New Books in Chinese Studies

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 territory into a space where global circuits of capital could circulate and reproduce at an ever greater scale. Offering a deep dive into the coercive nature of capitalism and the historically specific ways global capital reproduction took root in Qing China, Coercive Commerce will interest historians of capital and modern China alike. Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 and important book which challenges powerful ideas about the way we understand Vietnam’s history and place in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 answer is very).   In addition to Discovered but Forgotten, interested listeners (and readers!) should also seek out Bin's previous books, especially Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 Network. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Outlaws of the Sea. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-literature Reader, soon to be published by Columbia University Press. This anthology brings together translations of nine compelling stories from Taiwan, examining Taiwan’s most vibrant literary genre and its resonance to the theme of HOME. While this podcast series has featured interviews with some of the anthology’s authors, Ian speaks from the perspective as an editor, showing why it is critical to work on translating Taiwanese eco-literature for global readers. On a personal note, Ian also reflects his own sense of belonging, and the evolving sense of HOME, and how Taiwan has played a key role in that journey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 levels of the bureaucracy, these policy paradigms ultimately reorganized the Chinese economy and reshaped state-market relations. Drawing on fine-grained biographical and interview data, Wang traces how officials coalesced around shared career trajectories, generational experiences, and social networks to create new alliances and rivalries. Shedding new light on the making and trajectory of China’s ambitious economic reforms, this book also provides keen sociological insight into the relations among bureaucracy, states, and markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 ice of the river determined when and how Japanese authorities exerted their power, as well as how important the seasons were to resistance efforts. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in environmental history, transnational history, the history of borders and borderlands, and those seeking a vivid portrayal of how ordinary reed-cutters, engineers, and smugglers experienced and navigated the intricate dynamics of imperial power, resistance, and the changing seasons along the riverbanks. In addition to being available in both hardcover and paperback formats, Border of Water and Ice is also available as an ebook here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 bearer of artistic authority. While brushwork represented the artist's physical presence through ink and paper, rubbings were direct facsimiles of tactile experiences with objects. This shift empowered artists and scholars to transcend traditional conventions and explore new mediums, uniting previously separate image-making practices while engaging audiences through the senses. Centering on touch and presenting a fresh perspective on early nineteenth-century literati art in China, this volume sheds light on a period often dismissed as lacking innovation and calls into question optical realism's perceived supremacy in reshaping the sensory experience of the modern Chinese viewer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

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 (Stanford UP, 2023) reconsiders explanations that draw parallels with ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other settings. It reveals mass killings as the byproduct of an intense top-down mobilization of rural militia against a stubborn factional insurgency, resembling brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in a variety of settings. Moving methodically through the evidence, Andrew Walder provides a groundbreaking new analysis of one the most shocking chapters of the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies