New Books In East Asian Studies

How did young boys in premodern China learn? What educational texts did they use? What values informed their education? Katherine Ngo’s new book Unlocking the Treasury: Elementary Learning for Boys in Qing China (Lever Press, 2025) explores these questions through a focus on a Qing-dynasty textbook: Treasury of Elementary Learning (Youxue qionglin 幼學瓊林). One of the most popular textbooks in the Qing, Treasury is packed to the brim with allusions, references, exemplars, and much more. Katherine deftly unpacks Treasury, showing how it is at once a handbook for practical learning, a child-friendly version of the school of heart-mind, and an introduction to training for the civil-service examination. In addition to being a wonderfully rich and careful introduction to Treasury, this book highlights how education in the Qing was complex, eclectic, and anything but focused exclusively on rote learning. Unlocking the Treasury should be of interest to scholars of China, historians of the early modern world, but also a

Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That started centuries of travel to the islands, including one trip by famed sailor Zheng He. Then, quickly, the Maldives—and the broader Indian Ocean—vanished as Ming China turned inward. Bin Yang writes about these linkages between China, the Maldives and the Indian Ocean in his recent book Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c 1100-1620 (Columbia University Press: 2024) Bin Yang is a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong. His books include Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Columbia University Press: 2008) and Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Columbia University Press: 2019). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Discovered But Forgotten. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a glo

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past.  In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford UP, 2024), John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and politics were heard and felt. Scrutinizing the flow of news can reveal much about society and politics--illustrating who has power and why, and uncovering the connections between different regions, peoples, and social classes. Taking an innovative, holistic view of information practices, Alekna weaves together both rural and urban history to tell the story of rise of mass society through the lens of communication techniques and technology, showing how the news revolution fundamentally reordered the political geogra

Have you ever heard of the Chinese gay god, the Rabbit god? How did queer Chinese artists use this icon in reclaiming their own stories, while resisting and persisting through Covid-19? And, how can art be a space for fighting back against national hegemony? In this episode, Hongwei Bao discusses these questions with Kukasina Kubaha. Hongwei Bao is associate professor of Media studies at the University of Nottingham. Bao is the author of several books including Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China, and Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism. Alongside his academic work, Bao also writes poetry and curates film festivals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This new edited volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems. Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane (Columbia UP, 2024) shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association. Because the public-private dichotomy does not resonate with many people in China, they rely on informal social ties, not formal organizations or state agencies, to confront personal challenges. Chapters present vivid ethnographic portraits that consider both positive and negative aspects of community formation. A woman with an autistic child creates an organization to advocate for inclusion of neurodivergent children in public schools. A trainee in a psychological counseling course finds mutual support among other par

During the closing months of World War II, two military giants locked in a death embrace of cultural differences and diplomatic intransigence. While developing history’s deadliest weapon and weighing an invasion that would have dwarfed D-Day, the US called for the “unconditional surrender” of Japan. The Japanese Empire responded with a last-ditch plan termed Ketsu-Go, which called for the suicidal resistance of every able-bodied man and woman in “The Decisive Battle” for the homeland. In 140 Days to Hiroshima (Diversion Books, 2020), historian David Dean Barrett captures war-room drama on both sides of the conflict. Here are the secret strategy sessions, fierce debates, looming assassinations, and planned invasions that resulted in Armageddon on August 6, 1945. Barrett then examines the next nine chaotic days as the Japanese government struggled to respond to the reality of nuclear war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbo

Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930) (Harvard Asia Center, 2024) offers the first detailed account of the complex cultural, literary and intellectual relationships between Russia, Japan and China in the modern era. In this wide-ranging interview, author Xiaolu Ma reflects on the remarkable process of Russian culture reaching China through the prism of Japan and Japanese. What happens when translation takes place through an intermediary language? How did Russian literature and ideas get reimagined in the two-step exchange to Japanese and Chinese? This interview begins with the Professor Ma’s personal reflections on the experience of studying Russian literature in China, before turning to a broad overview of China’s encounter with Russia via Japan. The interview then zooms in on a few of the examples explored in Transpatial Modernity, bringing to life a network of cultural exchange, including such celebrated names as Pushkin, Lu Xun, and the Russian nihilists. Tra

From the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan has been a particularly enthusiastic user of exhibitions. Large-scale international exhibitions, including Osaka 2025, form only the tip of an iceberg comprising over 1,300 industrial, regional, and local exhibitions held in Japan over the past 150 years.  In Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development (Cambridge UP, 2025), Angus Lockyer explores how and why these events have been used as catalysts of development and arenas for fostering modern industry, empire, and nation. He traces their complicated genesis, realization, and reception, demonstrating that although they rarely achieve their stated aims, this does not undermine their utility - Japanese expos have provided a model subsequently adopted around the world. The history of this enthusiasm provides a more nuanced understanding of development in modern Japan, and emphasizes the shared experiences of global modernity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support

Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of U.S. military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades. Kornel Chang covers these tumultuous three years in A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Harvard University Press: 2025), and describes how the U.S.’s increased fears of Communism and the Soviet Union ended up puncturing Korean political aspirations. Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. He is a scholar of U.S. immigration and foreign relations, focusing on U.S.-East Asian relations. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press: 2012) is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements

In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global economic entanglements intruded on Qing territory and governance. Previously understood as an era of “semi-colonialism,” Stacie A. Kent reframes this century of intervention by shedding light on the generative force of global capital. Based on extensive research, conducted with British and Chinese government archives, Coercive Commerce (Hong Kong University Press, 2024) shows how commercial treaties and the regulatory regime that grew out of them catalyzed a revised arts of governance in Qing-administered China. Capital, which had long been present in Chinese merchants’ pocketbooks, came to shape and even govern Chinese statecraft during the “treaty era.” This book contends that Qing administrators alternately resisted and adapted to this new reality through taxation systems such as transit passes and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service by reorganizing Chinese t

Ian Rapley’s Green Star Japan: Esperanto and the International Language Question, 1880-1945 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is a sociopolitical history of the “planned” language of Esperanto in the Japanese Empire. Esperanto was invented in the nineteenth century to address the problem of international communication. This was an issue of great and growing interest to various groups within the burgeoning Japanese Empire, and Rapley shows that Japanese Esperanto aficionados and advocates could be found working both with the League of Nations and the Soviet Union, and were active in cities and the countryside working through questions of language, identity, modernity, and communication through and around the medium of Esperanto. Green Star Japan is thus not just a (socio)linguistic history, it is a book about what it means to be modern and how people make sense of their place in a changing world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooks

When we think of Vietnamese history, we tend to think of plucky peasant guerillas fighting for their independence against French colonial rule or American imperialism - or even mighty China.  In her new book, A Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2024), Li Tana challenges this powerful stereotype by recasting Vietnam as a maritime state with a long history of dynamic commercial relations with the outside world, from China, to Southeast Asia, to India, and the Middle East. The book aims to escape from the rigid nationalist historiography that has long characterized history writing on Vietnam and develop a new way of thinking about Vietnam’s history that emphasizes its outward, commercial relations. It also revisits the old question of whether we should view Vietnam as an East Asian country, oriented towards China, or a Southeast Asian country, characterized by a cosmopolitanism and historical openness to maritime trade and the outside world. This is a provocative

Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially as they relate to the Maldives. By weaving together the accounts of a 14th-century Chinese traveler (Wang Dayuan) to the archipelago, archaeological analysis of shipwrecks, maps by both the imperial court and Jesuits, records about items including cowrie shells and ambergris, and much more, Bin Yang argues that the Maldives — and the Indian Ocean world — shaped the Chinese empire.   Discovered but Forgotten is a far-reaching and ambitious book that showcases both imperial China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean world and how to do maritime history and global history, even when that means working with incomplete records and fragments of porcelain. This book should interest readers curious about East Asian history and global history, as well as anyone who doesn't yet know how important ambergris was to maritime trade and Ming China (spoiler: the

Did you know Hong Kong used to be a hub for pirates? That factoid has long been part of the popular history for Hong Kong—and for Southern China broadly. For centuries, Chinese pirates raided merchants and coastal communities up and down the Chinese coast, taking advantage of weak imperial rule and safe havens like what’s now present-day Vietnam. Robert Antony tells the story of pirates like Zheng Yi Sao in his recent book Outlaws of the Sea: Maritime Piracy in Modern China (Hong Kong UP, 2024) Before retiring in 2019, Robert Antony was distinguished professor at Guangzhou University and recently visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. His recent books include Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China (HKU Press: 2016), The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520-1810: A Short History with Documents (Rowman & Littlefield: 2022), and Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China’s Hidden Past (Rowman & Littlefield: 2023), also covered by the New Books

China’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a market economy, the economic bureaucracy retained a striking degree of influence and control over crafting and implementing policy. Yet bureaucrats are often dismissed as faceless and inconsequential, their role neglected in favor of party leaders’ top-down rule or bottom-up initiatives.< Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics (Columbia UP, 2024) offers a new account of economic policy making in China over the past four decades that reveals how bureaucrats have spurred large-scale transformations from within. Yingyao Wang demonstrates how competition among bureaucrats motivated by careerism has led to the emergence of new policy approaches. Second-tier economic bureaucrats instituted distinctive―and often conflicting―“policy paradigms” aimed at securing their standing and rewriting China’s long-term development plans for their own benefit. Emerging from the middle

In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family's rights and responsibilities.  In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families' complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls "biopolitical paternalism"--a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state's paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulne

Icy, unpredictable, and treacherous, the dangers of the Yalu River were heightened in the twentieth century when it became the longest non-maritime border of the Japanese Empire. Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan’s Empire in Korea and Manchuria (Cornell University Press, 2024) focuses on this river at this critical juncture, analyzing how imperial Japan attempted to harness and control this fluid border. By honing in on both human and nonhuman actors — including water, ice, timber cutters, smugglers, and anti-Japanese guerrillas — Joseph Seeley shows how the Yalu determined how borders were drawn, how imperial power was exerted, and how local resistance was enacted. Using primary sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Border of Water and Ice is an important reminder of the importance of the nonhuman world. Employing the concept of “liquid geographies” to highlight the fluid motion of peoples, goods, and sediment across the Yalu borderland, the book shows readers how the water and i

In early nineteenth-century China, a remarkable transformation took place in the art world: artists among China's educated elites began to use touch to forge a more authentic relationship to the past, to challenge stagnant artistic canons, and to foster deeper human connections. Networks of Touch is an engaging exploration of this sensory turn. In Networks of Touch: A Tactile History of Chinese Art, 1790-1840 (Penn State UP, 2023), Michael J. Hatch examines the artistic network of Ruan Yuan (1764-1849), a scholar-official whose patronage supported a generation of artists and learned people who prioritized epigraphic research as a means of truing the warped contours of Confucian heritage. Their work instigated an "epigraphic aesthetic"--an appropriation of the stylistic, material, and tactile features of ancient inscribed objects and their reproductive technologies--in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artwork. Rubbings, a reduplicative technology, challenged the dominance of brushwork as the beare

Cinema under National Reconstruction (Rutgers UP, 2024) calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961-1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive's digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorship was not simply a tool for authoritarian dictatorship. Through such case studies as Yu Hyun-mok's The Stray Bullet (1961), Ha Kil-jong's The March of the Fools (1975), and Yi Chang-ho's Declaration of Fools (1983), the author defines censorship as a dialogical process of cultural negotiations wherein the state, the film industry, and the public fight out a battle over the definitions and functions of national cinema. In the context of Cold War Korea, one cannot fully understand or construct film history without reass

Guangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup conflict. In the summer of 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, it became notorious as the site of the most severe and extensive violence observed anywhere in China during that period of upheaval. Several cities saw urban combat resembling civil war, while waves of mass killings in rural communities generated enormous death tolls. More than one hundred thousand died in a few short months. These events have been chronicled in sensational accounts that include horrific descriptions of gruesome murders, sexual violence, and even cannibalism. Only recently have scholars tried to explain why Guangxi was so much more violent than other regions. With evidence from a vast collection of classified materials compiled during an investigation by the Chinese government in the 1980s, Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China's Southern Periphery (Sta