New Books In East Asian Studies

China’s communist revolution has an intricate relationship with gender and religion. In Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023), Xiaofei Kang moves the two themes to the center stage in the Chinese Revolution. It examines the Communist Party’s first anti-superstition campaign in its wartime headquarters of Yan’an, the holy land of the Maoist revolution. The book argues that religion was not a mere adversary for the revolution; it also served as a model with which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In its rise from rural backwaters to national dominance, the Party attacked “superstitions” that had supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted the same religious resources for its own political ends. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained

Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with Dominic Steavu, a historian of Chinese religion and healing from UC Santa Barbara. We discuss the central role of the body in medieval Daoist practices, and talk about the Daoist use of psychedelics to facilitate mystical experiences. Along the way, we touch on talismanic tattoos, internal alchemy, and embodied nonduality. Plus, Dominic reveals what he thinks about aliens and the Wu-Tang Clan. Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes are distributed by NBN, so be sure to subscribe to Blue Beryl! Resources related to this episode: Christine Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face (2009) Pierce’s blog “In defense of a little romanticism… or, how Mr Miyagi inspired me to become a professor” Pierce Salguero, Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical (2022) Dominic Steavu, The Writ of the Three Sovereigns: From Local Lore to Institutional Daoism (2020) Dominic Steavu, Transforming the Void: Embryological

In 1911, as China was beset with challenges, a new generation of scholars considered a new problem: what to do with former imperial borders? How could China’s frontiers be considered part of the new nation? In Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China’s Borderlands 1919–45 (UBC Press, 2022), Andres Rodriguez looks at how students, travellers, social scientists, anthropologists, and missionaries contemplated these problems as they took to the Sino-Tibetan frontier to do fieldwork. Focusing on the intimately human stories of these ‘frontier workers,’ Rodriguez examines how these scholars approached the frontier, created new knowledge, and redefined what both ‘frontier’ and ‘fieldwork’ meant. Frontier Fieldwork does a particularly beautiful job of exploring the complex identities of these fascinating fieldworkers, highlighting how some worked with the state, some pushed back, and some were only anthropologists by pure accident. It is sure to be of interest to historians, scholars of borderland studies, anth

Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His Master’s Blade (Cornell East Asia Series: 2024). Unlike Part 1—which is all preamble!—in Part 2 we meet some of the fabled eight dog warriors and the Confucian virtues they represent: Shino, for filial piety; Gakuzo, for duty; Dosetsu, for loyalty. There’s betrayal, drama…and a lot of secret, intertwined family relationships. Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon and author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment & Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2017), the first monograph-length study of Hakkenden, a landmark of premodern Japanese fiction. Today, Glynne and I talk about Part 2, how the novel connected to readers at the time—and how Hakkenden ends up being a lot like our Marvel Cinematic Universe. Catch our first interview with Glynne on Part 1 here! You can find m

As an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan (SUNY Press, 2024) offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. The book begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective, mapping the transition from survival to subsistence and then from mixed family farms to monoculture and “mega” industrial operations. It then narrows the focus to examine concrete changes in a Tokachi-area dairying community that has undergone rapid sociocultural upheaval over the last three decades, with shifts in human relationships alongside changes in human and cow connections through new technologies. In the final chapters, the scope is further narrowed to a detailed history and ethnography of a single industrializing dairy farm and the morphing cast of individuals attac

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for better and worse—by China’s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.  Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compr

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?  In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls “hypography.” Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II up through to its many iterations in the present day. Mullaney takes the reader back through the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, showing the development of electronic Chinese input methods—software programs that enable Chines

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late imperial China. By examining versatile trends within paintings in modern China, this book questions the extent to which historical relics have been used to represent the ethnic identity of modern Chinese art. In doing so, this book asks: did the antiquarian movements ultimately serve as a deliberate tool for re-writing Chinese art history in modern China?  In searching for the public meaning of inventive private collecting activity, Appropriating Antiquity in Modern Chinese Painting (Bloomsbury, 2023) draws on various modes of artistic creation to address how the use of antiquities in early 20th-century Chinese art both produced and reinforced the imaginative links between ancient civilization and modern lives in the late Qing dynasty. Further exploring how these social and cultural transformations were related to the artistic exchanges happening at the time between China, Japa

"What happened in Hong Kong is not an anomaly but a warning" - Hong Kong Human Rights defender Chow Hang Tung, speech written from prison upon receiving a human rights award. In our interview today, I spoke with Professor Michael C. Davis, author of Freedom Undone: The Assault on Liberal Values and Institutions in Hong Kong (AAS and Columbia UP, 2024). In his latest book, he writes about how one of the world's most free-wheeling cities has transitioned from a vibrant global center of culture and finance into an illiberal regime. We spoke about the progressive shifts towards authoritarian governance in Hong Kong's post-colonial period, leading up to the introduction of the National Security Law of 2020, and the rapid erosion of human rights and liberal freedoms since. Professor Davis explained the significance of Hong Kong's new domestic National Security Law, introduced last week, and its implications for the erosion of global democratic institutions globally.  Professor Michael C. Davis is a former long-time

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US

In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.  In Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State (U Michigan Press, 2022), Javed illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new pa

As Taiwan gains prominence on international headlines, often framed in terms of conflict with China, it’s easy to neglect the island nation’s human stories and nuances. Niki Alsford’s book Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History (University of Washington Press, March 2024) aims to provide a more nuanced counterweight to the sensationalism and soundbites that come up in Anglophone discourse about Taiwan today. Through a carefully curated selection of 24 biographies — stretching across social divides and time periods, featuring everyone from priests to pop stars to presidents — Taiwan Lives tries to make Taiwan’s multilayered colonial history more accessible to English-language readers. Alsford, who’s a Professor in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, draws upon his background in historical anthropology and extensive Taiwan-related experience to highlight the shifts and shades of Taiwanese identity across the past few centuries.  Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects internationa

In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and-remarkably for this time-such claims were recognized in both Korea and Japan. Their position, coupled with dominance over strategic ports and mines, allowed them to facilitate trade throughout East and Southeast Asia. They also played a key cultural role in disseminating Confucian texts, Buddhist sutras, ink paintings, and pottery, and in creating a distinctive, hybrid culture that fused Japanese, Korean, and Chinese beliefs, objects, and customs. Kings in All But Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569 (Oxford UP, 2024) illustrates how Japan was an ethnically diverse state from the fourteenth through

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters (U Michigan Press, 2023) uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary

Japan's Holocaust: History of Imperial Japan's Mass Murder and Rape During World War II (Knox Press, 2024) combines research conducted in over eighteen research facilities in five nations to explore Imperial Japan's atrocities from 1927 to 1945 during its military expansions and reckless campaigns throughout Asia and the Pacific. This book brings together the most recent scholarship and new primary research to ascertain that Japan claimed a minimum of thirty million lives, slaughtering far more than Hitler's Nazi Germany. Japan's Holocaust shows that Emperor Hirohito not only knew about the atrocities his legions committed, but actually ordered them. He did nothing to stop them when they exceeded even the most depraved person's imagination, as illustrated during the Rape of Nanking as well as many other events. Japan's Holocaust will document in painful detail that the Rape of Nanking was not an isolated event during the Asian War but rather representative of how Japan behaved for all its campaigns throughout

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system. Dr. Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connect

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the turbulent end of China’s imperial system, violent revolutionary movements, and the fraught establishment of a republican government. During these decades of reform and revolution, millions of far-flung “overseas Chinese” remained connected to Chinese domestic movements. Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898-1918 (Stanford UP, 2023) uses rich archival sources and a new network approach to examine how reform and revolution in North American Chinatowns influenced political change in ChinaPo and the transpacific Chinese diaspora from 1898 to 1918. Historian Zhongping Chen focuses on the transnational activities of Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen, and other politicians, especially their mobilization of the Chinese in North America to join reformist or revolutionary parties in patriotic fights for a Western-style constitutional monarchy or republic in China. These new reformist and revolutionary parties, including the first Chinese

With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the trappings of “geekdom” have made their way into the global mainstream over the past few days. As part of this trend, Japanese-style anime has also gained immense transnational popularity, arguably becoming part of the “new cool”. It’s against this backdrop that Jinying Li dives into the sociocultural landscape of anime with her book Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai (University of Minnesota Press, March 2024). However, instead of diving into the “Japaneseness” of anime and otaku culture, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures helps frame anime within a more globalized sense of “geekdom” — especially with the rise of post-80s millennial zhai in China’s cultural and economic spheres. Li is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her research and teaching focuses on media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. She is

Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Fynn Holm argues that for centuries some regions in early modern Japan did not engage in whaling. In fact, they were actively opposed to it, even resorting to violence when whales were killed. Resistance against whaling was widespread especially in the Northeast among the Japanese fishermen who worshiped whales as the incarnation of Ebisu, the god of the sea. Holm argues that human interactions with whales were much more diverse than the basic hunter-prey relationship, as cetaceans played a pivotal role in proto-industrial fisheries. The advent of industrial whaling in the early twentieth century, however, destroyed this centuries-long equilibrium between humans and whales. In its place, communities in Northeast Japan invented a new whaling tradition, which has almost completely eclipsed older forms of human-whale interactions. This ti

In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are killed. At the very onset of the atrocities, the Danish supervisor at a cement plant just outside the city, 26-year-old Bernhard Arp Sindberg, opens the factory gates and welcomes in 10,000 Chinese civilians to safety, beyond the reach of the blood-thirsty Japanese. He becomes an Asian equivalent of Oskar Schindler, the savior of Jews in the European Holocaust. Bernhard Sindberg: The Schindler of Nanjing (Casemate, 2024) follows Sindberg from his childhood in the old Viking city of Aarhus and on his first adventures as a sailor and a Foreign Legionnaire to the dramatic 104 days as a rescuer of thousands of helpless men, women, and children in the darkest hour of the Sino-Japanese War. It describes how after his remarkable achievement, he receded back into obscurity, spending decades more at sea and be