:13

Xian Aubin Wang, "Islam and Maoism in Southern...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/07/03

Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024 (Cornell University Press, 2026) by Dr. Xian Aubin Wang investigates decades of contentious relations between the Communist party-state of China and the Muslim community of southern Yunnan centered on the village of Shadian, site of an incident of state violence in 1975 that resulted in 1600 civilian deaths. Examining the causes and legacies of the Shadian massacre, Dr. Wang draws on an extensive review of internal

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0:00

Chinese EVs: From Nordic Streets to Central Asian Hubs

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/07/02

Can Europe afford to stand back as China rewrites the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem? In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to United Nations Senior Adviser Matthew Gray for Europe and Central Asia Markets, who discusses the rapid international expansion of Chinese EVs. The conversation highlights how Chinese brands have moved beyond public buses to growing passenger car markets in the Nordic region and Central Asia through superior technology, lower price

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61:06

Fabio Lanza, "Urban Revolution: People's Communes in...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/06/27

During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In his new book, Urban Revolution: People's Communes in Beijing (Cambridge UP, 2026), Fabio Lanza examines the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. This first full-length history in English of China's urban communes shows how universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal

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33:44

Xiaobing Li, "China’s Mahan: Admiral Liu Huaqing and...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/06/25

In 2012, China debuted its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, a refurbished Soviet-era ship from Ukraine. The debut of the Liaoning was largely thanks to a longtime pressure campaign by Liu Huaqing, the onetime leader of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the man responsible for transforming China’s naval strategy. (China now has three carriers, and is building a fourth). When Liu began his career, China saw its military victories as coming primarily via land warfare; Liu, over decades,

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46:07

Charlotte Brooks, "The Moys of New York and Shanghai:...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/06/18

The story of the Moy family—U.S.-born Chinese-American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century—is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and cosmopolitan Shanghai. It’s a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War—and stars one sibling who was an early participant in the Kuomintang…and another who records propaganda for Germany and Japan during the Second World War.In her new book, The Moys of New

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55:13

Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen, "Meiji Graves in...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/06/17

The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong’s historic Japanese community received the attention it deserves through Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024). In this compelling book, Dr Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen guide readers into the Meiji era, reconstructing history through the lives of ordinary people whose stories have long been overlooked. During our

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46:39

Colin Flahive, "The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/06/15

Colin Flahive is an American entrepreneur and writer who has spent more than two decades living and running social enterprises in southwestern China. He is best known as one of the founders of Salvador's Coffee House, which is a hub of international exchange in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. In this New Books Network episode, we talk with Colin about his latest book, The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China (Earnshaw Books, 2026). The Galaxy's Last Ride is a rich

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47:14

Michael Dillon, "Shanghai: The Story of China's Most...

New Books in Chinese Studies ·

2026/06/09

Home to 25 million people, Shanghai is the most populous and wealthiest cityin China. A meeting point between China and the wider world, the city has become the beating heart of Chinese capitalism, a place of initiative, confidence, and forward thinking. It is a city of stark contradictions, suffused with both extreme wealth and poverty, luxury living, and a highly organised criminal underworld. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor

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