New Books In East Asian Studies

Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different 'other' that somehow exists outside the 'real' world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the potential to impact on the 'normal' functioning of things. This core assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised, and separate 'other', ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the world. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Ivan Franceschini from Australian National University and Nicholas Loubere from Lund University. Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere’s 2022 book Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press), seeks to illuminate