Zheng Liu, "Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China" (Columbia UP, 2026)

In Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou (Duke UP, 2026), the cultural anthropologist Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry—one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Chu shows how rural Chinese migrants, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production that fuels the constant accumulation of wealth via global supply chains. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangzhou’s urban villages and household workshops, Chu outlines how these entrepreneurs’ dreams of economic freedom clash with the reality of precarity and the exclusions of emigre status. Migrant bosses operate within a highly competitive, informal economy where they are both agents and target of exploitation, as they must evade rent collectors, endure racialized policing, and mitigate extortion from security officers and competitors. Chu crucially demonstrates how their efforts generate novel forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in postsocialist China. Nellie Chu (email here) is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on transnational and domestic migrant entrepreneurs across the global supply chains of fast fashion in southern China. She has papers published in leading academic journals, including positions: east asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and Journal of Modern Craft. Her work can also be found in Made in China Journal, Youth Circulations, and Noema Magazine. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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 recent decades, self-proclaimed “independent bookstores” have arisen across China. In the West, such retailers represent an alternative to corporations and chains. In China, by contrast, they differentiate themselves from not only the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore but also other privately owned shops through an emphasis on intellectual independence and the free exchange of ideas. Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China (Columbia UP, 2026) by Dr. Zheng Liu takes readers inside the world of independent bookselling in China, showing how a wide range of figures navigate the challenges of book retailing in the digital age amid rapidly shifting social, political, and economic dynamics. Drawing on more than a decade of immersive research—including interviews, observations, and extensive documentary analysis—Dr. Liu unveils how these bookstores carve out a unique identity and market position. She develops the concept of “culturally adapted strategy” to explain how independent bookstores—as both dedicated cultural institutions and resilient business enterprises—balance economic imperatives with a deep commitment to intellectual autonomy. Dr. Liu challenges the tendency to understand nonstate cultural institutions in China in terms of resistance, arguing that independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategic means of differentiation from the competition. Richly detailed and compellingly written, Cultural Mavericks sheds new light on the interplay among culture, commerce, and politics in China, offering timely insights into the evolving dynamics of China’s book industry and wider cultural economy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What does it mean for a small state to imagine itself as a model for the developing world? And how were these visions of agrarian development received on the ground? In The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (U California Press, 2025), James Lin examines these questions through the example of Taiwan. In the first half of the twentieth century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, and it then attempted to export its agrarian success — the “Taiwan model” — to rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. The book looks at how these development missions portrayed Taiwan, both at home and abroad, and shows how agriculture, domestic politics, and development politics were deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Taiwan’s postwar development as a self-contained success story, Lin reframes it as a global project shaped by Cold War geopolitics and international development regimes. As the book shows, the “Taiwan model” was actively constructed and promoted through overseas missions, beginning with early efforts such as the 1959 agricultural mission to South Vietnam and expanding through large-scale initiatives like “Operation Vanguard” in Africa. In these encounters, Taiwanese experts worked directly with rural communities, and the model itself was reshaped in local contexts. At the same time, these missions were deeply significant domestically, serving as a way for the Taiwanese state to project national strength and legitimacy in the context of diplomatic isolation. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Lin places Taiwan at the center of global development history and offers a new way of thinking about how models of modernization travel, as well as how “development” itself came to be understood as a technical and scientific enterprise. As such, this book will appeal to readers interested in Taiwan studies, global history, and development studies. A free ebook version of this title is also available through Luminos, the University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

What happens to the environment when the state enters previously self-governed villages in rural China? We explore this question in the Blang mountains in southwestern China, a region that was incorporated into the nascent people’s republic of China from 1953 onwards, with immense consequences for Blang communities and ecologies. Our guest Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström disentangles how the arrival of the state disrupted long-standing relations between Blang communities and the local mountain gods, making the land sick. And what Blang people can teach us about tackling the ongoing climate crisis. Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström is a guest researcher at the Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is a social anthropologist working at the University of Oslo where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Who bore the burdens of empire?  Christopher Munn's Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2025) explores how judges, juries, and lawyers strove to deliver justice during the 150 years when the death penalty was in force in Hong Kong. Nine main chapters focus on key capital trials in the first century of British rule. Among the cases are piracies, assassinations, and crimes of passion and desperation. These chapters describe the proceedings in court and the participants involved. They also explore the debates surrounding each case and the exercise or denial of mercy by governors. Two final chapters discuss the decline of the death penalty after World War II, its suspension after 1966, and the controversies leading to its formal abolition in 1993. Penalties of Empire traces the evolution of criminal justice at its highest levels. It also offers a prism for understanding some of the broader forces at work in Hong Kong’s history. Christopher Munn served as an administrative officer in the Hong Kong Government and in various positions in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. His publications include Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 and (with May Holdsworth) Crime, Justice and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. 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 is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China (U Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Yanshuo Zhang investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.” This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Dr. Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the “Greening the Motherland” campaign promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms explores the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation from the early twentieth century through to the present. Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of Chinese conservationist ideas. Combining literary, historical, and environmental studies approaches, he shows that these ideas acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability. Li historicizes authoritarian environmentalism and probes the global-local dynamics underlying conservationist ideas that energize environmental impulses in China. Examining ethnic borderlands, the Beijing political center, and China's growth on the world stage, this book demonstrates the strength of Chinese environmentalism to adapt and survive through tumultuous change lies in what seems to be a weakness: its inconsistency and contestation. Cheng Li is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in modern Chinese environmental literature, film, science fiction, and history. He is a literary scholar and a cultural historian. His research focuses on cultural history, ecocriticism, and infrastructure. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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

For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the “Greening the Motherland” campaign promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford UP, 2025) explores the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation from the early twentieth century through to the present. Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of Chinese conservationist ideas. Combining literary, historical, and environmental studies approaches, he shows that these ideas acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability. Li historicizes authoritarian environmentalism and probes the global-local dynamics underlying conservationist ideas that energize environmental impulses in China. Examining ethnic borderlands, the Beijing political center, and China's growth on the world stage, this book demonstrates the strength of Chinese environmentalism to adapt and survive through tumultuous change lies in what seems to be a weakness: its inconsistency and contestation. Cheng Li is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in modern Chinese environmental literature, film, science fiction, and history. He is a literary scholar and a cultural historian. His research focuses on cultural history, ecocriticism, and infrastructure. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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

What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese? China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials—and emerged as a major US competitor—its leaders are looking within, focused on suppressing dissent and fostering cohesion. The result has been an increasingly nationalist cultural agenda, celebrating a Chinese identity steeped in the mystique of the Middle Kingdom and nostalgia for heroic twentieth-century resistance. Yet Chinese nationalism, like nationalism everywhere, is fraught. Few Westerners, and even fewer Chinese, recognize that the very idea of China is up for grabs.  Xu Guoqi is the founding director of the Institute of Transnational History of China at the University of Hong Kong, and author of The Idea of China: A Contested History (Harvard UP, 2026) Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim. Rian Thum, in his book Islamic China: An Asian History (Harvard UP, 2025), strives to make Chinese Muslims “ordinary”, placing them in both Chinese and global history by following pilgrims, merchants, and others across the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras. Rian is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Islamic China. 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