New Books In East Asian Studies

The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a continental landmass encompassing multitude of different language families and groups. Indeed, what is even meant by “Chinese” is unclear when one considers the huge range of related but mutually unintelligible linguistic varieties – from Cantonese to Shanghainese and many other lesser known ones. The story of how the Beijing-derived language today known – at least in English – as “Mandarin” became the standard is thus a highly complex one. In Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Gina Anne Tam takes us through the ways that people in China have navigated the country’s complex linguistic landscape while also negotiating profound questions over the meanings of modern Chinese identity itself. Moving smoothly from the late imperial period up to the Maoist sixties and indeed beyond, t

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dynastic book looks at how Chinese approaches to knowledge changed during the Ming and Qing as state-commissioned pharmacopeias dwindled, amateur investigations into the knowledge of things soared, and, ultimately, as natural history was de-medicalized, all while commercialization, monetization, long-distance trade, and empire flourished. This exceptionally rich and intimately text-based study introduces readers to a number of fascinating bencao (materia media), makes a compelling case for studying Chinese history through the lens of pharmacy, and demonstrates that Chinese pharmacy itself has a rich and vibrant history—all with stunning ease. This is both an essential and a joyful read for China historians, while still accessible for non-specialists interested in reading about the early modern world, medicine, the his

We stand on the eve of a different kind of world, but comprehending it is difficult: we are so accustomed to dealing with the paradigms of the contemporary world that we inevitably take them for granted, believing that they are set in concrete rather than themselves being the subject of longer-run cycles of historical change. – Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World The biggest question of the twenty-first century is: What does China want? China is without question the rising power of the age. What that means for the current global order, crafted and led by the United States since the end of World War II, is the topic of think tank studies, Congressional hearings, vats of newsprint, and dinner conversations from Washington to Tokyo. What exactly will China do with its new power? Will China become a partner to the West and its allies, or will it wish to change the world, to promote new values, institutions, and patterns of trade and finance? Will it play by our rules, or write new ones? … The answer to the

Bringing attention to the importance of li (an articulated system of social domination and political legitimization, consisting of rituals, ceremonies, and rites) as the foundation of the Qing political system, Macabe Keliher’s book The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China (University of California Press, 2019) challenges traditional understandings of state-formation and helps us rethink how we tell the story of the founding of the Qing. Focusing on how rituals and other practices of legitimization emerged, formed, and were then codified, the book is a deep dive into the early years of the dynasty. Using Chinese and Manchu-language archival materials, including edicts, memorials, legal codes, and court records, Keliher emphasizes how concerned with li the Qing really was, and in turn how very different from the Ming the Qing ended up being. Covering all aspects of ritual, from court ceremony to sumptuary greetings, clothing regulations, and how members of the imperial family were dealt with, this is a

Today I talked to Charlotte Bruckermann about her new book Claiming Homes: Confronting Domicide in Rural China (Berghahn Books, 2019). Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond. Suvi Rautio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her interests delve into themes, such as Chinese state-society relations, space and memory, to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China and reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. suvi.rautio@helsinki.fi Learn more about you

Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity. In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of baseball in Taiwan. He argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese and different groups of Taiwanese people. He considers Taiwanese baseball transnationally within the larger frames of the Japanese imperial nation-state and the Kuomintang’s retrocession Sinicization project. He shows how and why indigenous Taiwanese

Many people outside China, and indeed many urbanites living in the country, rarely think about its vast rural areas. Yet today’s People’s Republic in many ways owes existence to the countryside where, seven and more decades ago, a rural revolution brought the new state into people’s lives, and new people under the state’s stewardship. Brian DeMare’s highly engaging Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2019) tells the story of this revolution, and indeed shows how the process was itself a story. Key to the psychological, political and economic transformations which unfolded in China’s million villages in the 1940s and ‘50s was a powerful narrative impulse – a Maoist “script” for revolution which gave shape to often chaotic and violent events. Untangling this script – and the relationship between the “literal and the literary” as DeMare puts it – is key to interpreting this formative cataclysm of the PRC’s recent past.  Professor Brian DeMare specializes in modern Chin

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century. The translations in Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic. (Stone Bridge Press, 2020)--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to global literary modernity. Frederik H. Green is an associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and culture of the Qing dynasty and the Republican Per

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. TB was a plague of epic proportions in industrializing Japan, particularly affecting young women workers in the new textile factories. These marginalized laborers, many from rural villages, were not a priority for Japan’s first modern administrations, who focused their energies elsewhere and left the welfare of tuberculosis patients to the private sector. The opening left by this choice was filled by American evangelicals, who saw an opportunity to advance their missionary work in Japan. Perelman identifies a kind of twinned moral entrepreneurship, arguing that a tacit agreement was hammered out between the two sides, with the government accepting the evangelical groups’ assistance with this p

The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common themes, styles, motifs, and even pigments that circulated across the continents. Drawing on visual as well as textual sources from eight unique locations that spanned between Siena in Italy and Quanzhou in China, Roxann Prazniak maps out in Sudden Appearances an elaborate thirteenth-century network of cultural and commercial exchanges that “produced an ascendant materialism and intervisuality that emphasized human agency.” Join me as I discuss Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art (University of Hawaii Press 2019) with Dr. Prazniak. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to t

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities. Focusing on themes of reform, political Islamism, Sufism, gender, as well as a rich array of material culture (such as sacred spaces and art), the book maps the development of Islam in Asia, such as in Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. It considers both transnational and transregional ebbs and flows that have defined the expansion and institutionalization of Islam in Asia, while attending to factors such as ethnicity, linguistic identity and even food cultures as important realities that have informed the translation of Islam into new regions. It is the “convergence and conversation” between the “local” and “foreign” or better yet between the theoretical notions of “centre” and “periphery” o

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Yasuhara Miho’s Branding Japan’s Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores historical and contemporary practices of place branding through food in Japan. The book’s narrative centers on the event that precipitated its writing, namely, the 2013 addition of “Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year” to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The authors argue that the definition of washoku in the UNESCO nomination is part of a longer history of manipulative place branding in Japan that has its roots in the premodern period. Contemporary Japan’s penchant for and success at gastrodiplomacy is well known, but Cwiertka and Yasuhara place this national-level soft-power branding strategy within a centuries-long history of business practices that fabricated connections between products (many of them food products) and locations. Those stories are told through the book’s

Alexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social construction of territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia. In his analysis of Japan’s rows over the “Northern Territories” (with Russia), the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (China), and Takeshima/Dokdo (Korea), Bukh reveals in detail how the nonstate actors that he calls “national identity entrepreneurs” manufacture and maintain national salience for what are often militarily, economically, and geographically relatively unimportant territories, moving them from the national margins to the core in times of crisis. Bukh follows an often colorful cast of civil society actors as he places each dispute within the macro-level geopolitical climate of its times as well as the micropolitics of national crises and tensions between national regions and capitals. By marshaling a broad range of sources and com

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country. The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiessen argues, such a vision of development was appealing to a broad range of actors: both the left(ish) Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, in power from 1952-1964, as well as the (often) right wing military governments that succeeded it, were deeply concerned with developing Bolivia through colonization of of the lowlands. Starting in the 1970s, however, as the state started to pull back from the day to day operations of such projects, it opened up space for NGOs and what Nobbs-Thiessen calls, "faith-based development practi

When advocacy organizations are forbidden from rallying people to take to the streets, what do they do? Diana Fu’s nuanced ethnography of Chinese labor organizations demonstrates how grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) mobilize under repressive political conditions. Instead of facilitating collective action through public protests or strikes, Fu demonstrates how Chinese activists innovatively coach citizens to challenge authorities – in private spaces. Activists work with individual workers to help them understand and assert their rights in labor negotiations. Activists use individual conversations with workers to create a sense of belonging to a larger community of migrant workers. These “pedagogies of contention” foster collective identity and consciousness: mobilization without the masses. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is divided into two parts. First, Fu examines the structural conditions of above and underground groups in Be

This podcast was recorded on May 21st, 2020 – the same day that the Chinese government proposed new national security laws that would give China greater control over Hong Kong. What motivates these laws and what is at stake for Hong Kong, China, and the rest of the world if they go into effect? In the podcast, Wasserstrom draws on examples from modern Chinese history and politics – such as the role of local press in reporting on SARS – to connect on the ground reporting in Hong Kong and the exercise of rights by the Hong Kong people with practical policy-making during a pandemic. He offers both stark realism and optimism about the ability of the public, heads of state, and policy makers to fully comprehend the meaning of political protest – and the freedom it represents – in Hong Kong. Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) provides a nuanced yet accessible overview of the struggle between Hong Kong and China over self-governance and civil liberties. This historica

Challenging the popular image of Buddhism as a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment, Dr. John Elverskog’s new monograph, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), demonstrates that Buddhist institutions across Asia have actually been intimately connected to the accumulation of wealth, the consumption and exploitation of natural resources, and urbanization. What drives these acts, Dr. Elverskog argues, is a prosperity theology that is central to the Buddha Dharma, which regards wealth as a sign of positive karma. Calling into question the stereotypical understanding of Buddhism as an ascetic, apolitical, and contemplative tradition, this book investigates not only monks but also how the laity and the Buddhist states participated in the generation of wealth for religious merit. Dr. Elverskog points out that The Buddha’s Footprint is not “arguing that Buddhism and environmental thought and action are antithetical or that Buddhism cannot be

State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Julia C. Strauss is a comparative study of regime consolidation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) after 1949. It examines the ways in which bureaucratic and campaign modalities were deployed in the regime consolidation of the PRC and the ROC by focusing on three paired case studies: state personnel, terror unleased by the state against domestic enemies, and land reform. Throughout it shows that while there were striking similarities in what policies the PRC and ROC implemented, how the polices were conveyed and above all how they were performed differed radically. Meticulously researched and wonderfully nuanced, it is both a fascinating read and an elegant model for how to do comparative history. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the History and East Asian Languages program. She is interested in translation, Manchu books, and an

China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations accused of human rights violations. The PRC has emphasized the norm of sovereignty and rejected external interference in its own internal affairs. Yet they have supported UN intervention when states have been accused of mass human rights abuses. Why has China acquiesced and supported intervention? Neither realism or liberalism offer complete explanations for China’s seeming inconsistency. Courtney Fung finds that social constructions by way of public discourse of regime change matter when embedded in wider material conditions. She argues that anxieties about loss of status help explain China’s choices. In her new book China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford University Press, 2019), Fung explores three cases involving mass atrocities: Darfur (2004-2008), Libya (2011-2012), and Syria (2011-2015). China’s focus on status requir